In late 2013, the then-19 year old Justin Bieber revealed to a radio show host that he found his latest collaborator, Chance the Rapper, online. He liked the budding Chicago rapper’s cadence, and wanted to ‘get him now before he blows up’.

Chance was not exactly unknown at that point, having recently been nominated for a BET award, but he wasn’t really famous either, certainly not far beyond the Chicago-New York axis of rap. Bieber was looking for energy and a unique style, and Chance had both in spades. To Chance, meanwhile, Bieber offered exposure to a new audience the magnitude of which was out of reach even for the kings of the rap game.

The result of their collaboration was Confident, a smooth, dub-influenced lament on falling in love with a girl who’s, like, really confident.

Pictured: Bieber and Gas Valve. For some reason it plays a role in the Confident music video.

Lyrical content aside, the song was commercially and critically successful, with Spin.com inviting their readers to Hear Justin Bieber Not Suck on Chance the Rapper Collab.

More importantly for Chance, though, the video amassed 196 million views on Youtube — a warm introduction to the mainstream. Chance has since had a celestial career trajectory: Freshman of the Year by XXL, collaborations with Childish Gambino and Kanye and universal acclaim for Coloring Book, his latest album.

Did the Bieber collaboration cause Chance’s ascent? Probably not. But my intuition told me that it certainly helped. It seemed like no coincidence that after Confident dropped, the average number of views on Chance’s videos went up by 52%[1], including several with view counts in the double-digit millions. It’s only right that scoring a collaboration with the Biebs will propel a lesser-known artist’s career.

But do the numbers bear that out across pop stars and their lesser known collaborators? Are struggling musicians justified in spending their time looking for opportunities to work with well-known artists? And if that’s the ticket to stardom, do certain artists offer it more consistently than others?

I figured YouTube video views are a sufficiently close proxy for this and turned to the Youtube Data API to see what truths/stats/pretty charts I could wrest from its data-heavy bosom.

But before turning to the data, let’s set out the rules of the game. First, how the hell did I define a star? I didn’t: I let others do it for me[2]. Then, I set rules about who an emerging artist is and what counts as a collaboration to try to isolate the impact of the variable I am looking for (namely, star power), like not having other stars on the song or multiple collaborations between the two[3]. This helped me filter my stolen list of 20 down to seven superstars who often collaborate with new artists.

The process of filtration was revealing in itself. It seems that certain stars broadly eschew collaborations, like Lady Gaga and Adele (who rebuffed Queen Bey herself) while others, like, well, Queen Bey, prefer to collaborate with artists who are already established. Others still do not seem to mind bringing new talent on set and indeed, even proactively seek it out like Nicki Minaj and Kanye West.

Cool. Now, whose Instagram account should you be spamming with links to your MySpace, you ask? Apparently, Eminem’s.