I would have put my money on Taylor Swift or Beyonce, but it turns out that the Biebs has held a steady place in hearts across the world for a large portion of the past decade. Below you will find a detailed explanation of how I produced the visualization below:
Getting the results for this analysis turned out to be a little more difficult than I first expected. Two things limited the speed in which I could compile what I needed:
1) Google limits the numbers of Trends comparison searches to five topics/people
2) The Trends comparisons are normalized (so if you replace the least popular of your five people with someone slightly more popular, it modifies the overall trend rating for the other four people).
Knowing these two things were going to hinder my progress, I decided to start by simply getting my list of potential popular artists together. I primarily stuck with three sources for compiling my list of artists:
- Billboard's top 100 artist list
- Wikipedia's list of top albums in the 21st Century
- Various lists of artists on Ranker
My goal here was to get a solid list of artists who could possibly end up at the top of Google's search rankings when I compared searches for artists over the past decade. I ended up with 96 potential artists:
A few notes on this chart:
- I found it interesting that Susan Boyle held the top Google Trend ranking for the same number of months (or in this case, a single month) as Shakira and Ariana Grande. Definitely wouldn't have guessed that before I started this analysis.
- Beyonce is interesting because she actually has one of the five highest Trend rankings over the past decade; however, she's only held the top rank for three months out of the past 120.
- Just as interesting was Taylor Swift, who has an overall Trend ranking just under Beyonce, but managed to hold the top rank for ten months.
- Britney Spears' total months is slightly deceiving because she had a solid end to 2007 and beginning to 2008, and her peak came at a time prior to the arrival of Justin Bieber and Lady Gaga. This was also a point in time where Rihanna was coming off of A Girl Like Me (2006) and Beyonce was transitioning into her solo career. Still, not bad considering the majority of her success happened in the late 90s and early 2000s.
- Four artists do not appear on this chart but actually rank fairly high during certain months because of their deaths: Michael Jackson, Whitney Houston, Amy Winehouse, and Prince. I did not include these artists on this chart because I wanted to find out who has been the most popular active artist over the past decade. (Michael's death was so important to people that searches for his name between June 2009 and November 2009 actually placed him in the top five overall Trend rankings for the entire decade. Crazy stuff.)
Once I had my list down to sixteen, I continued to swap artists/bands in my five available Google Trend slots until I came up with the five artists with the highest overall Trend rankings for the entire decade (in order of popularity):
- Justin Bieber
- Rihanna
- Miley Cyrus
- Lady Gaga
- Beyonce
Again, this list is based solely on overall search popularity provided by Google Trends. Below is the embedded version of my final comparison (if the chart indicates that it doesn't have enough data, just refresh the page; Google Trends can be a little finicky):
No doubt three out of the five benefit from their partners/former partners boosting overall interest in their name (i.e. Bieber with Selena Gomez; Beyonce with Jay Z; Rihanna with Chris Brown). Miley gets a boost from her Hannah Montana days. Gaga might be the only one of the five whose music is the primary driver of her inclusion on this list.
But then again, she also wore a dress made of meat, so...
Getting the results for this analysis turned out to be a little more difficult than I first expected. Two things limited the speed in which I could compile what I needed:
1) Google limits the numbers of Trends comparison searches to five topics/people
2) The Trends comparisons are normalized (so if you replace the least popular of your five people with someone slightly more popular, it modifies the overall trend rating for the other four people).
Knowing these two things were going to hinder my progress, I decided to start by simply getting my list of potential popular artists together. I primarily stuck with three sources for compiling my list of artists:
- Billboard's top 100 artist list
- Wikipedia's list of top albums in the 21st Century
- Various lists of artists on Ranker
My goal here was to get a solid list of artists who could possibly end up at the top of Google's search rankings when I compared searches for artists over the past decade. I ended up with 96 potential artists:
Once I had this list together, I picked a few artists I figured would be some of the more popular artists over the past decade (my original list consisted of Taylor Swift, Beyonce, and Eminem). At this point, it was a trade out game: take my five available spots and attempt to reduce my list of 96 down to the five artists with the highest average Trend ranking. Some artists were easier to eliminate than others (i.e. sorry Gotye and Luke Bryan fans).
I was able to reduce my list down to 17 artists/bands who held the top Google Trend ranking at some point in the past decade:
- I found it interesting that Susan Boyle held the top Google Trend ranking for the same number of months (or in this case, a single month) as Shakira and Ariana Grande. Definitely wouldn't have guessed that before I started this analysis.
- Beyonce is interesting because she actually has one of the five highest Trend rankings over the past decade; however, she's only held the top rank for three months out of the past 120.
- Just as interesting was Taylor Swift, who has an overall Trend ranking just under Beyonce, but managed to hold the top rank for ten months.
- Britney Spears' total months is slightly deceiving because she had a solid end to 2007 and beginning to 2008, and her peak came at a time prior to the arrival of Justin Bieber and Lady Gaga. This was also a point in time where Rihanna was coming off of A Girl Like Me (2006) and Beyonce was transitioning into her solo career. Still, not bad considering the majority of her success happened in the late 90s and early 2000s.
- Four artists do not appear on this chart but actually rank fairly high during certain months because of their deaths: Michael Jackson, Whitney Houston, Amy Winehouse, and Prince. I did not include these artists on this chart because I wanted to find out who has been the most popular active artist over the past decade. (Michael's death was so important to people that searches for his name between June 2009 and November 2009 actually placed him in the top five overall Trend rankings for the entire decade. Crazy stuff.)
Once I had my list down to sixteen, I continued to swap artists/bands in my five available Google Trend slots until I came up with the five artists with the highest overall Trend rankings for the entire decade (in order of popularity):
- Justin Bieber
- Rihanna
- Miley Cyrus
- Lady Gaga
- Beyonce
Again, this list is based solely on overall search popularity provided by Google Trends. Below is the embedded version of my final comparison (if the chart indicates that it doesn't have enough data, just refresh the page; Google Trends can be a little finicky):
No doubt three out of the five benefit from their partners/former partners boosting overall interest in their name (i.e. Bieber with Selena Gomez; Beyonce with Jay Z; Rihanna with Chris Brown). Miley gets a boost from her Hannah Montana days. Gaga might be the only one of the five whose music is the primary driver of her inclusion on this list.
But then again, she also wore a dress made of meat, so...
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