Ethiopia’s music industry has become an open market in the past few years. Those days where I see the same singers over and over again has long been gone. Thanks to social media sites like YouTube, anyone with access to a good camera and well-produced beat can take a shot at being an artist.
That made me ask, who the best artists are in the business or if the average Abebe can make it in this industry. How many of the artists produce a song but never to repeat it? Or do people make a music video as a pretext for a visa to the USA, as rumor has it? To find out, I wanted to do some analysis of the songs released on YouTube.
For this experiment, I chose Hope Entertainment which is quite famous and houses the famous celebs in their video collection. Founded on April 19, 2010; they have more than 1 million subscribers and more than 1 billion views as of November 1st, 2019. Their social media visibility is not limited to YouTube. They are on Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram.
That’s not to say there are no videos released on other channels or artists don’t release songs on their own platform. Admas Music has some highly viewed music videos but most of their content is made for the Eritrean community. DireTube Music also has a lot of content but they have stopped posting 2 years ago. And Minew Shewa is recently coming into the business. There are artists like Fikreaddis Nekatibeb who has her own YouTube channel, with more than 17+ million views on only 4 videos. But for the sake of management and my sanity I have only chosen Hope Entertainment channel.
First things first! I scraped their video collection from their YouTube channel using a python script. In the scraped CSV file, I had the title of the video, the number of likes and dislikes, comment count, song duration, published date and number of views. Since their video titles are well organized, I was able to extract the name of the artist along with its featuring artist and whether the video is a music video or audio with just an image of the artist. All the data was scrapped on November 1st, 2019. For more details and to find the whole extracted content, please refer to the project on Github.
Based on the extracted data, I was able to find the following information.
The average song length is 5 minutes and this includes the hope entertainment intro in the beginning and credits at the end.
The most viewed music video is Tekebel by Getish Mamo. The squeal is also in the 10th position. Selamawit Yohannes has three videos in the top 10.
Kokebe by Jossy in z house & Millen Hailu by far is the most commented video in the channel. Hard to say what the content of the comments are but it’s safe to assume that a song involving an Ethiopian and Eritrean artist has something to do with it.
Appreciation was calculated by subtracting dislikes from likes. Again, Kokebe by Jossy in z house & Millen Hailu was the most appreciated video. The video has 50,297 likes but has 14,848 dislikes.
The growth of Hope Entertainment is shown chronologically below. Their business has started to grow full speed from 2016.
The two months with the most number of videos released were March 2019 and March 2018. I can’t explain why this is so.
Unfortunately, an artist with a video isn’t as profitable as one might think. There are a total of 1882 music videos and 1463 artists. 1136 artists released only one music video on the channel and that’s 77% of the artists. Music videos with more than 1M+ views (243 music videos) were made by 13% of the artists and they contributed 75% of all the views on the channel. 1026 out of 1882 videos (54%) are viewed under 100k. From the above stats, it’s easy to conclude that the average artist in the channel isn’t making the company or themselves substantial money.
On the other side of the coin, I believe some artists are under-appreciated and I wonder if they are paid accordingly, or if they are aware of their influence. For instance, Selamawit Yohannes is by far the most influential artist with a total of 47+ million views on only 4 videos. She also maintains a good standing on videos posted on other YouTube channels. 1 out of 20 views on Hope Entertainment goes to her videos. The count below represents the number of music videos by the artist.
The top 10 artists have contributed 22% of all the views on the channel.
In terms of lifetime earnings, it’s hard to say how much money the company has made through 1882 videos. But there are websites that estimate the total earnings of a channel. I want to underline that these numbers are estimates and should be taken as such. I used tubecalculator to estimate the earnings of the channel. This data only shows the money the channel would have received from YouTube and doesn’t put into consideration the dividend or payment the artists receive.
My last take would be on Belba by Jambo Jote winning single of the year award, on Leza Award. His video on YouTube has garnered 2.9 million views. But, you will see a list of videos released in the past 1 year that performed better in terms of views. It makes you wonder how the winners of the award are really picked.
For any comments, you can find me on Telegram @hagere
