George Miller, also known as Joji, is a Japanese songwriter and singer. Releasing his first album, In Tongues, on November 3rd 2017, Joji would start to find success with “Will He.” Quoting a post on Joji's instagram, “it’s a favorite song of mine that I am overjoyed to share with you," "Luckily, this is only the beginning of everything.” Joji was correct, this was just the start to his career as an artist, and things could only get better from there. “Will He” is arguably one of his best songs early on and a big contribution to his success.
Growing in popularity, Joji then released “Yeah Right”, a single, in May of 2018. This song served as a precursor to his next big album, Ballads 1. Nearing the album’s debut, Joji would release three more songs, “Slow Dancing In The Dark,” “Can’t Get Over You,” and “Test Drive,” to keep his fans excited. Ballads 1 was released on October 26th, 2018, and fans could not get enough of it. His most popular hit was “Slow Dancing In The Dark”, even though it was released a month before the official debut, fans ate it up. This one track is by far Joji’s most listened to song, racking up nearly 200 million views on YouTube alone. This one hit is arguably his biggest breakthrough into his career, making Joji a common name on the internet.
However, this is not the end of Joji’s story. While he was busy working on Midsummer Madness with 88rising, he was also slowly working on his next big album. On June 14th, 2019, Joji, dropping his first hint of what was to come, released “Sanctuary.” Throughout the next year, Joji would release four more songs as precursors to Nectar. On September 25, 2020, fans finally got to listen to Joji's most anticipated album yet. Before one can judge any of these songs using data, it is important to note that as of now it hasn’t even been a full month since Nectar's release. According to the current data, his most popular song from this album is “Sanctuary.” This could be that the newest songs haven’t had the time to collect views, or that “Sanctuary,” released early on, has had a year to collect views.
In conclusion, Joji has seen rapid success and growth in the past several years. His growth and popularity aren’t determined by one song alone, but by his passion to create music and improve. His most popular song so far is “Slow Dancing In The Dark,” one that most definitely caused his biggest breakthrough in media. However, it is important to keep in mind that “Will He” brought Joji success early on. Without these two hits Joji would not top R&B charts, and would not be the same artist he is known as now.
The Data was collected using the YouTube Api and Python 3.6. Bringing the data to life, a Tableau page was created, visualizing the data. The Python libraries used are as follows:
- youtube_api - a wrapper for the YouTube Api
- Pandas - to easily export the data and to create a master document
- time - to space out my Api calls
If one would be interested in trying this themselves, there are comments throughout the code explaining what is going on. Getting the album ids was done manually to save time and reduce Api calls. These ids can be found at the end of the album link; they follow the
?list=. For example, the link to Joji’s newest album Nectar is: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=OLAK5uy_nq9PSQZCORK_TXwQuv6OL6pFIR_JuMfNM.
The id for this link is: OLAK5uy_nq9PSQZCORK_TXwQuv6OL6pFIR_JuMfNM, which, as previously stated, follows after the ?list=.
Link to the public Tableau page: Joji Breakthrough