Whether it’s a late-night tweet or an Instagram post with a baby name or the loudest and most social fanbase worldwide, Time’s 25 Most Influential People on the Internet list includes a slew of musicians. BTS, Kanye West and Rihanna are the three biggest music names on Time’s online radar due to their cultural impact and entrepreneurial spirit.
BTS’ Love Yourself: Tear album is the first K-pop project to top the Billboard 200 chart, thanks in part to the group’s very active “ARMY” fanbase. The boy band also spent almost 90 weeks perched atop Billboard’s Social 50 chart — longer than even Justin Bieber — and won the top social artist award at the Billboard Music Awards for the second time in a row in May.
West, on the other hand, has a different relationship with social media, with his Twitter musings ranging from introspective mantras of the day — “style is genderless” and “only free thinkers” — to pictures of a Donald Trump-signed “Make America Great Again” hat (another figure who made the magazine’s list and shares West’s “dragon energy”). As Twitter users began denouncing West, fans stuck around for his productions coming in hot on a weekly basis and lifting ye to No. 1 on the Billboard 200 dated June 12.
Rihanna’s clout as of late can be best summarized by Eliza Berman’s description for Time: “When Rihanna speaks — or, more precisely, ‘grams — the world listens.” She denounced Snapchat and sent the company’s financial value plummeting for an ad ridiculing her domestic violence experience. She has been a voice for women who feel undesired by beauty and fashion lines, so she started Fenty Beauty makeup and Savage x Fenty lingerie that highlights and accentuates the everyday woman — something Rihanna markets to her 63.6 million Instagram followers.
The magazine also featured Desus & Mero, Busy Philipps and a myriad of activists, from Shaun King fighting for marginalized communities to Emma Gonzalez, David Hogg and the other Parkland students.
