This was first posted for Band of the Day app on 9/30/14 over at: http://bit.ly/mvsfbands
It’s hard to believe we’re about to begin the tenth month of the year — that’s nearly 300 new bands we’ve featured just in this year alone! Fueled by one too many cups of coffee, and sheer curiosity/music geekery, we decided to take a look at the data of all of the bands we’ve featured in the app this year to see if we could determine any trends on what types of bands are defining the 2014 emerging music scene. We looked at three key data points from the app (number of song plays, number of social media shares, and number of buy button taps), to find the top ten bands in each category. Here are the results (click on the band names to listen to their music):
Most Song Plays
- The OK Social Club
- The Fratellis
- Quiet Company
- Drowners
- Megan Bonnell
- Jessica Hernandez & the Deltas
- Kayleigh Goldsworthy
- Deaf Havana
- Lily & Madeleine
- Sumie
Most Music Buys
- The OK Social Club
- Megan Bonnell
- Lily & Madeline
- Jessica Hernandez & the Deltas
- Kayleigh Goldsworthy
- The Fratellis
- Takenobu
- Quiet Company
- Western Lows
- Sumie
Most Social Media Shares
- The OK Social Club
- Jessica Hernandez & the Deltas
- Quiet Company
- Cherri Fosphate
- The Fratellis
- The Sounds
- Drowners
- XXANAXX
- Basecamp
- Chicks Who Love Guns
Breaking it down by category, we noticed a few trends that popped up. Just based on song plays alone, female singer-songwriters are dominating the results, followed closely behind by British guitar-heavy rock bands. The ladies are also dominating the Most Music Buys category, followed by rock and folk bands. We theorized that the results for Most Social Media Shares would also follow a similar pattern but, after looking at the data, we noticed that it was actually completely different. Rock bands are most likely to be shared publicly on user’s social media networks, followed by electronic and folk bands.
So how can this variance possibly be explained? Digging one layer deeper, we know that 61% of our Band of the Day users are male, while 39% are female. Given this statistic, could this mean that, while the majority of users (both genders) spend more time listening to female singer-songwriters, males are less inclined to publicly share their love of female singer-songwriters, opting to publicly portray a more “masculine” taste in music with heavier guitar rock? While we can’t conclude definitively, and just have a small sampling of the 2014 emerging music landscape, the numbers seem to suggest that this might be the case. Have a different theory on why this might be? Feel free to share your insights by leaving a comment at facebook.com/bandoftheday or tweeting @bandoftheday. </endmusicgeekmode>.