Every year, Aram Sinnreich, an assistant professor at Rutgers University’s School of Communication and Information, quizzes his students on how they assess, acquire, and listen to music.
When he first started teaching, Sinnreich notes in Hypebot, his students weren’t that far off from where he was as a college student. Kids mostly bought CDs and stuck to one core genre they loved.
Now, Sinnreich writes, “almost without exception” his students not only consume music almost exclusive via digital formats, but their tastes are so diverse that their favourite genres range in the mid-double digits.
With music easier than ever to acquire and with a growing homogeneity in the musical tastes of the younger generation (they listen to everything all of the time) which genre can boast to have the most loyal fans?
Well, the folks over at Spotify decided to answer the question as best they could. Arming themselves with statistics pulled from their own listeners, they ventured to uncover which genre inspires the most loyalty in listeners.
They started out by identifying the “core” artists most central to each genre. For example, in the case of metal it might be Metallica, for jazz it would Miles Davis, and for reggae it would be Bob Marley.
After gathering the big names of each genre, including local genres in various countries around the world, Spotify’s team divided the number of streams each core artist had by their number of listeners.
While it comes as no surprise to anyone with a metal-lover in their household, but metal fans are the world’s most loyal music fans, their fidelity outweighing that of the number two genre by a considerable margin.
Image via Spotify
After metal and pop, the rest of the genres basically cluster into two groups. Folk, country, rock, and hip-hop fans have a fairly high loyalty score, while scores for jazz, EDM, classical, and blues are not as high.
Rather than indicating that blues and jazz fans aren’t as devoted to their favourite genre as metal fans, the data suggests their tastes are more refined and don’t adhere as closely to the core of their favoured genre.
For example, if someone is an ardent fan of classical music, it’s reasonable to assume that they would stray from core artists like, say, Beethoven and Mozart, to more obscure composers, eras, or even orchestras.
However, while metal ranked highly on Spotify’s loyalty measure when it came to Australian listeners, as well as those of virtually every country surveyed, it wasn’t the genre with our most devoted fans.
In fact, it was fans of the Australian country scene that kept coming back to the genre’s core artists, outdoing metalheads by a considerable margin. Check out Spotify’s Australian results below.
Image via Spotify
