So it’s that time of year again where the mighty Traxsource creates end of year stats for its Artists and Labels. It’s a fascinating thing to explore visually as we scroll through our socials and there are some huge achievements – congrats to all. Now whilst scrolling my mind was building up a dataset and dashboard and I just had to put something together which is incredibly compelling to explore.

You can find the link here – https://datastudio.google.com/s/sOuE7vbmKh0

Methodology & Build

Considering all of this was publicly available I hand crawled the Garage Top 100 and pulled the stats from each artist using the web app front end. I did make exceptions however, where an artist is predominantly NOT garage I removed them to avoid skewing the figures and if an artist had no stats they were of course not included. The overall ranking was a simple summing of all metrics which felt fair – I saw no point in weighting each as they all contribute to the ‘success’ overall of the artist.

I grabbed the artist URLs and noted some other information – those who did not have bio and artist texts (room for improvement basically). This data was compiled into a spreadsheet and then ingested into a Google Data Studio project where the Dashoard was built.

What has been incredibly interesting here for me is the education of who is doing what. It has introduced me to new names I hadn’t been paying attention to and will do from now on – especially because I’m starting to do live-streaming DJ mixes and need fresh tracks! I imagine this is going to be very thought provoking and discussion will no doubt be interesting over on the Traxsource Garage Group – I’ll answer questions if anyone has them over there 😉

Firstly, congrats to the entire Garage community, we have a new home! Traxsource in their wisdom have given us our dedicated top sales chart and associated complimentary assets – thank you!

Go take a look for yourself – https://www.traxsource.com/genre/29/garage/top

Group leader and talented producer Marc Cotterell quite rightly highlighted the diversity of sub genres that exist under this umbrella on the Facebook group’s header – see below

So it confidently encompasses the following:

• Garage
• Garage House
• US Garage
• 2 Step
• UKG

It’s a solid and sensibly mixed bunch that covers a variety of styles but there’s just one thing that needs clarification – how do you actually say Garage?

This young lady perhaps has the full lowdown:

The fact that the above video mentions class is interesting. Some people have told me in the past that they consider 4/4 Garage as ‘Council House’ but how does that make someone feel from that demographic? Appropriate? Insulting? I lived on a council estate for a few years and I pronounce it the ‘posh’ way so where does that leave us?!

Perhaps across the sub genres it is indeed pronounced differently. I was brought up on the US (Paradise) Garage and there’s no way the yanks said Paradise Garridge 🤣 That’s the reasoning behind my pronunciation – what’s yours?