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Mariah Carey is among the Top 3 best selling female artists of all time. She has massive sales in North America and Asia. In Japan, she even outsells the likes of Madonna and Celine Dion. How does the legendary diva perform in the rest of the world? We’ll find out shortly!

It is often said that Mariah Carey is much bigger in the US than in the rest of the world. While her US success is out of this world, she also enjoys extraordinary sales in many Asian countries like Japan, Taiwan and South Korea. To this day, her sales in several countries remain unknown. In this article, we will use the distribution of her views from every relevant market to complete the global map of her fame.

The method

In order to identify on which countries Mariah Carey performed well, the way to go is to look at the remaining monster sellers. Thus, we collected market by market YouTube statistics of all Top 5 CSPC artists so far. They are the Beatles, Michael Jackson, Elvis Presley, Madonna and Queen. Then, Adele was also added to get an artist reflective of the current market dynamics. Referenced at the time of their own studies, Meat Loaf, Jennifer Lopez and Frank Sinatra add volume and thus consistency to the scaling group.

As stated inside the article Learn how to exploit YouTube Insights, the absolute number of views is irrelevant. Depending on your target audience and its YouTube usage habits, you will have very different results. Relative results do matter though. That’s why rather than comparing views numbers, we compare the share of views coming from each market for all these artists. For example, both the Beatles and Queen have over 1,6 million monthly views in Japan. Since Queen outperform the Beatles by 3 to 1 globally, that means Japan is a market 3 times more relevant for the Beatles.

Once we defined the strength of each market for scale artists, we calculate their respective average. To continue with our example, our scale artists register 0,47% of their global streams in Taiwan. Carey‘s count there stands at 1,14%, it means the relevance of this market is 243% (1,14%/0,47%) as high for her as for the others.

The results

The greenest a country is, the best Mariah Carey performed in comparison to the scale artists. On yellow ones, she still does better than the average. Countries in orange represent mixed performances, the most red they get, the most there is an underperformance. Countries in white fail to appear among personal Top 100 markets on YouTube of all our scale artists.

We aren’t done still. An artist can record a huge chunk of his views in a few countries only, say in the US. Her comparative shares in remaining countries would then underperform massively reference values. This issue is known for years in the world of statisticians. A very efficient way to avoid these outliers consists in comparing rankings instead of raw values. As a result, instead of saying that Mariah Carey outperforms the scale by 4,08 to 1 in the Philippines, we will say that the Philippines is the country of rank 1, the one where she performs the best relatively speaking.

The greenest a country is, the highest it is among Mariah Carey‘s top markets and so on until red markets.

It has been known for decades that Carey has extraordinary sales all over Asia, so the fact the Philippines appears to be her best market is not surprising in the slightest. Malaysia (#6), Taiwan (#8) and Thailand (#9) are her best Asian markets along with the Philippines, which ranks at #1. The diva also seems to be quite popular in the Middle East, with Qatar (#7), United Arab Emirates (#10), and Kuwait (#12) rounding up her Top 15. What’s more surprising is the fact that Japan ranks only #42 given that she’s the best selling international female artist in the country. It is down to the fact that various international artists also did well there while hitting big numbers in continental Asia is rarer, making Carey’s numbers all the more impressive.

While her Asian dominance is hardly shocking at this point, her popularity in Africa remained a huge mystery till this day. Thanks to the global heat-map, now we know Carey is quite popular in Africa. Kenya and South Africa are her best African markets, ranking at #4 and #5, respectively. Nigeria and Mauritius also appear in the diva’s Top 20, at #15 and #18, respectively. It has to be said that many global superstars fail to make it big in Africa, so this says a lot about her global reach. In a world of physical formats, fame in these countries hardly translated into great sales since there is virtually no legal market except in South Africa. As internet is getting developed in the region at the moment it is going to impact streaming results of our favorite artists in years to come.

Carey‘s popularity in Europe is often questioned. While the diva has respectable sales in the continent, they aren’t that impressive in comparison to her peers such as Madonna and Dion, or even her own sales in Asia and North America. As a result, no European country makes the singer’s Top 40 aside from France, which is easily her best market ranking at #36. Romania, Portugal, and the Netherlands also appear in the Top 50 at #41, #45, and #50, respectively. The diva doesn’t rely a lot in several key markets, such as the UK (#59), Poland (#62), Italy (#65), Germany (#67), Ireland (#75), Russia (#79) and Spain (#84), as well as Scandinavia as a whole.

We don’t know much about Carey‘s popularity in Latin America, aside from the odd certification in some key markets. Mexico is one of the diva’s worst markets, ranking at #95. In fact, Uruguay (#90), Argentina (#91), Chile (#92), Ecuador (#93), Colombia (#94), Mexico (#95), and Paraguay (#96) are all among her worst markets ever. Conclusion? Carey is truly unpopular in Latin America, although the diva does exceptionally well in Brazil, which ranks as high as #20 for her.

Carey‘s popularity in the US is fully displayed in her global heatmap, ranking at #37. Surprisingly, the diva also does quite well in the Caribbean, with Jamaica and Trinidad and Tobago ranking at #2 and #3, respectively.

If you are more of a number guy, below is the list of countries with both values and ranks.