Beatles global heatmap
Since their breakthrough in 1963, the Beatles have been the number one force of the music industry. It’s regarded as a given that they are massively popular all around the world.
How true is it yet? Their records sales in markets like the US, the UK, and Japan are monstruous, but does their appeal shines as well in lesser known regions?
The method
In order to identify on which countries Beatles performed well, the way to go is to look at data from various top sellers and compare his own results with theirs.
Thus, we collected market by market YouTube statistics of 16 major artists including the Michael Jackson, Elvis Presley, Madonna, and Queen.
The sample also includes various recent artists among which Adele, Beyoncé, Britney Spears, and Eminem.
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 Michael Jackson have around 2.5 million monthly views in Japan. Since the latter outperforms the Beatles by 2 to 1 globally, that means Japan is a market 2 times more relevant for the Beatles. In conclusion, even if both have similar views there, the latter group is relatively speaking bigger there.
Once we defined the strength of each market for scale artists, we calculate their averages. To continue with our example, our scale artists register 1.44% of their global streams in Japan.
Beatles‘ count there stands at 3.55%, it means the relevance of this market is 247% (3.55%/1.44%) as high for them as for the others.
The results
The greenest a country is, the best Beatles performed in comparison to the scale artists. On yellow ones, he is on par with the average. Countries in orange represent weaker performances, the most red they get, the most he underperforms.
Countries in white fail to appear among his personal Top 100 markets on YouTube.
We aren’t done still. An artist can record a huge chunk of his views in a few countries only, say in the US.
Their 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 Beatles outperforms the scale by 2.47 to 1 in Japan, we will say that Japan is the country of rank 1, the one where they perform the best relatively speaking.
The greenest a country is, the highest it is among Beatles‘ top markets and so on until red markets.
The analysis
In absolute terms, Beatles have not-so-great numbers. Their strength on YouTube has been strongly rising, with their weekly views being twice higher now than just one year ago.
Still, their catalog records less ongoing views than artists who are nowhere near as big as them in remaining formats. This includes artists as diverse as the Guns N’ Roses or Tupac.
Of course, these relatively modest numbers were expected. There was virtually no music video during their active years. Once we consider this, their results are massive.
Looking at markets, the fab four does wonders in Japan. The market is far and away their best. One easily understands why they are the greatest selling foreign act of all-time there.
This superb popularity in Japan isn’t translated into remaining Asian countries yet. They are quite hot in Indonesia (#12), in Macau (#14), but then we need to go out of the top 20 to see additional markets from this continent.
This includes Hong Kong (#24), South Korea (#28), Philippines (#36), and Taiwan (#46). They do poorly in India (#59), Bangladesh (#87), and Pakistan (#93) while Sri Lanka is outside their top 100 markets.
A greater continent for them happens to be America as a whole. North American countries are incredibly high with Mexico, Canada and the US at 2, 3 and 6, respectively.
South American markets are also very fond of the Beatles. Argentina (#4), Chile (#7), Uruguay (#9), Paraguay (#13), Peru (#17), Brazil (#19), Bolivia (#25) are all great markets for the band.
Key markets historically speaking are also strong places for them. Australia ranks at 5, Spain at 9, the UK at 10, Ireland at 11, and all remaining strong European markets belong to their top 45.
It’s where these numbers are very interesting. The Liverpool legends are over 1 in relative popularity in only 12 markets out of 100, knowing that 100% of views are distributed just like for other artists. What does that mean?
It means that they are big in markets which are themselves very big. The US, the UK, Latin America, Canada, Japan, France, Spain, Italy, etc. These are all places where one can get a lot of views, and these are all markets where the Beatles are strongly popular.
In the other side, if we look at their bottom 10 markets in popularity, they are Morocco, Egypt, Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, Trinidad and Tobago, Algeria, Cambodia, Tunisia, and Iraq. All countries where foreign artists sold virtually nothing.
How can we interpret these results? We can say that they are larger in markets that were already kinda structured when they were active. We can also say that they are someway lucky that their sound is the most popular where sales happen to be the highest. Their success has been exploited incredibly efficiently.
If they are a bit less global than one could have though, it’s worth noting that they sold bucketloads everywhere, even in markets which are relatively low for them. It’s the trademark of legendary artists, to outperform most competitors where you don’t even do that well for your standards.
If you are more of a number guy, below is the list of countries with both values and ranks.
