Research - Demographic Data: Kanye West

Kanye West

The song we have decided to make out music video to is called 'The Blame Game' by Kanye West ft John Legend. Kanye West was born June 8, 1977 and is an American rapper, singer, and record producer. West first rose to fame as a producer for Roc-A-Fella Records, where he eventually achieved recognition for his work on Jay-Z's album The Blueprint, as well as hit singles for musical artists including Alicia Keys and Janet Jackson. His style of production originally used pitched-up vocal samples from soul songs incorporated with his own drums and instruments. He has also sold over 11 million albums in the United States, over 15 million worldwide and and over 25 million digital songs in the United States placing him second for solo male artists on the list and sixth overall for best selling digital artists. Kanye West has had 5 songs exceed 3 million in digital sales as of July 2011, with "Gold Digger" selling 3,086,000, "Stronger" selling 4,402,000, "Heartless" selling 3,742,000, "E.T." selling over 4,000,000 and "Love Lockdown" selling over 3,000,000 placing him third in overall digital sales of the past decade.

As well as this since the boom of social networking sites, Kanye has accumulated many more fans over the years as the chart shows. As you can see facebook makes more than 50% of Kanye's total fans on social networks with over 800,000 fans. These fans on these social websites either mention the artist or plays one of their videos giving it more popularity which is why they are such good sites to promote music.


Source - Musicmetric

The next graph shows the percentage of male and female fans kanye west has Myspace. From 2005 until early 2008, Myspace was the most visited social networking site in the world, and in June 2006 surpassed Google as the most visited website in the United States. In April 2008, Myspace was overtaken by Facebook in the number of unique worldwide visitors. Even though it is in decline, it is still known as one of the top entertainment websites in the world. The chart below shows that over 55% of kanye west fans on myspace are male and 42.6% of the remaining are female. This data can be seen as an overall perspective of the world being that the majority of the kanye west fan base are men due to the genres kanye west do whether it is rap/hip hop or RnB.



Source - Musicmetric

The final myspace graph i am going to show is the age distribution his music is sent across to. The graph below clearly shows the majority of people that listen to kanye west's music are aged about 16-33 years old with the largest distributes aged being 21. This is good data to our group because it shows us that our music video should be targeted toward teenagers and early adults due to the 'boom' of the age distribution from 17-21 there is a huge increase in number of listeners.

Source - Musicmetric

However it is not only social networking sites that contribute to an artists fan base, it is also the country where fans are located. Note that the united states of America make up over 40% of the total music distribution around the world due to the amount of top selling artists that come from the country. America is then followed by the united kingdom and the rest of Europe. This theory is backed up by the following map as it shows the distribution of kanye west fans around the world and he has a heavy following of fans in the united states followed by Europe.



Source - Musicmetric

 Through all the controversy that he goes through, Kanye west has still managed to be one of the top selling RnB rappers of all time with a huge following to support it. He has his own record label with the acronym G.O.O.D which stands for Getting Out Our Dreams. Kanye West has received 47 awards out of over 140 nominations, including 14 Grammy awards and with a long career ahead of him, he has bound to get more awards and more fans.

-MICHAEL IKEJI-