Nelly Cottoy’s Global Footprint Starts to Take Shape
In the Caribbean, where music often travels by word of mouth, speaker box, or Carnival truck, proximity has traditionally shaped perception. Success is measured in crowd response—who knows your song, and how loud they sing it back. Nelly Cottoy’s story offers a different perspective. Her listeners are forming not through local visibility, but through a growing interest in her catalogue—often surfacing months or years after release, and in places far beyond her native Trinidad and Tobago.
Streaming data from Spotify, Apple Music, and iTunes reveals a striking dislocation between cultural origin and listener base. Cottoy’s voice—unmistakably Trinbagonian in cadence and tone—resonates far beyond Trinidad and Tobago. Fewer than 10% of her streams originate in the Caribbean. Nearly half of her Spotify audience comes from North America, led by the United States and Canada. Europe follows closely, with the UK and Netherlands acting as strongholds. And then, more unexpectedly, there is Israel, Finland, Sweden, Denmark, Switzerland, and Italy. These are not places typically associated with Zess-influenced Caribbean street music. Yet they are listening—intently.
On Spotify, she has more listeners in Nigeria and Kenya than in Trinidad & Tobago. Even Jamaica outpaces her home base in terms of streaming volume. On iTunes—where purchases reflect more deliberate, on-demand consumer behavior—Cottoy’s tracks have surfaced across the European iTunes (World) charts, suggesting a growing base of fans who are not merely discovering her music passively but actively seeking it out.
This isn’t just algorithmic curiosity. It’s momentum—measurable, but not always visible.
Over the past several weeks, a quiet pattern has emerged in Nelly Cottoy’s digital footprint: multiple songs, across various stages of her catalogue, have begun surfacing on charts far outside the Caribbean. From Germany to Italy to Uzbekistan, listeners are discovering her music—and not just a single track, but several, spanning genres, years, and moods.
One of the most consistent examples is Nom Nom, a track produced by Money Circle Records and originally released in August 2022. Its global arc has been slow-building and geographically unexpected. It first appeared on the Apple Music Reggae chart in Egypt in January 2023. By April that year, it had landed on Apple Music Dance charts in nine countries, including Papua New Guinea. The momentum continued in 2025, peaking in Barbados in April, then in St. Kitts & Nevis in May, with recurring placements across Guyana, Grenada, and the British Virgin Islands.
In early June 2025, Nom Nom reached a new milestone: #37 on the iTunes Reggae chart in Italy—Cottoy’s first appearance in that market. The timing suggests more than coincidence. On May 29, she performed the song live on Listening to the Grind with Chromatics Music on O.U.R. Radio. That performance was shared to Instagram and TikTok, giving the track renewed visibility just days before the Italian chart entry. Whether causal or coincidental, the result was the same: Nom Nom found new life between Port of Spain and Palermo—and perhaps a few Italian listeners really did say, “nom nom nom.”
But Italy wasn’t the only European signal that week. Around the same time, Cottoy registered an unexpected dual entry in Germany: Poof debuted at #47 on the iTunes World chart, while Boop! landed at #20 on the more competitive Reggae chart. Both tracks remained charted for several days, suggesting intentional downloads rather than one-off spikes. Notably, Boop!’s stronger performance on the genre-specific chart may indicate a deeper resonance with German listeners, even in the absence of a promotional campaign.
The momentum continued into Sweden and Central Asia. On April 30, UH—a 2020 release from the Soca Zess Riddim produced by WMG Lab Records and featuring Mar Doonn—debuted at #8 on Sweden’s iTunes Reggae chart, where it held steady for over a week. By June, the song had also entered the Apple Music Reggae chart in Uzbekistan at #82, quickly surging to #12 the following day. Uzbekistan, though well outside the Caribbean diaspora, now presents an unexpected but potentially fruitful listening base.
What’s striking about this flurry of activity isn’t just the geography—it’s the breadth of Cottoy’s catalogue being tapped. These are not all recent releases. The dates range from 2020 to 2025, spanning riddims, collaborations, and standalone tracks. The pattern is less about a single viral hit and more about scattered discovery: a sign that listeners across markets are encountering her music through varied paths—and choosing to engage.
Together, these signals paint a picture of an artist steadily—and often silently—gaining ground across multiple territories. It’s a paradox of digital reach: the audiences forming around her music may be distant, disjointed, and sometimes invisible from home. But they are present, engaged, and growing.
In an era of fractured attention and fluid cultural exchange, Nelly Cottoy’s career offers a reminder that success may not always look local—but it can be no less real. The music is traveling. The streams are consistent. And the appetite, three years on, is only increasing.
Listen to Nelly Cottoy on Spotify
