Turkey
MENA
Turkey's Spotify chart is almost entirely domestic. The current #1 is 'Hileli,' a cross-generational collaboration between the Turkish trap collective manifest and Ajda Pekkan, a national pop figure now in her seventies. Turkish trap (the Ezhel / Ben Fero lineage), Turkish pop and Arabesk — the longstanding melancholic working-class tradition — define the three main tiers of the market. Arabesk has been quietly reassessed in the 2020s as worth taking seriously rather than dismissed.
Top domestic tracks
Top foreign tracks
Generational / regional / economic split
Younger men run on Turkish trap (manifest, Ezhel, Cakal); younger women lean toward Turkish pop (Aleyna Tilki, Edis). Older and working-class listeners hold Arabesk, particularly the Ferdi Tayfur and Muslum Gurses lineage, and the older Turkish pop catalog of Ajda Pekkan and Sezen Aksu. Arabesk carried real cultural stigma as lower-class music for decades, and its current rehabilitation tells you something about how the country is currently rewriting its own pop history.
Sources
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