Ukulele Popularity by Country-Curiosity

juliaann

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I've noticed most of the youtube tutorials I click on are from the UK or Australia. The US ones tend to be people who can open boxes and (surprising to me) none from Hawaii.

Are ukuleles far more popular in those countries? More popular than other instruments? To be fair I never look for flute tutorials so maybe they just do all the music tutorials. ;)

I'm in Austin and there is a small-ish ukulele club but we are that little weird spot in Texas. I'm pretty sure 80% of Austin has an acoustic guitar though. And yeah, Texas isn't a "country" but close enough. :p

I just find this all very interesting and curious. Where do you live? Is the Uke culture jammin' or are you constantly drowned out by 10 acoustic guitars?
 
Seriously, no videos from Hawaii? There are zillions but HMS is a great place to start if you wanna hear home brew 'ukulele at it's best:

https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCH6E4xDfxBqrkoKdAyVu2dg

Only like 6 thousand videos on their channel with 36 million views...

Haha, I've seen people playing just the general "ukulele tutorial" search hasn't brought any for me thus far. I've watched a ton of lovely players just playing though.
 
He or she who knows how to manipulate the system will appear first in search results. What you are seeing on Google or Youtube is a listing of people's skill at making the algorithm happy, ranked from best to worst. It's not because they're the people you should be learning from!

Hawai'i is a big player, but my guess is that most players out here couldn't be bothered to care about playing the game (except for HMS). Unless you are making money from it (like all the people in the search results you see), there's better stuff to do than try and make Google happy. It's miserable. Trust me.
 
Ukulele is huge in Taiwan, the Philippines, and Japan. I think we don’t hear much from those countries because they most likely have forums in their own languages. But YouTube has videos from all over the world. In Thailand and Korea there is a ukulele scene, too.
 
I lived in Philippines for nine years and now for l5 years in Korat, Thailand. Yes there is a very big ukulele playing public in this country plus ukulele's are made here. www.ribbee.com. Located in Bangkok, Thailand. However, the outside world would never know because of the language differences. I think, guitars are still king but that is slowly changing. Yesterday I hooked up my baritone to an amp and my wife said that it now sounded like a guitar.
 
I am biased toward thinking the instrument is popular. I live in michigan usa and am within an hours drive of ann arbor and lansing(location of the mighty uke day and Elderly Instruments). I don't know if it is popular in other parts.
 
Hawaii has the largest concentration of ukulele players and there are 100s of people who are trying to make a living by performing and teaching. The number of videos is overwhelming though they are not necessarily identified as Hawaiian. I think that UU is based on Kauai so the tutorials on this site are a typical example.
 
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I live in Los Angeles and as you might expect, there's a thriving community for the ukulele. I belong to a group of about 50 regulars that meet twice a week in Culver City. There are groups in most areas of this sprawling city, and there are many music stores that carry ukuleles, especially Island Bazaar in Huntington Beach. I may be biased, but my guess would be that outside of Hawaii, there are more ukulele enthusiasts in the L.A. area than any other city in the states.


This is Michael Kohan in Los Angeles, Beverly West near the Beverly Center
9 tenor cutaway ukes, 6 acoustic bass ukes, 12 solid body bass ukes, 14 mini electric bass guitars (Total: 41)

• Donate to The Ukulele Kids Club, they provide ukuleles to children in hospital music therapy programs. www.theukc.org
• Member The CC Strummers: YouTube: www.youtube.com/user/CCStrummers/video, Facebook: www.facebook.com/TheCCStrummers
 
I've noticed most of the youtube tutorials I click on are from the UK or Australia. The US ones tend to be people who can open boxes and (surprising to me) none from Hawaii.

Are ukuleles far more popular in those countries? More popular than other instruments? To be fair I never look for flute tutorials so maybe they just do all the music tutorials. ;)

I'm in Austin and there is a small-ish ukulele club but we are that little weird spot in Texas. I'm pretty sure 80% of Austin has an acoustic guitar though. And yeah, Texas isn't a "country" but close enough. :p

I just find this all very interesting and curious. Where do you live? Is the Uke culture jammin' or are you constantly drowned out by 10 acoustic guitars?

As others have said don’t be mislead by what the Internet feeds to you (because it may well be misrepresentative).

There is a non-trivial Ukulele scene in the U.K. but it is one that has, I think, grown from a small base over the last decade. I don’t come across folk playing guitars but the music shops here have a lot on display so they’re being (bought and) played by somebody. Until recently I didn’t know that Ukes were played in China but they are although I’m not certain to what level - probably not that common because it’s a western instrument and they have their own cultures to follow instead. Ukes are also played in France, Germany and Italy but we hear little about those players and likewise those in Asia.

I’ve wondered about that scant overlap with some other Ukulele players and have decided that it’s pretty all much down to language barriers. If your main or only language is English then activity in non English speaking countries becomes hidden.

With regard to ‘North America’ it’s a very large land mass and so there’s likely to be a lot of variation within it. Each area will have cultural and historical reasons for Uke playing or not.
 
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I would not judge a country's ukulele immersion level from your youTube search results. Not only is the search influenced by posters/channel owners that have a commercial interest -- and perhaps those knowledgable in riding the algorhythms are living in certain countries to begin with -- but also your personal preferences have an influence on what is displayed to you. If, for instance (just for argument's sake, no offense meant) you like to browse right-wing webpages, you might be more likely to get right-wing ukulele players as a result. (On a sidenote, personally, I think ukulele players are mostly nice, considerate and caring people interested in a world-wide community with respect to other cultures, so there are probalby not that many right-wing ukers out there).

I live in Germany, and there are quite a few ukulele online shops, stores and even manufacturers in this country. Most big cities also have a ukulele club of sorts, and we have a fairly active German uke forum as well (nothing compares to this one though :).
 
It reflects a search bias more than a statistical reality - there are a lot of Spanish and French language video tutorials out there if you know how and where to look for them.
 
I wouldn't pay too much mind to YouTube (or similar) search results - there is an algorithm going on there to deliver to you what YT thinks is best for you.

By way of stats though, I have been running the Got A Ukulele website for nearly ten years now. It get's global readers, but of course it is in English so readers from non English speaking countries are likely more depressed than you would expect.

Nonetheless, the attached image is the lifetime percentages of views (totalling over 20 million) for the last few years. Australia are actually surprisingly low, but bear in mind per capita population. That 4% of my readers is from a population of 24 million. The US is at 46%, but has a population of 327 million. Saynig that about Australia - it takes the same percentage as Canada, despite being a fair bit smaller in headcount.

A bit more clouded than you would expect!

79663402_2370591586379914_909660179073597440_n.jpg
 
[....] so readers from non English speaking countries are likely more depressed than you would expect.

I don't think I am more depressed just because I am from a non English speaking country :)
 
I am Belgian and there are hardly any people I know there, who play ukulele. The instrument is sadly still trying to shirk off its 'toy' reputation. As a matter of fact, I probably wouldn't have taken it up either, had I not moved to the UK. But even then, it took 12 years to bump into the right people, one of them Aussie, before I got the bug. I think there is big potential in Belgium. Herman Vandecauter is a talented player. However, I don't think he has tutorials or playalongs on his YouTube channel.

If the tabs are included onscreen Korean, French etc tutorials are easy enough to follow. Once you watch them, YouTube will feed you more of them.
 
I've noticed most of the youtube tutorials I click on are from the UK or Australia. The US ones tend to be people who can open boxes and (surprising to me) none from Hawaii.

Are ukuleles far more popular in those countries? More popular than other instruments? To be fair I never look for flute tutorials so maybe they just do all the music tutorials. ;)

I'm in Austin and there is a small-ish ukulele club but we are that little weird spot in Texas. I'm pretty sure 80% of Austin has an acoustic guitar though. And yeah, Texas isn't a "country" but close enough. :p

I just find this all very interesting and curious. Where do you live? Is the Uke culture jammin' or are you constantly drowned out by 10 acoustic guitars?

Maybe you just haven't found them yet, but I've seen lots of tutorials and lessons from the US.
 
There is a non-trivial Ukulele scene in the U.K. but it is one that has, I think, grown from a small base over the last decade.

Yes, I can vouch for that. When I first started playing ukulele in the late 1980s, my local musical instrument shop in Bristol had just one model of ukulele for sale - a rather nondescript cheap one, but I enjoyed learning on it nonetheless. I dropped playing for a while, and when I picked it up again around 1998, having found an old banjo uke in my local music shop, internet searches came up with the George Formby society (a few branches in the North of England and maybe one in London), and the Ukulele Society of Great Britain (formed 1970), and not much else if I recall, certainly nothing local to me. There were so few events for ukulele players I contemplated travelling to Philadelphia in the USA to a festival there. Crank the clock forward to 2010 or so and there are dozens of ukulele clubs across the UK, and a growing number of events and festivals. I put this growth down partly to the Ukulele Orchestra of Great Britain who kept the candle burning so-to-speak, but mainly to the internet which brings people with a shared interest together so very effectively.
 
The ukulele is definitely got a strong presence in the Metro Vancouver area with numerous monthly and weekly uke circles as well as the Langley Ukulele Ensemble and the adult version, Luongo Ukulele Ensemble. Youtube may not be the best tool for determining the popularity of the instrument in specific countries.
 
A so-called guitar is actually nothing more than an overgrown baritone ukulele with extra strings. A cello is simply a very large baritone ukulele that's too big to hold under one's arm so some uke player invented the bow. Summary: ALL stringed instruments are based on ukuleles.

BOTTOM LINE: In every country, every musician who really matters plays some sort of ukulele.
 
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Search for Aldrine Guerrero, lots of tutorials...
 
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