Which country likes Chris de Burgh the most ?!

As far as I can remember, I have always been a fan of Chris. He was the first artist in my childhood which I started to pay attention to his lyrics as well as the music, and I was totally mesmerized by his songs!

I just recently got a CD of him, and after listening to it for a while (oh man, isn't "Moonlight and Vodka" a touching one?) I thought I could take a look at his website. To make a long story short, I ended up in the fan section of his site, which is categorized by countries.

Now, you may already know what a geek I am! I felt curious to know which country has the largest number of fans, and with help of some quick and dirty perl scripts, I managed to gather the required info (I'm rather new at Perl, so it took me about an hour to write these scripts. But I'm improving!). Finally I fed the data to Microsoft Excel, and here are the results:



Now, the results turned out to be very interesting. Guess which country in the world has the most number of fans of Chris de Burgh? Ireland you say?! Not even close (Ireland is at rank 16, after Turkey, if only you count Ireland and Northern ireland together)! The first country in the list is Iran my friends!

A total of 5316 people are among his registered fans as of today (October 2nd, 2006), among which the top 10 countries are:



Now, these numbers don't count the Iranian fans who are in USA or Canada, but only people inside Iran. If you browse through his fans in USA or Canada however, you'll see many Iranian names, which I didn't consider for this study.

I wonder why it's like this; can anybody please provide me with some possible reasons?!

Note: Click on the photos to enlarge them.

If you feel interested in any of them and want to get the original file, please don't hesitate to email me!