Kanye West Named Webby Artist Of The Year & He Is The Correct Choice

The Webby Awards have named Kanye West Artist of the Year. Now before you start griping about more deserving artists/albums, keep in mind this is an internet award, not a music award. As the Webbys’ executive director said in a statement, West is being honored because he “successfully leveraged the immense influence and addictive elements of streaming media to drive innovation on the Internet.”

This is the correct choice. In terms of online influence in the past year, it’s hard to top Kanye West and The Life Of Pablo. The only other reasonable choice for the title would probably be Drake, who managed to win a rap feud almost entirely thanks to memes. But with TLOP, Kanye (purposely or not) truly created the first album in the streaming age that fully embraced a multidimensional digital experience.

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He essentially live-tweeted the album’s creation and constantly changed its title and tracklist, thus making it Twitter-optimized and SEO-obliterating. He has updated the album after its release, treating it like software patches, meaning it exists solely in the digital plane. And, oh right, the album was the first to top the Billboard 200 with a majority of stream-equivalent units as opposed to hard sales — this was several weeks after the album premiered and garnered a reported 250 million plays in its first 10 days on the lowly Tidal. That’s quantifiable #internet #impact, like it or not.

West is expected to attend the Webbys ceremony at Cipriani Wall Street on May 16. The full show will stream on demand at the official site the next day.