Bloomberg's Take on Watches in Music
...and why I disagree!
Something I didn’t expect to see yesterday, was Bloomberg publishing an analysis1 on Billboard’s Hot R&B/Hip-Hop Songs chart from January 1995 to June 2025. The whole piece honed in on the top 50 song-chart positions and then cross-referenced the lyrics in these songs for fashion, watch, and jewellery brands being mentioned. This was accomplished using an API to search through lyrics looking for ~90 brands, and then they also manually reviewed over 2,100 songs to filter out false positives from the data.
The scope seems comprehensive enough; they used 60 fashion and leather goods brands from the Vogue Business Index, 20 watch brands, and 10 jewellery brands, and tracked everything from brand names to common abbreviations, slang terms, key products, and influential designers.
With all that in mind, and when it comes to watches in particular, I suppose you’re wondering whether there were any findings worth talking about?
Well, that’s why I’m here!
Estimated reading time: ~6 minutes
Watch Related Findings
Rolex peaked way back in 2014, and mentions of Rolex have been declining ever since. This initially confused me, given how dominant the Crown still feels in the watch world, and even when it comes to secondary market performance. But I thought about it some more, and what I think really happened with Rolex, is that it just became a bit more commonplace, that’s all.
In cultural terms, when your accountant, dentist, and plumber all wear versions of a particular aspirational watch brand, it kinda stops being, well, aspirational! The irony is that Rolex’s success as a brand (relative value stability, reduced depreciation, mainstream acceptance etc) is precisely what seems to have killed its cultural cachet in music. It became an easier purchase to justify to the wife, so to speak, and this made it less likely to hear anyone rapping about it.
AP and Patek dominated the cultural conversation from 2015-2022. These brands became the lyrical gold standard and one artist (Future) alone, name-dropped AP or Patek in over 50 songs. Bloomberg credits FHB for being a visionary in this sense:
As mentions of Rolex declined, those of two other privately held manufacturers, Audemars Piguet and Patek Philippe, took off. This can be traced back to the appointment of Francois-Henry Bennahmias as CEO of Audemars Piguet in 2013. A former professional golfer, he recognized the power of celebrity and enlisted a roster of stars to promote the brand. In the years that followed, “AP” popped up in lyrics alongside Patek.
Richard Mille gained a fair bit of traction (frequently shortened to “Millie” in lyrics) but RM mentions have always been modest compared to the bigger brands.
Cartier showed a more consistency relative to other brands which fluctuated wildly, but it never quite reached the peaks which other brands reached. Bloomberg credits former Cartier CEO Cyrille Vigneron for recognising Gen Z adoption early and relaunching what they call iconic pieces. Tyler, The Creator’s line “The Cartier so light on my body, thought I floated here” is positioned as “evidence” of the CEO’s brilliant cultural positioning of the brand. I mean, maybe?!