Who Collaborates the Most?
The collab-to-solo ratio measurement
After these past few weeks of exploring the dynamics of collaboration in my data you might wonder - who has the highest ratio of collaborations to solo releases on the charts? First, if you’re new, you can find details about me and this data project here. Now to answer the question at hand: between late 2020 and the end of 2024, it was essentially a tie between the two individuals pictured below:
While both Young Thug and 21 Savage collaborate with other artists more often than they appear alone, the slight edge does go to 21 Savage. And this is over the better part of half a decade!
This got me curious. When 21 Savage is the lone vocalist, do his songs perform worse than when he appears with another artist?
To address this, I decided to re-categorized some of the songs from his collaborative album with producer Metro-Boomin to the solo category, since he is the only artist on these particular records with a vocal presence. I think these should be considered solo appearances for the purposes of this analysis, since Metro’s contribution is limited to the production even though he is credited as a co-headliner.
I also created a new category of songs where 21 is credited specifically as a guest feature rather than a co-headliner. I then had my custom Chat GPT analyze the chart performance, while making sure it was accounting for the fact that there are unequal amounts of songs in each category so that we can get a better sense of actual strength.
Seen below is a success score that shows a clear out-performance of co-headlining material for 21 Savage.
Over time, this is what the chart performance of the three different categories looks like:
Some insights:
Co-headlining (blue) has performed consistently for 21 Savage.
While uncommon, his performance as the lone vocalist on a track (green) has steadily improved over the years. If I was on his team, I’d suggest focusing on a big solo album. The data suggests growth in this area and a strong solo record could move him up into the next echelon of artists.
Next week we go a bit deeper down the 21 Savage rabbit hole and look at the sound and instrumentation of these songs and how they perform through that lens.