Square

Have you ever wondered who the biggest ‘lil’ music artist is? As more and more enter the music arena and start to hit the top of the Billboard charts, I wanted to find out who the biggest ‘lil’ is, as we enter into Q2 of 2019. To determine this I tapped into Google Trends, Google’s tool for measuring search trends over time. Looking at top related queries for the term ‘lil’ allowed us to gain all the insights we need into which ‘lil’ artist is getting searched for the most on Google. Out of 25 results given by Google most were related to music artists, while surprisingly people are searching for pizza using “lil” instead of “little” (‘lil Ceaser Pizza’). Duplicate names with extended spellings and non-artists (like ‘lil ceaser’ ) were removed from the ranking.

So who are the biggest ‘lil’ artists?

When we look at “lil” searches since 2004, we see Lil Wayne dominating Google for searches related to the term “lil.” Over the last 15 years searches for Lil Wayne are about 9X higher than all of the other lil’s. Much of this is likely because many of these artists carriers have started more recently than Lil Wayne, who has been active since 1996.

Who’s the biggest ‘lil’ right now?

When we dig a little deeper into the past 12 months, Lil Wayne continues to take the cake, especially after releasing the highly anticipated CARTER V in September, 2018. Next up is a tie between chart topers Lil Baby and Lil Pump, but my guess is, if we check back in a few weeks, this tie could be broken depending on new releases. We’ll have to wait till the end of 2019 to see who had a more influential year. Lil Uzi Vert takes the #4 spot for “Lil Uzi” searches while the late Lil Peep rounds out the top 5, raking up more searches over a year after his death than most of the other lil artists. Lil Nas X who’s hit song Old Town Road has been causing a lot of buzz, ties for 14th place for “Lil Nas” searches, but is the top rising result on Google Trends.

Digging a little deeper into the trends, I queried results for the top 5 artists over the last 12 months. We see a huge spike for surrounding the Lil Wayne CARTER V album release date. We also see some interesting state-by-state trends. Here we see Atlanta artist Lil Baby beating Lil Wayne for searches in Georgia for this timeframe and searches on the West Coast lit up by Lil Pump. Unfortunately, Lil Uzi searches are not enough to get him the #1 for any states for this 12 month time period.

When we look at each artist on their own map we see Lil Wayne and Lil Baby really cornering their home states and the South with searches. Lil Pump seems to follow a different trend, lighting up the West Coast, with his home state of Florida not even making the top 5. Lil Uzi Vert and Lil Peep also keep it close to home, both with their home states on their top 5. Lil Peep’s searches spike around the South West and expand up into the Midwest region, while Uzi’s searches are coming mostly from the North East.

For this project we looked at the last 12 months (April 2018–April 2019) of searches for the term “lil” across the United States, along with any related queries. I encourage you to explore Google Trends yourself here. It’s a great free tool that allows anyone to quickly gain insights into the searches happening across the web by state, county and major cities. Simply type in a term, select a region of the word and a timeframe for your query to get started. Have questions about Google Trends or getting started on your own project like this, feel free to each out!