The band debuts at No. 36 on the Social 50 after its annual St. Patrick’s Day concert was livestreamed on the Internet due to the COVID-19 outbreak.
Despite the global outbreak of COVID-19 putting a damper on St. Patrick’s Day’s celebrations, Celtic rockers Dropkick Murphys didn’t let that spoil their annual holiday concert.
Instead of doing a traditional concert with fans in person, the group opted to perform a livestreamed concert across multiple social media and video-streaming platforms, helping the act debut at No. 36 on Billboard’s Social 50 chart dated March 28.
The Social 50 is powered by data tracked by music analytics company Next Big Sound and ranks the most popular artists on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, YouTube and Wikipedia. The chart’s methodology blends weekly additions of friends/fans/followers with artist page views and engagement. The chart’s latest tracking week ended March 19.
The Boston-bred band saw gains in all social media categories, led by 41,000 new subscribers on YouTube (one of the places the concert was streamed) in the week ending March 19 (up 2,628%), according to Next Big Sound.
Dropkick Murphys’ Wikipedia page also racked up 28,000 views, and on Twitter, where the concert was also streamed, the band was mentioned 12,000 times, up 2,129%.
In the tracking week ending March 19, the group’s catalog of songs was streamed 7.3 million times in the U.S., up 169%, according to Nielsen Music/MRC Data. One of its songs, “I’m Shipping Up to Boston,” concurrently re-enters the Rock Digital Song Sales chart at No. 6 with 2,000 downloads – a new high on the chart for the band, despite the song’s re-entry on Rock Digital Song Sales every year since the tally was created (2010) around St. Patrick’s Day.