Study: Where do you find new music?

This week at Genera Studios we decided to perform a study about where people find new music. We wanted to see out of the diverse ways the internet allows us to find new artists, how people of different genders and musical interests were finding new music. We polled 50 random people and asked them to select which from the following they use (they could select multiple):

• YouTube

• Spotify

• iTunes/Apple Music

• Radio

• Word of Mouth

• Facebook

• Other Social Media

The first results are in, and they're quite interesting. We decided to do something new and create a fancy infographic focusing on the differences between how men and women responded.

Now, isn't that beautiful? We're proud of it (i'm proud of it).

Observations

You can probably see for yourself in the graphs but YouTube took first place between both men and women. For men YouTube is the clear winner and for women its a tie between YouTube and word of mouth, with the radio in a close second. The sample size of 50 people was 31 females and 19 males, so each gender has a relatively small sample size (usually at least 30 samples is desired for statistical significance). However the fact that women are more likely to use word of mouth and radio to find new music than men is pretty clear.

Even with the small sample size we can definitively say that YouTube is the most common way people find new music in 2018. This makes sense since YouTube is completely free, it recommends related content, and it has a great search function to find what you want. I've found quite a few new artists through YouTube myself, even if it was mostly by accident.

We'll get into specific genre's of music in a future update, but the trend we were seeing is that for people that look up new music on YouTube they were mostly interested in Pop and Rap/Hip-Hop with Rock and Alternative in close seconds. This isn't too much of a surprise because those are the most popular types of music today. The only weird numbers were that Metal and Jazz were basically tied with Electronic and Country music. I have a feeling this would change with a larger sample, and potentially using a different audience.

How does this help anyone?

First of all its just cool to know this information about how people find new music. However I think this information could be useful for new artists who are trying to expand their reach. You probably already suspected it, but now you know that most people seek new music on YouTube. Perhaps artists can use this to their advantage by focusing on the YouTube platform and coming up with new and entertaining ways to associate their music with similar popular music.

If you're in a genre thats very male dominated, you probably won't be as successful on Facebook and Instagram as if you were in a genre thats very female dominated. If you're a metal fan and you've ever been to a concert you know what i'm talking about, and if you're a pop-punk or pop fan and you've ever been to a concert you know what i'm talking about too. Every genre has a slightly unique demographic and it can be useful if you know what that demographic is.

I hope you found this post interesting. If you did, please share it!