With Spotify Wrapped results flooding the timeline, we’ve collected some of the notable results from hip-hop’s incredible year.
It’s no secret that hip-hop stands among the biggest genres in the world, a dominant force behind the direction of pop-culture as a whole. And thanks to Spotify’s Wrapped feature, which has been embraced by many of the game’s prominent artists, fans can get a deeper understanding of exactly how deep hip-hop’s popularity truly runs. And that’s only factoring in the statistics of a single streaming service, as Apple Music and TIDAL have yet to implement such a feature.
With stats like total streams, hours, listeners, and countries, it’s easy to get a deeper picture of an artist’s popularity in a given year. It’s especially interesting in the cases when artists haven’t dropped an album this year, like Dreamville’s Cozz and Bas, yet still turn in solid results. In Nav‘s case, who flooded the game (no pun intended) with three full albums, his numbers appear aligned with the sheer volume of music he turned in. “What can I say? I’m not lucky,” marvels Denzel Curry, who shared his Unlocked project with Kenny Beats earlier this year. “I’m blessed.”
Though many have tried, it would appear that “canceling” Tory Lanez was ultimately a fool’s errand; even with controversy suffocating his name, the Canadian rapper’s fans continued to keep the momentum going. For Joyner Lucas, over half-a-billion listeners still wasn’t sufficient; “I’m not working hard enuff,” he reflects. And thanks to the watchful eye of Akademiks, it was learned that Lil Uzi Vert stands tall as one of the rap game’s numerical titans, with over two billion streams this year alone — surely indicative of his three-pronged output.
As one of the new era’s streaming kings, YoungBoy Never Broke Again’s 1.5 billion cemented him as a superstar in his own right. Unsurprisingly, Travis Scott found himself clocking in a staggering 4.4 billion, a tally made all the more incredible given the absence of a full-length album. And though they have been recently dealing with a hefty lawsuit from Three 6 Mafia, the $uicideBoy$ have also cracked the one-billion mark — not too shabby for a crew often labeled underground. Xzibit and Busta Rhymes, both of whom dropped new music with Summer Of Sam and ELE2: The Wrath Of God also held it down with some strong showings, proving that the game still has love for its OG lyricists.
And these are only a few of the tallied results, with plenty of rappers opting to keep their numbers secret for the time being. All things considered, it’s cool to see how massive hip-hop culture truly is, and Spotify Wrapped continues to provide a more analytical examination of the year’s most popular artists. Which rappers do you wish shared their statistics? Sound off in the comments section.