IMS Business Report 2022: tech house takes the top spot in Beatport’s chart

The IMS Business Report 2022 revealed that after holding 2nd place for the past few years tech house overtook techno in 2021 as the best selling genre. But what determined this trend?

There is a lot of interesting data to absorb. What marked electronic music in 2021? What trends are shaping 2022 so far? All these answers are well explained in the IMS Business Report 2022 that has just been unveiled. Aiming to be everyone’s eyes on what’s happening in the electronic music industry, International Music Summit (IMS) analyses key facts and digests them, then delivers what are the most relevant conclusions. What do the numbers tell us this time? This report seeks to go beyond numbers and so do we.

One of the hot topics that this analysis brought up is tech house. Yes, last year’s IMS Business Report already drew a growing trend towards this genre, an omen that is now confirmed. According to the report, when it comes to music production available on Beatport’s charts, tech house is the most popular genre. This means that it occupies the top of the Beatport charts and that it is the best selling genre. In the past few years, this place belonged to techno and tech house followed in second place. The trend has reversed and techno is now in second place, making tech house the top genre in the download trend. Techno still managed to hold on to its reign until Q1 2021, but then tech house took the top spot and kept it.

Image credit: IMS Business Report 2022 page 23

Going deeper into the data, IMS Business Report 2022 also makes a small ranking of the labels based on the number of tech house tracks on Beatport charts in the last twelve months. From the first to the fifth position, all with very competitive numbers, we find Repopulate Mars, Sink or Swim, Toolroom Trax, La Pera Records, and Black Book Records. Evaluating the same criteria, the report also calculates a top 5 of tech house artists, in which from the first to the fifth position we find the British BISCITS, the Italian Moreno Pezzolato, the German NightFunk, the Polish duo DONT BLINK, and the American Dilon Nathaniel.

This way tech house takes the throne, followed by techno, house, melodic house & techno, drum and bass, deep house, dance/electro pop, progressive house, minimal/deep tech and finally trance. The growth of tech house as a best-selling genre seems to have accompanied the industry’s revival in the transitional and now post-pandemic scene, seemingly saying that tech house is exactly what the new trends are made of. What do you think about this?

Image Credit: Ministry of Sound (via Facebook)