When D’Banj met Kanye West at the airport around 2011 he was on his way to the United States to meet the rapper, Snoop Dogg. The meeting will eventually become the beginning of a working relationship between D’Banj and Kanye West, at least for some time.
Not too much was known of the impact the meeting had and the subsequent collaboration had on the Koko Master. But there were stories. These stories aren’t so dependable and in fact, the parties involved were known to even cast aspersions on the veracity of the stories in the public eye.
These days, measuring impact no longer require having to look about for the people involved in the story at the risk of having them share only the compelling parts of it. Instead, turn and look at the available data from streaming platforms; some answers might just be there waiting to be mined.
This is the path WeTalkSound associates, Dolapo Amusat and Paschal Okeke took on their quest to find out what’s making Afrobeats tick. The data was collated prior to the announcement of some of Nigeria and Africa’s biggest music acts involvement in The Lion King playlist curated by Beyonce.
The research titled “#Afrobits: An Analysis of Ten Top Nigerian Artists Using Spotify Data” examined 1,585 songs by 10 top Nigerian artists. These artists include Davido, Mr Eazi, Wizkid, Burna Boy, M.I Abaga, Falz, Niniola, Olamide, Wande Coal and Tiwa Savage. The artists were selected based on perceived size of following and diversity.
Of all the streaming platforms available, this project only examined data from one streaming platform and this might be a strong limitation to the strength of the research. The research did not test the correlation between the variables examined.
However, here are some interesting findings in the work:
Popularity on social media may not mean same on streaming platforms
An artist’s activity on socials might be boisterous with engagements and all, it doesn’t necessarily mean it’d impact their activity on streaming platforms. A case in point is Mr Eazi, who ranks lowly on the social media (Instagram and Facebook) followers count compared to Davido and Wizkid, but still have a solid follower and listener count on Spotify.
Mr Eazi even has more listener count on Spotify than Wizkid, whose number is also high, just not as high as the former. Dolapo and Paschal think it could be because Wizkid there’s a dearth of materials from Wizkid around that time.
The rapper M.I Abaga has the least followers and listeners count on the platform. The reason for this might not be unrelated to the fact that:
Volume & Collaborations seem to have a heavy impact on artist popularity
Take for example, M.I appeared on 110 songs. 33 out of those songs are features. When you take those numbers and compare them with others, the numbers are meagre.
One anomaly at this point is Falz. The rapper has a lot of content (223) on Spotify. However, his collaboration count is just 55. In his defence, his Spotify contents skewed towards the high side because of his comedy skits and live album.
From this finding, 3 hypothesis must be tested:
- Bigger artists tend to collaborate more.
- Artists tend to be bigger when they collaborate.
- Bigger artists are more attractive to potential collaborators.
75% of Davido’s catalogue are collaborations; for Wizkid it’s 70%; while for Mr Eazi, it’s 68%. The 3 artists are all big on the platform.
Volume also does play a big role in the popularity of artists. The more materials artist put out, the more the chances of the artist being note. Case in point, Olamide, who is also big on features/collaboration.
4 out of the 5 most popular Nigerian artists on Spotify all have high number of features.
Where talent can’t get you, collaboration will
Artists can’t ride on talent alone to succeed at scale. This is evident in the statistics of the top 5 artists (Davido, Wizkid, Olamide, Burna Boy and Mr Eazi).
While Burna Boy, with features being only 40% of his catalogue, might not be a heavy collaborator like Wizkid and Davido, the impact of features on his popularity can’t be understated.
In an analysis of the performance of the top 10 songs by Burna Boy, 3 out of the 10 songs — “Location” with Dave, “Killin’ Dem” with Zlatan and “Sunshine Riptide” with Fall Out Boy — are joint efforts with other artists.
The impact of collaborations are most significant on Wizkid. 9 out of his top 10 most popular songs being from joint efforts. Closely following him is Mr Eazi, with 6 out of 10 being collaborations.
Collaborations are not automatic tickets to popularity
Wizkid and Mr Eazi, the most active collaborators, often collaborated with foreign artists. This probably explains why there’s a drastic impact on their popularity. Collaboration with foreign artists opens up access to a whole new market and audience. Where artists are not collaborating internationally, their best bet is to do so with native/local artists. But for this to work, the artist must have more reach. This can be beneficial to both parties at a bigger scale. Why because a common trend in this set of data suggests that artists who collaborate more tend to stay relevant for longer than those who don’t.
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It is important to note that a lot has happened since the data used in this research was collated. For example, Burna Boy, Mr Eazi and Tiwa Savage appeared on The Lion King: The Gift, a playlist curated by Beyonce. It’d be interesting to see how their appearance on that work impacted their popularity.
When data from other streaming platforms like iTunes, BoomPlay and Deezer are collated, there’s a chance that the outcome may be different: some artists thrive on one platform than another; Spotify is not officially available in Nigeria.
See more graph from #Afrobits here.