Beyoncé Soars Above Detractors To Top Of Social Music Power Rankings
There’s a reason why they call her Queen Bey.
Despite the lip-sync row, PETA’s petulance, and Internet infamy after her publicist Yvette Noel-Shure unwisely asked BuzzFeed to remove seven of the most incredible performance shots in history, Beyoncé is soaring above the noise.
If the best way to get out from underneath a negative story is to get attached to a new one, then the singer’s recent surge in music social media rankings is an impressive place to start.
According to Billboard, the 31-year-old received a 42 percent boost in online fan growth, adding 794,000 followers across multiple platforms after her 104 million drawing Super Bowl halftime show last Sunday.
The Houston native stormed to the number one spot on Billboard’s Social 50 chart, which ranks the most active artists on leading social networking and/or user-generated sites — Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, YouTube, Instagram, Reddit, Hi5, Google+, Pinterest, and the rest.
The data is calculated by music metric analysts Next Big Sound, who measure artist page views, weekly song plays, and the weekly additions of new friends, fans, or followers that an artist gains.
In addition to the 5.5 million Tweets that mentioned Beyonce’s Super Bowl throwdown, Twitter.com notes that the #beyoncebowl hashtag was used in over 200,000 tweets.
The singer’s own Twitter account gained 108,000 new followers in the week after CBS’s broadcast, an 86% boost over the previous seven days. Likewise, over 375,ooo new followers hitched on to her Instagram account @baddiebey — translating as a 116% increase in growth over the previous week.
The surge continued. Rehearsal teasers posted on Beyonce’s YouTube channel on each of the four days just before the Super Bowl, drew between 100,000 and 600,000 views — a 505 percent increase in her weekly YouTube channel hits.
And it doesn’t stop there.
Internet Radio Pandora notes that since the Super Bowl, over 46,000 Beyoncé stations have been created on Pandora, amounting to a 158 percent increase in station creations to date.
If all of that isn’t enough, the singer’s catalog of albums (solo plus Destiny’s Child) sold 20,000 in the week ending February 3, a spike of 197% up from the previous week.
In digital song sales, Beyonce and Destiny’s Child shifted 167,000 downloads last week — a hike of 132 percent. Breaking those figures down, Beyonce’s solo songs sold 122,000 downloads (up by 103 percent) while Destiny’s Child’s sold 44,000 (up by 286%).
After harnessing the Super Bowl spotlight to announce the Mrs Carter Show World Tour, and sparking a tsunami of praise and criticism from conservatives, MSNBC, a Pastor, and Illuminati conspiracists — Beyoncé stepped off-stage into dignified silence and now gazes serenely from the cover of Vogue’s March 2013 issue.
Leaked on Twitter — aren’t they always? — the singer channels Sophia Loren in a Givenchy adorned, cat-eyed pose. Vogue’s headline reads “Beyoncé Rules The World.”
Fittingly, Beyoncé and husband Jay-Z will take their seats in the front row at the 55th Annual Grammy Awards in Los Angeles’ Staples Center tonight, and perhaps win one of the seven nominations they total between them.
Sometimes you just gotta wait the storm out.
