In 2012, while travelling on plane from Edmonton, Canada to Vancouver, BC, a thought crossed my mind ... who is the most popular music artist in the world. By popularity, I meant, the one whose songs was the most shared on popular sites such as FB, Twitter and Youtube.<p>When I got to Vancouver, I set up a crawler and gathered over 39000 artist names and over 400,000 song titles. Then for each artist + song name, I check the social sites for the most shares / comments / recommendations / tweets etc., as a proxy for popularity or social engagement.<p>Prior to adding up the numbers I was expecting Rihanna or Justin Bieber to be on the top of the list. I was also mindful of problems with the data, such as songs released prior to the popularity of social networks, growth rate of social networks vs. accumulated likes / shares and many more.<p>Anyways, considering the rough data I had, when I added up the #s, Eminem was on top. I was confused by the data. Why Eminem ...<p>So anyways, I decided to dig further and to my surprise, Eminem I found out that he is very smart in how he markets his songs. Basically, he generates multiple waves of popularity for his music ..<p>First the song comes out .. which is cool. Then when it cools off, the same song gets used for a movie sound track ... and eventually, it gets used as a sound track for a video game.<p>So there u go ... when I run my data, Eminem was the King of social networks in 2012 :)<p>Thanks for reading.