For a while, I have been very interested in people’s music tastes. Whether you listen to what is on social media at the time, or whether you listen to the same five songs for a year, says a lot about you. So, I sent out a survey to figure out what most Ascension students listen to, complete with the Billboard top songs at the time and the most popular genres in the United States.
The first question centered around the musical artists with the most monthly listeners according to Spotify. Unsurprisingly, 52% of Ascension students and teachers reported that they listened to Taylor Swift (willingly) at least three times a week on average. The second most popular artist in this category was The Weeknd with 49%, followed by Bruno Mars with 39% and Travis Scott with 32%. The least popular artist reported was David Guetta, with only one individual listening to him at least three times a week.
The second question asked which musical genres individuals listened to at least three times a week on average, with pop being the most popular (at 71.3% of respondents). The next most popular were rap/hip-hop (59.1%), country (56.5%), rock (33.9%), and indie/alternative (30.4%). The least popular genre was EDM, where only two respondents claimed that they listened at least three times a week.
Next, I wanted to compare these genres with respondents’ favorite genres, offering the same answer choices. Country came out on top, with 24.6% individuals indicating that country is their favorite genre. Pop was next (23.7%), followed by rap/hip-hop (19.3%). This discrepancy in answers leads me to wonder why exactly more individuals listen to pop in total, but country is the most favorite genre. I believe this may be due to the fact that pop is the most popular genre currently in our country, so more popular songs people like fall into this category, while people enjoy country music as a whole more.
For this question, only one person indicated that classical music was their favorite genre. The same was true for Latin music.
I asked the same question about genres, this time asking about the individuals’ least favorite genres. Most respondents indicated that EDM was their least favorite genre (23% of responses), followed by country (15.9%) which was interesting. Many people claim that country is their favorite genre, but many also claim that it is their least favorite. People seem to be quite split on whether or not they enjoy it.
The next section of the survey covered the Billboard top songs at the time I created the survey. Most respondents claimed that they had heard (regardless of whether they liked these songs) “Fast Car” by Luke Combs (86.6% of responses), followed by “Flowers” by Miley Cyrus (82.3%) and “Barbie World” by Nicki Minaj and Ice Spice. Although “Flowers” was one of the lower ranked songs, I suspect that this is due to the song having topped the charts for weeks prior. The song that the least amount of people had heard was “Calm Down” by Selena Gomez and Rema, which really surprised me, because I feel that I have heard this song more times than I can count. It also won a Video Music Award recently. I have a feeling that if people listened to each of the songs before submitting to this survey, more individuals would have marked that they have heard this song before.
The next question offered the same answer choices, but prompted individuals to reply based on which of the songs they enjoyed. Not surprisingly, 54.8% of respondents claimed that they enjoyed “Fast Car’, followed by “Cruel Summer” by Taylor Swift (51.9%) and “Last Night” by Morgan Wallen (49%).
For the final multiple choice question, I asked Ascension students and staff if they believed their music taste was different from the majority of Ascension students. Most respondents to this question (24.1%) claimed that they believed their music taste was mostly similar to the majority of Ascension students. The second most popular response was “Mostly yes”, claiming that their music taste was mostly different from the majority of Ascension students.
The last set of questions was free response, where I prompted individuals to report their favorite music artists regardless of their popularity (in contrast to past questions). 33 individuals indicated that one of their top five favorite musical artists was Taylor Swift, 25 said the same about Zach Bryan, 17 about Morgan Wallen, 11 about Tyler Childers, 8 about Olivia Rodrigo, and finally 7 about Lana Del Rey and 7 about Zach Bryan.
The next question asked what individuals’ top favorite songs were. There is no good way to figure out what is most popular, because responses were so incredibly varied, but the most unique response, with songs and artists no one mentioned, was “Get Your Sparkle On”, “Let It Grow”, and “How Bad Can I Be”.
In all, this survey was very interesting and gives valuable insight into what music students and faculty at our school most enjoy. I definitely want to spark more discussion around this with others, as some responses to the form had very unique answers and even shared favorite songs and artists with myself. However, a form can only go so far, and everyone at Ascension is bound to have unique favorite music based on a variety of factors, which should be embraced and shared.
