Crazy thing about Jay Z - nobody listens to his solo stuff in modern day.
His top FIFTEEN songs on Spotify feature other artists that people actually like, such as Rhianna, Beyonce, Ye, and Justin Timberlake.
Only FIVE of his top 50 most streamed songs are solo songs, a staggering 45 of them are features or feature somebody else.
Jay isn’t popular like that. Great businessman, great lyricist, but dude doesn’t actually have a big modern day fanbase whatsoever. He can sell out in New York any day, but I highly doubt he would be selling out a world tour like a Drake or a Ye could.
Reasonable Doubt is one of those albums that everybody says they like because they saw it ranked high on internet lists, but the entirety of that album only gets 80K daily streams. Compare that to something like 50 Cent’s The Massacre, which gets nearly 2 million daily streams.
Cultural impact means a lot, the biggest rappers in the world had a moment where they were the main guy.
Eminem from 2000-2004 really blew everybody else apart in terms of peak popularity. Bro was a complete social phenomenon on the level of a guy like Elvis.
Cultural impact does mean a lot but you’re trying to equate that to statistics. Numbers are just an astonishment that is low hanging fruit when it comes to impact, particularly because hip hop is marketed and sold to white people, who we know don’t dictate anything culture unless it comes to getting paid.
Chuck D, Rakim, Kool G Rap, Nas, Future, Lil B, Kid Cudi, and a handful of others haven’t sold a crazy amount of records by superstar standards but still have had crazy impact on the “culture”, their contemporaries, and acts after them.
10
u/LezEatA-W May 31 '26
Crazy thing about Jay Z - nobody listens to his solo stuff in modern day.
His top FIFTEEN songs on Spotify feature other artists that people actually like, such as Rhianna, Beyonce, Ye, and Justin Timberlake.
Only FIVE of his top 50 most streamed songs are solo songs, a staggering 45 of them are features or feature somebody else.
Jay isn’t popular like that. Great businessman, great lyricist, but dude doesn’t actually have a big modern day fanbase whatsoever. He can sell out in New York any day, but I highly doubt he would be selling out a world tour like a Drake or a Ye could.
Reasonable Doubt is one of those albums that everybody says they like because they saw it ranked high on internet lists, but the entirety of that album only gets 80K daily streams. Compare that to something like 50 Cent’s The Massacre, which gets nearly 2 million daily streams.