Britney Spears’ Global heatmap
Britney Spears is the most successful female artist who debuted in the last 25 years. She has made it big in all the relevant music markets. How does she perform in smaller markets like Russia or the Philippines? Or even truly irrelevant markets like Belarus and Bangladesh? Thanks to the global heatmap, we can do more than just guesstimate.
We know her sales in many countries thanks to her record label publishing them on her official website, leaving little to imagination, but the question mark is still there for several countries in Asia, Africa, Latin America and Eastern Europe. In this article, we will use the distribution of her views from every relevant market to complete the global map of her fame.
The method
In order to identify on which countries Britney Spears performed well, the way to go is to look at the remaining monster sellers. Thus, we collected market by market YouTube statistics of all Top 5 CSPC artists so far. They are the Beatles, Michael Jackson, Elvis Presley, Madonna and Queen. Then, Adele was also added to get an artist reflective of the current market dynamics. Referenced at the time of their own studies, Meat Loaf, Jennifer Lopez and Frank Sinatra add volume and thus consistency to the scaling group.
As stated inside the article Learn how to exploit YouTube Insights, the absolute number of views is irrelevant. Depending on your target audience and its YouTube usage habits, you will have very different results. Relative results do matter though. That’s why rather than comparing views numbers, we compare the share of views coming from each market for all these artists. For example, both the Beatles and Queen have over 1,6 million monthly views in Japan. Since Queen outperform the Beatles by 3 to 1 globally, that means Japan is a market 3 times more relevant for the Beatles.
Once we defined the strength of each market for scale artists, we calculate their respective average. To continue with our example, our scale artists register 1,70% of their global streams in Japan. Madonna‘s count there stands at 1,56%, it means the relevance of this market is only 92% (1,56%/1,70%) as high for him as for the others.
The results
The greenest a country is, the best Britney Spears performed in comparison to the scale artists. On yellow ones, she still does better than the average. Countries in orange represent mixed performances, the most red they get, the most there is an underperformance. Countries in white fail to appear among personal Top 100 markets on YouTube of all our scale artists.
We aren’t done still. An artist can record a huge chunk of his views in a few countries only, say in the US. That’s not the case of Britney Spears who scores just 18% of her views in her native country. Her comparative shares in remaining countries would then underperform massively reference values. This issue is known for years in the world of statisticians. A very efficient way to avoid these outliers consists in comparing rankings instead of raw values. As a result, instead of saying that Britney Spears outperforms the scale by 2,24 to 1 in the Philippines, we will say that the Philippines is the country of rank 1, the one where she performs the best relatively speaking.
The greenest a country is, the highest it is among Prince‘s top markets and so on until red markets.
Last year, we pointed out that the Philippines is arguably the singer’s most impressive market. This is proven once again as the Southeast Asian country ranks at #1. We also pointed out that Britney Spears has been getting extraordinary results in Russia since 2003, and the Eastern European country is quite simply her best European market, ranking at #6.
Britney Spears has proven to have a huge following in Asia, with the Philippines (#1), Malaysia (#2), Vietnam (#3), Singapore (#9), Kazakhstan (#10), Indonesia (#11), Taiwan (#12), and Hong Kong (#19) taking up most of her Top 20. Japan seems to be weaker than the previously mentioned countries, but still very decent. The singer also does exceptionally well in the Middle East, with Kuwait, Saudi Arabia, United Arab Emirates, and Qatar ranking at #4, #8, #18, and #13, respectively. Unsurprisingly, we have little to no information about her sales in the Middle East.
She is much weaker in Africa, although the singer displays a strong popularity in North Africa. Algeria is her strongest African market, ranking at #36. Tunisia (#54), Egypt (#72) and Morocco (#74) also seem to be good markets for her.
In Europe, Britney Spears does well in most markets, particularly in Eastern Europe. Her best markets are Belarus (#5), Russia (#6), Ukraine (#14), Finland (#15), Hungary (#16) and Poland (#17). As far as relevant markets go, France is her best market, ranking at #22. Last year, we learned that Britney Spears has huge sales in Latin America, where her debut album sold more than 1 million copies. Brazil is her best Latin American market, ranking at #20.
The United States ranking as low as #89 may be shocking as the singer has sold huge numbers in the country, but relatively speaking the country is #89 among her Top 100, the true trademark of a global star.
If you are more of a number guy, below is the list of countries with both values and ranks.
