Boy, am I glad I didn’t have to do the Excel work to come up with these charts. A dogged reporter named Randall Roberts at the LA Weekly has delved into the Billboard Top 10 album and singles charts for every week this year, tallied up demographic data about the artists, and made some dandy little diagrams with the results. It turns out that Americans really like white guys. Whites outnumbered blacks on the charts by 63 to 36 per cent (with Latinos grabbing the leftover 1%), while men outnumbered women on the charts by nearly a 5-to-2 ratio. High five, bros! As far as musical genre goes, R&B/hip-hop dominated the singles charts, while pop/rock commanded the album charts, so, combined, they’re just about equal, with country way behind. Other odd statistical revelations include the fact that the South was the region that produced the most Top 10 hitmakers by far (attributable to an “unlikely Southern coalition” of country and R&B) and Rihanna singlehandedly helped her native Barbados to the Top 7 list of foreign countries represented on our charts. Okay, Barbados, you get a high-five too.
