The First Half of Hip Hop's 2018: Dissected

In January, it was revealed that (for the first time), Hip Hop was the most streamed genre in the country. Now, it seems an important time as ever for the genre to establish itself at the top. For someone who doesn’t like Drake or anything he stands for, it feels important that the year is full of good music from potentially chart-topping hip hop artists. Just past the halfway mark of 2018, it’s probably about time we take a look at the quality and popularity of the genre before answering a few other questions about the year in hip hop so far.

Is Hip Hop still popular?

It seems so. In answering this, I consulted the Billboard 200 albums chart. I know that albums are not the way that many consume music these days, but this helps track the popularity of an artist slightly easier and individual song streams do factor in, so singles are not all together ignored. Out of the 28 weeks before this article was written, 16 of those weeks had a hip hop or hip hop adjacent (The Weeknd and Post Malone) project at the top spot of the album chart. At just over 50%, the grip on listener’s ears seems to have continued.

Out of those 28 weeks, four projects have held the top spot for multiple weeks. Three of those projects were hip hop, Drake’s Scorpion (two weeks, but will probably continue), Post Malone’s Beerbongs & Bentleys (three weeks) and the Kendrick Lamar’s Black Panther Soundtrack (three weeks). This is a dominant control of the industry. None of these albums are nearing the records of Adele (over 20 weeks), but that seems almost impossible in the unlimited access age we live in.

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Other questions answered in this article:

• Is Hip Hop still good?

• So has 2018 been a good year for Hip Hop?

• What have we learned this year?

• So what’s left this year?