The article is worth actually looking through, but here are some quotes:
Were we saying something about a close contest? Not on the album tally, where comeback king Eminem takes the top slot by an absurd margin. Thanks to his two latest chart-topping albums, 2009's Relapse and 2010's Recovery, the man otherwise known as Slim Shady sold more than two and a half times the number of albums as the second-ranked Lil Wayne during our survey period.
More than half of Eminem's 7.5 million in sales were taken by Recovery. Now past four million copies in the U.S. alone, Recovery was the best-selling album, period, of 2010. One-fourth of those albums sold digitally, making it the first album in history to sell more than a million non-physical copies, a mark it crossed just last month. Despite losing the Album of the Year Grammy in an upset to Arcade Fire, Recovery still took home Best Rap Album, Eminem's fifth win that category. It also doesn't hurt to have a crossover hit song to fuel album sales, and Recovery had a monster: the Rihanna-supported ballad "Love the Way You Lie," which topped the Hot 100 for two months last year and probably fueled more soccer-mom album purchases for Shady than at any time in his career.
Of the 10 videos we tracked that were viewed more than 100 million times, nine were Top Five hits on the Billboard Hot 100, including Jennifer Lopez's "On the Floor" featuring Pitbull, Katy Perry's "E.T." featuring Kanye West, and Jay-Z's team-up with Alicia Keys, "Empire State of Mind." (As for that 10th video, "Price Tag" by Jessie J featuring B.o.B., it topped the pop chart in Britain.)
Only one of these nine-figure-viewers is a video from a rapper by himself – one who's neither supporting a singer nor being supported by one. That would be Eminem, who goes it alone on his 2010 hit "Not Afraid," the video of which has been watched 257 million times. Perhaps it is appropriate, then, that Eminem leads our YouTube tally – again, as with his albums lead, by a massive margin. The 1.3 billion total video views collected by Mr. Mathers are double those of perpetual runner-up Lil Wayne. Almost half of those views come from just two clips: the aforementioned "Not Afraid," and (of course) "Love the Way You Lie." That Rihanna-supported clip has been watched 360 million times, the most of any lead performance by any of our rappers.
As with YouTube, Eminem is king of social media, racking up the largest number of both friends and followers on the major sites.
Slim Shady's command of Facebook is particularly eye-popping – nearly 44 million fans have "liked" him there, placing him not only 14 million fans ahead of Lil Wayne but also a couple of million ahead of such pop figures as Rihanna (43 million) and Lady Gaga (42 million). In fact, among actual humans, Em is more "liked" than anyone; across all of Facebook the only things given the thumbs-up more than him are Texas Hold'em Poker and Facebook itself.
On Twitter, Eminem's lead among rappers is slimmer – his five million followers top those of his "Roman's Revenge" duet partner Nicki Minaj by only 600,000 or so. And for a public figure and a musician, it must be said his following is strong but not especially remarkable – Gaga and Justin Bieber passed 10 million followers several months ago, and Em is also soundly beaten by such pop starlets as Britney Spears, Katy Perry and Shakira.
So here we are at the final showdown, ready to mash up all of our data into a master list and crown a winner.
With his dominant album sales, YouTube views and social-media scores, Eminem takes the title as the current King of Hip-Hop.
http://www.rollingstone.com/music/news/ ... p-20110815
