Thursday, June 27, 2013

Mars vs Venus In Country Music Tastes

When listeners take five minutes to express their views on music hooks (thanks to RateTheMusic.com for sharing this data from last week's national test, 25-54), they're not thinking that we're going to parse every percentile, so it's smart not to read too much into one week's test scores.

However, I find it hard not to at least try to draw some possible conclusions.

  1. The biggest hits are the biggest hits regardless of gender.  The best songs win.
  2. Women like more songs and feel more strongly about the ones they do like.
  3. Men are more critical of the songs, loving fewer of them and showing lower levels of positive acceptance on the majority of the songs tested.
  4. Tempo may have a stronger impact on male positives (i.e. Zac Brown Band/Jump, Justin Moore/Point)).
  5. Ballads seemingly work better with women than for the men.  (is that why Eric Church/Jesus, Lady Antebellum/Goodbye and Brantley Gilbert/Miles appears to do better with the females, for example?  Or, is it that women understand the lyrical message better than the guys?)
  6. Six female singers make the male 55% pos+ ranker and five make the female listing, so you can't conclude that men don't like to hear women singers or that women prefer them).
  7. Sheryl Crow/Easy fails to make the top 25 with the women, but does rank better with the men.  Carrie/Again scores more with women than the males, while Gloriana/Shake seems stronger with guys.  Is it their personal image/vocal familiarity or the song driving these differences?
  8. Men don't like songs that flirt with women (Brent Eldredge)?  Yet, if that's true, why does Luke do so well?
What am I missing?  What do you see in your current music tests that's worth pondering?

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