¶ What the Kids* Are Into · 24 May 2016 listen/tech
*or the elders, or the girls, or the boys
I added two more optional sort-orders to the list view of Every Noise at Once today.
Youth sorts the genres by the average self-reported ages of each genre's artists' listeners. Thus the genres at the top are the ones listened to most uniformly by younger listeners, and the ones at the bottom are the ones mostly only old people like. (If you hover over the rank numbers on the left, you can see the actual average ages.)
The youngest genre by this measure is Pixie, which is a hyper-poppy strain of pop-punk/-emo/-screamo, but "hyper-poppy pop-punk/-emo/-screamo" is ungainly, so I made up a name for it. I think it's a pretty good name, and I encourage you to work it into everyday conversation as if of course everybody calls it that.
The oldest-listener genre, and one of only 2 genres whose average listener-age is older than I am, is Indorock, a bizarre 1950s repatriation of Dutch Indonesian colonialism back to the Netherlands after Indonesian independence. Probably this was the Pixie of its time and place, but that time was a really long time ago, and that fact that you can listen to it on a streaming music service in 2016 at all is fairly astonishing.
Femininity sorts the genres by what percentage of each genre's self-identified male/female listeners self-identify as female. Spotify sign-up forms only offer three gender options at the moment ("female", "male" and just leaving it blank), so the current data is artificially binary, and thus the genres at the top are the ones with the highest ratio of female listeners to male, and the ones at the bottom are the most dominantly male-not-female.
The most feminine genre by this measure is Teen Pop, which is rather stereotype-reinforcing, but the second one is the fanfic-pop genre Wrock, which I'm pretty sure you didn't expect, because statistically you probably didn't know that there's Wizard Rock to begin with, let alone that they call it "Wrock" for short, never mind that the Hermiones have more tolerance for it than the Harrys.
The least-feminine genres at the bottom of the list are a roiling quagmire of auralized testosterone, the last 15 all explicitly involving death or brutality or brutal death or deathly brutality or grinding. I'm thinking I should really rename Djent to "Brutal Deathdjent Grind" just so it fits in better.
As if the binary thing wasn't embarrassing enough, this data reveals that, at the moment, 72 genres skew more female than male, and 1363 skew more male than female. Only 9 genres have more than 60% female listeners, while 188 have more than 60% male listeners. Spotify's gender-self-identified listenership is about 53% male to start with, and small absolute differences can produce dramatic tipping effects, but that still doesn't seem to me like even vaguely a strong enough bias to account for this by itself.
My first guilt theory, honestly, since it's mostly me that determines the genres in the genre-space, was that I over-model male-centric genre-areas, and thus the map presents a vastly unbalanced view of gender-balanced listening. To my superficial relief, at least, the basic gender disparity exists at the underlying artist level. Artists with more male listeners than female outnumber the reverse by about 4 to 1, and artists with more than 60% male listeners outnumber artists with more than 60% female listeners by almost 8 to 1. At the 90% threshold it's more than 40 to 1. Female listeners definitely gravitate towards a smaller set of core artists, and thus too a smaller set of genres.
But do they "gravitate", as the result of innocent natural forces? Or are they pushed by some invisible forces generated by the ways in which music is made and distributed and presented? I don't know, and I feel like maybe somebody should try to find out, and I have a simultaneously sinking and inspiring feeling that maybe nobody is in a materially better position to find out than me.
[A little further refinement from later: younger male listeners (<30) and older female listeners (30+) have mostly consistent shares of listening across the popularity spectrum. The big differences are between younger female listeners, who make up 40% of the audience for the most popular artists but only 20% for less popular artists, and older male listeners, who represent 13% for the most popular artists but 30% for less popular ones.]
[PS2: A very cursory examination of the usage of Discover Weekly, Spotify's personalized weekly music-discovery playlist, seems consistent with all of the above: it represents a notably larger share of overall Spotify listening for older male listeners than for younger female ones. But, emphasizing the always-important point that individuals are not averages, among people who listen to their Discover Weekly lists actively, the age and gender differences essentially disappear. So maybe it's the idea of "discovery" itself whose appeal varies.]
[PS3: The global disparity varies in magnitude across regions, but is present almost everywhere. The one major exception is Sweden, where the most popular artists do not skew towards either gender en masse. The effect is also fairly weak in the Netherlands, and tails off relatively quickly in Spain. But it is observable pretty much everywhere else, reaching an extreme in the Philippines, where the top 100 artists average 49% young female listeners but only 8% older male listeners.]
I added two more optional sort-orders to the list view of Every Noise at Once today.
Youth sorts the genres by the average self-reported ages of each genre's artists' listeners. Thus the genres at the top are the ones listened to most uniformly by younger listeners, and the ones at the bottom are the ones mostly only old people like. (If you hover over the rank numbers on the left, you can see the actual average ages.)
The youngest genre by this measure is Pixie, which is a hyper-poppy strain of pop-punk/-emo/-screamo, but "hyper-poppy pop-punk/-emo/-screamo" is ungainly, so I made up a name for it. I think it's a pretty good name, and I encourage you to work it into everyday conversation as if of course everybody calls it that.
The oldest-listener genre, and one of only 2 genres whose average listener-age is older than I am, is Indorock, a bizarre 1950s repatriation of Dutch Indonesian colonialism back to the Netherlands after Indonesian independence. Probably this was the Pixie of its time and place, but that time was a really long time ago, and that fact that you can listen to it on a streaming music service in 2016 at all is fairly astonishing.
Femininity sorts the genres by what percentage of each genre's self-identified male/female listeners self-identify as female. Spotify sign-up forms only offer three gender options at the moment ("female", "male" and just leaving it blank), so the current data is artificially binary, and thus the genres at the top are the ones with the highest ratio of female listeners to male, and the ones at the bottom are the most dominantly male-not-female.
The most feminine genre by this measure is Teen Pop, which is rather stereotype-reinforcing, but the second one is the fanfic-pop genre Wrock, which I'm pretty sure you didn't expect, because statistically you probably didn't know that there's Wizard Rock to begin with, let alone that they call it "Wrock" for short, never mind that the Hermiones have more tolerance for it than the Harrys.
The least-feminine genres at the bottom of the list are a roiling quagmire of auralized testosterone, the last 15 all explicitly involving death or brutality or brutal death or deathly brutality or grinding. I'm thinking I should really rename Djent to "Brutal Deathdjent Grind" just so it fits in better.
As if the binary thing wasn't embarrassing enough, this data reveals that, at the moment, 72 genres skew more female than male, and 1363 skew more male than female. Only 9 genres have more than 60% female listeners, while 188 have more than 60% male listeners. Spotify's gender-self-identified listenership is about 53% male to start with, and small absolute differences can produce dramatic tipping effects, but that still doesn't seem to me like even vaguely a strong enough bias to account for this by itself.
My first guilt theory, honestly, since it's mostly me that determines the genres in the genre-space, was that I over-model male-centric genre-areas, and thus the map presents a vastly unbalanced view of gender-balanced listening. To my superficial relief, at least, the basic gender disparity exists at the underlying artist level. Artists with more male listeners than female outnumber the reverse by about 4 to 1, and artists with more than 60% male listeners outnumber artists with more than 60% female listeners by almost 8 to 1. At the 90% threshold it's more than 40 to 1. Female listeners definitely gravitate towards a smaller set of core artists, and thus too a smaller set of genres.
But do they "gravitate", as the result of innocent natural forces? Or are they pushed by some invisible forces generated by the ways in which music is made and distributed and presented? I don't know, and I feel like maybe somebody should try to find out, and I have a simultaneously sinking and inspiring feeling that maybe nobody is in a materially better position to find out than me.
[A little further refinement from later: younger male listeners (<30) and older female listeners (30+) have mostly consistent shares of listening across the popularity spectrum. The big differences are between younger female listeners, who make up 40% of the audience for the most popular artists but only 20% for less popular artists, and older male listeners, who represent 13% for the most popular artists but 30% for less popular ones.]
[PS2: A very cursory examination of the usage of Discover Weekly, Spotify's personalized weekly music-discovery playlist, seems consistent with all of the above: it represents a notably larger share of overall Spotify listening for older male listeners than for younger female ones. But, emphasizing the always-important point that individuals are not averages, among people who listen to their Discover Weekly lists actively, the age and gender differences essentially disappear. So maybe it's the idea of "discovery" itself whose appeal varies.]
[PS3: The global disparity varies in magnitude across regions, but is present almost everywhere. The one major exception is Sweden, where the most popular artists do not skew towards either gender en masse. The effect is also fairly weak in the Netherlands, and tails off relatively quickly in Spain. But it is observable pretty much everywhere else, reaching an extreme in the Philippines, where the top 100 artists average 49% young female listeners but only 8% older male listeners.]