Charts: White People Are No Longer Relevant in Pop Music Sales

More than 81 percent of Billboard Top 10 best-selling albums are now made by non-white or mixed-race groups of artists, according to research done by ad agency DraftFCB.

The agency looked at the Billboard Hot 100 Top 10 songs for each year from 1950 to 2009, which encompassed around 600 datapoints. Then, each artist was classified as being either White, Hispanic, African-American, or “Multicultural” (groups or collaborators with members of different ethnic backgrounds).

While it’s been obvious for a long time that American pop music has a heavy minority influence, seeing it tabulated into hard numbers is nonetheless shocking (if you’re white): Since 2000, Caucasians have had only a feeble presence in Top 10 music sales.

Ken Muench, Draft’s director strategic planning, said, “The U.S. is undergoing a radical, fundamental shift in demographics. Consider that among 85-year-olds in the U.S., only 14 percent are a minority … while among 0-4 year-olds, 48 percent are a minority!”

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