Music

Spotify Maps Out Which Music Genres Have the Loyalest Fans

Apr 7, 2015

Music fans all have their favorite genres — the ones that most resonate with our personal taste, and that they always return to. Hip hop fans, metalheads, EDM enthusiasts, country fans, rockers, reggae lovers, etc. might dabble with other genres, because there’s just too much amazing music out there. Still, we come back to our favorites.

Do fans of some genres return to their favorites more than fans of other genres? And which genres inspire the most loyalty in the listener?

To find out, Spotify first identified the “core” artists that, according to The Echo Nest (a part of Spotify), are most central to each genre, starting with the big ones, on a global level. Then they did the same thing with local genres in various countries around the world. To create a measure of genre loyalty, they divided the number of streams each core artist had by their number of listeners. All of the charts are normalized against the genre with the loyalest fans.

The first thing they noticed: Metal fans are the world’s loyalest listeners (they’ll get to the individual countries soon):

Global

After Metal and Pop, the rest of the genres cluster into two groups. Folk, Country, and Rock fans have a higher loyalty score, and Hip Hop does fairly well too, while Jazz, EDM, Classical, and Blues scores are not as high, suggesting that those listeners don’t adhere as closely to the core of their favored genre. (Reggae sits between the two groups.)

Aside from the obvious conclusions that Metal fans are the most loyal of all and Pop fans are also fairly loyal globally, one could also conclude that the more guitar-oriented genres inspire more loyalty in the listener. It’s worth remembering our methodology here: They looked for repeated listens to the core artists from each genre — the ones sitting right at the “center” of the genres, as it were. So one could also reasonably conclude that Jazz, EDM, Classical, and Blues listeners play more fringe artists from those genres.

This doesn’t necessarily mean Metal is “better” than Jazz (metalheads would disagree), but it does tell us that Metal fans are in fact the most hardcore, according to this new measure of genre loyalty.

Now, let’s see how some additional genres stack up in various countries, loyalty-wise.

One thing Spotify noticed overall about the charts below: Homegrown genres tend to inspire lots of listener loyalty. There are plenty of other interesting details to pore over, and they’ve included listening links below each chart so you can find out what each genre sounds like: