You Played Yourself: The Curious Case of DJ Khaled
They Don’t Want You To Succeed
(Read to the tune of a Spotify playlist of DJ Khaled Singles)
We don’t see 95% of how success is actually made, and DJ Khaled’s path is no different. What seemed to be an overnight miracle was really 10+ years of hard work and endless hustle. He rose from the bottom and has heavily capitalized on the latest wave of social media fame. But fame isn’t easy, and Khaled rose so fast that transparency was completely eliminated from his fan base, leaving open questions about who he truly was.
December 14, 2015. DJ Khaled, the famous rapper-who-doesn’t-actually-rap chronicled this unfortunate night on Snapchat while he was lost at sea. After several hours Khaled managed to wade through the pitch black sea and make it home, but those several hours was all it took to launch Khaled from occasional name to pop culture obsession.Though Khaled had been gaining popularity from his Snapchat starting back in October, this event spurred countless articles and loving chronicles of his life. If you didn’t know who he was before, you did now.
December 1 was also a good day for Khaled. Buzzfeed featured him on “16 Snapchats That Prove DJ Khaled Is The Hero We All Need”, which is labeled a top article. Then he drops a viral video “Wise Words With DJ Khaled”, where he repeats his own catch phrases over and over again, a la Shia LaBeouf. For the first time since his 2013 album “Suffering From Success” he had hit mainstream again.
His keys to success; his phrases; his breakfast of turkey bacon, egg whites and water; his garden; everything that he had been building the past two months had come to fruition. Searches for DJ Khaled, We The Best, and Bless Up hit all time highs and he was consistently landing high profile late night talk shows, Buzzfeed articles and a presumed 6M views per snap (according to a Bloomberg article in March, 2016).
Starting as a radio DJ in Miami, Khaled Khaled worked his way through the A and B list rapper world, hitting a high as the producer for Terror Squad. He rallied his connections to release his first album in 2006, “Listennn…The Album”, which was filled with so many features all he had to do was produce, bob his head, and call out his name a couple times. That album peaked at #12 on Billboard’s Hot 200 and lasted on the charts for 7 weeks.
The formula worked, and Khaled kept going. He amassed fame and notoriety, enough to feature the likes of Kanye West and Lil’ Wayne before they really took off. Though he appeared to be in the gang, he was segmented; only making hits every once and a while and then dropping into the abyss. He was the DJ that everyone knew a song, but no one knew the whole album. He couldn’t crack it.
So he went a different route, he started to create less of an emphasis on the music and more on sponsorships and building a brand. His persona shifted from background DJ to a character, almost too accentuated to be human. His brand relied on sponsorships and product placement, and he leveraged those like no rapper of his time. While other rappers had sponsorship deals here and there, DJ Khaled was producing entire music videos around Monster headphones, Nuvo Liqueur, or his own restaurant, Finga Licking Miami Gardens.
All I Do Is Win
Of his 22 music videos, 13 of which have over 20 seconds in visual and spoken brand recognition. That’s saying that roughly 10% of those videos are focused on brands, not his music. Now, not all brands are paid-for sponsorships, but Khaled makes it very clear if the brand is to be in the spotlight.
Take Nuvo Liqueur for example. Nuvo was really the first true brand that Khaled incorporated into his music videos, and he could not have done it more bluntly. In “Out Here Grindin”, Khaled had just 12 seconds of visual brand placement, 9 of which were for Nuvo. Here’s the great part, the music video had no natural space for brands (other than maybe a clothing brand) to slip in. So what did Khaled do? He shows up carrying the bottle halfway through the video. Never has brand placement looked more forced, but it didn’t matter, because Khaled had just featured his first major product.
That was nothing compared to his 2009 single “Fed Up” (which didn’t even chart on Billboard’s Top 100). Khaled created a mini-movie out of this video that surrounded a lengthy chase for a nondescript briefcase. Following history and common sense, there should be jewels or money or something of value in that briefcase yes? Wrong. We find out that in the briefcase is a pair of (coveted) Monster Turbine headphones and for the last 37 seconds of “Fed Up” we are fortunate enough to be given a native commercial for the headphones. Khaled drew us in, fooled us all, and presumably made a pretty penny off of this stunt.
His 9 seconds for Four Loko in “I’m On One”, 47 seconds for We The Best Headphones in “Hold You Down” (his brand partnership with B&O, introduced in “They Don’t Love You No More”) brand, 46 seconds for Finga Licking Miami Gardens: Carrol City Location, his own restaurant where “Gold Slugs” was filmed, in “Gold Slugs”, this is DJ Khaled.
He had found his wild, insane, memorable niche. But none of this came without fault, and skepticism is abound from the entire act. His rise to fame was so quick and organic that no one has questioned just how truly successful Khaled is. He has sponsorships, is the face of T-Mobile’s new “T-Mobile Tuesday” campaign, has signed to EPIC records (with a very non-epic lineup to his name), and has Jay-Z as a manager, but has he completely fooled everyone into believing he is more important than he ever actually will be?
He’s never had a #1 hit (though he will tell you all of his songs are #1’s and anthems), he has never had a single on the charts for over 25 weeks, and other than his 2007 album ‘We The Best’, every album hops on and off the charts in a matter of weeks. None of his albums have reached RIAA GOLD, though 7 singles have hit that marker and 3 have even gone PLATINUM: this anthems. And let’s not forget he isn’t singing, nor producing any extravagant beat as a DJ, unlike other DJs like Calvin Harris and The Chainsmokers. By all accounts, he is not an A-list artist.
But that doesn’t stop the money from coming in. He’s taken sponsorships and led it through his hodge-podge crew of rappers to create marketing gold. He leverages his image, fame, and notoriety with his colleagues and brands to create a controversially lucrative career. Not to mention that it is still a complete mystery which part of the record Khaled actually has a hand in.
Congratulations, you played yourself
One big issue now revolves around how many fans Khaled actually has amassed. Has he just fooled everyone into thinking he is as big as he is? Let’s take a look at his Twitter:
First off, it’s important to note that Twitter is not DJ Khaled’s best social media platform. But at this point, Twitter isn’t really a leading platform for many celebrities, so it all cancels out. They generally find more success on Instagram and (now) Snapchat, but the numbers are still very revealing.
From April 16 to May 13, I charted his tweets and follower counts to reveal his general engagement. I also did the same for artists in the same general space of his: Nicki Minaj, Chris Brown, Katy Perry, T.I., and Jason Derulo.
Instantly it’s clear that almost every celebrity has either bought followers or is swamped by non-personal bots. Why? While doing preliminary research, I found that both Flo Rida and Meek Mill LOST followers every day during the time period. Khaled, on the other hand, performed a bit better. He clocks in at just under the average of the other 5 in terms of followers gained, at 0.66% of increased followers in the time frame.
But here is the where the lights shines through, and a couple things are important to understand before everything else: (1) DJ Khaled tweets a lot. During the 28 day span, he tweeted 20 or more times on 10 of those days. On May 6, he tweeted 58 times. Other than a news outlet, this is an unreasonably high amount of tweets. (2) At the start of the study, DJ Khaled had 2.82M followers on Twitter, he ended the study with almost 2.84M.
Diving in, there is one thing that quickly rises to the top of the analysis: his engagement. [for this study, engagement=(favorites+retweets)/followers] He would consistently have tweets with only 30–40 favorites on it, and averaged an astoundingly low 230 engagements on his tweets. 230 favorites and retweets, out of his 2.82M followers.
A lot of his tweets were simply auto-tweets from his Instagram posts, which is widely known as poor practice and could have contributed to his poor engagement. So let’s isolate his more popular tweets during that period.
On April 19, Khaled dropped the bomb that he was going on The Formation tour. Literally the biggest tour of the year. 1468 engagements, 0.052% engagement.
April 30 Khaled was at the White House Correspondent’s Dinner. 219 engagements, 0.0077% (though, it is important to juxtapose that with his 5700 engagements for a tweet where he @Drake and was dancing to his music. This was such an anomaly, it can be assumed that Drake’s fans were engaging with this tweet and not Khaled’s).
May 11, he thanked Beyonce for letting him on the tour. 1618 engagements, 0.057%. This was his best day of tweeting too, partly because he only tweeted 12 times.
Here’s the kicker, his best day, at an average engagement of 0.0182%, is still less than the flight average of ALL 5 other figures studied. Even on his best day, Khaled can’t come close to hitting the average numbers of anyone else.
He had very important moments happen during that month (especially compared to his cohorts), he has the followers, so why can’t he get the engagement of the others? Coupled with the analysis of his product placement, sponsorships, and assumed reliance on product/character over art to succeed, it’s only justified to assume that he has artificially boosted his follower count to appear more desired, which in turn would fool brands (and us) into giving him sponsorships and deals. It’s the classic street performance priming scenario.
Another One(.98 million)
So how many fake followers does he have, compared to the average engagements of his cohort? About 1.98 million. That’s saying that if Khaled was to have the same engagement as the others, he would only actually have about 861,000 followers — not his 2.83 million. This is an astounding number and really pads the rest of the analysis.
NOTE: This is speculative based upon several standardized conditions of the other followers and their engagement. It could be that this is true and they have less fake followers, or DJ Khaled could just be that much worse at creating engagement on twitter. These are just results that I concluded, not fact, on a base level analysis.
If this is accurate, it would also seem understandable that fans were purchased across all of his platforms: Instagram, Facebook, and even Snapchat. While Snapchat does not release viewership numbers, a quick look at his Instagram and Facebook pages show the same trend of his Twitter accounts, the numbers are just too low to be feasibly real.
This is not to discredit his work ethic though. He has tirelessly worked on his image and brand for 10+ years in the spotlight. He has spouted his household phrases for years, and it is only just now that they are picking up. You think he started saying “we the best” and “another one” when he logged onto Snapchat? “Another one” dates back to the “Take It To The Head” video in 2011, and “we the best” can be dated back to 2007 with his titled sophomore album.
But for all intents and purposes he has built his fame on a good business mind, piggybacking off of iconic artists, and most importantly, a presumed false base of fans. His antics took over the airwaves and he is unconventional as all get out, but there is no way he is as popular as he is on the surface. I commend DJ Khaled for fooling us, and for capitalizing on it with as strongly as he has.
One last note to really seal the deal on all of this. On his Twitter bio page, his booking contact is an ‘@gmail.com’ link. That could say 2 things: (1) he doesn’t have a real management agency and is handling it himself (WHICH LIKE HOW) and (2) he is no bigger than the indie artists and Youtubers that are just getting their start, not a multi-million record selling artist.
DJ Khaled,
Keep making incredible music, keep securing sponsorships and incredible management deals, please keep fooling the world into thinking you are famous and worth every penny. Enjoy your new $3.8M Miami home and I hope Major Key at least makes it on the charts for a couple weeks. They don’t want you to succeed, but you’ll fake a way into it.
Also PS s/o to Ryan Cocoa who made the Keyman graphic that has been used countless places, including the profile picture for wethebestmusic on instagram and received no credit. Giving credit to artists is a major key, DJ Khaled.
