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Lil, DJ, and Big: Trends in Hip-Hop Stage Names

12/28/2021

A chart illustrating common artist-name beginnings. Lil is used by 56 artists, DJ by 43, Big by 30, MC by 21, ...

Summary

An analysis of 2,322 hip-hop musicians counted the most common beginnings for artist names. "Lil" tops the list followed by "DJ", "Big", and "MC." However, if Young/Yung and J/Jay had been counted together, they would have taken 4ᵗʰ and 5ᵗʰ place. The chart above shows the 15 most common beginnings.

Methodology

Artist names were extracted from the Wikipedia's self-proclaimed "list of notable hip-hop musicians." The beginning of the artist-name was taken to be the first word in the name. Within an artist-name, word separators were defined as any of the following characters: spaces, apostrophes, hyphens, periods. Data from Wikipedia was collected on December 28ʳᵈ, 2021.

Comments

The term "DJ" is often used to convey additional information about an artist. It might make sense to exclude the term in such instances. Also, the data source does not include duos and groups.