Survey Results

Many of you may have noticed that there was a link to a quick 3-question survey on the lyrics site for a little more than a week.

There was a decent response (for a survey), and we ended up getting 610 valid responses before I took it back down to start processing it.

The survey asked for age, gender, and favorite genre of music.

Here are the highlights:

• 75.08% male, 24.91% female.
• Average age of 21.57 years old
• Median age was tied between 17 and 18 years old (see below)
• People whose favorite genre is Metal are 94.83% male, but otherwise the genres are fairly evenly balanced.

How the stats were processed…

Results with entirely impossible ages were removed (the oldest person alive is 113 right now, so no LyricWiki users are 1,000 years old). There were only a couple of them, and the 610 results is the number that were left after removing these results.

Genres were combined – so “Rock”, “rock”, and “R0ck!!!!” were all treated the same. Some of the genres are close to each other, but not enough that I combined them (“East coast hip-hop” versus “hip hop” and “Everything” versus “None”).

Below are stats on the most popular genres, and a link to the mySQL data file of the results (after grouping genres together)…

NOTE: The number of items shown in each list are not nice round numbers, but they were chosen so that there was a “clean cutoff” meaning that if two genres were tied with 4 votes, either both were shown or neither.

Top 29 Genres

mysql> select genre,count(*) from quickSurvey
group by genre order by count(*) desc,genre
limit 29;
+------------------+----------+
| genre            | count(*) |
+------------------+----------+
| Rock             |      148 |
| Metal            |       58 |
| Alternative      |       46 |
| Indie            |       44 |
| Pop              |       35 |
| Punk             |       22 |
| Hip hop          |       17 |
| Classic rock     |       12 |
| R&B              |        8 |
| Electronica      |        7 |
| Everything       |        7 |
| Gothic           |        7 |
| Hard rock        |        7 |
| J-pop            |        7 |
| Progressive rock |        7 |
| Ska              |        7 |
| Country          |        6 |
| Jazz             |        6 |
| Trip hop         |        6 |
| Christian        |        5 |
| Japanese Rock    |        5 |
| Electronic       |        4 |
| Emo              |        4 |
| Folk             |        4 |
| Grunge           |        4 |
| Heavy metal      |        4 |
| None             |        4 |
| Soundtracks      |        4 |
| Trance           |        4 |
+------------------+----------+
29 rows in set (0.00 sec)

Top 9 Genres for Males

mysql> select genre,count(*) from quickSurvey where
gender='M' group by genre order by count(*) desc,genre
limit 9;
+--------------+----------+
| genre        | count(*) |
+--------------+----------+
| Rock         |      109 |
| Metal        |       55 |
| Alternative  |       31 |
| Indie        |       28 |
| Pop          |       19 |
| Punk         |       18 |
| Hip hop      |       14 |
| Classic rock |       11 |
| Ska          |        7 |
+--------------+----------+
9 rows in set (0.01 sec)

Top 7 Genres for Females

mysql> select genre,count(*) from quickSurvey where
gender='F' group by genre order by count(*) desc,genre
limit 7;
+-------------+----------+
| genre       | count(*) |
+-------------+----------+
| Rock        |       39 |
| Indie       |       16 |
| Pop         |       16 |
| Alternative |       15 |
| J-pop       |        5 |
| R&B         |        5 |
| Punk        |        4 |
+-------------+----------+
7 rows in set (0.00 sec)

Ages

mysql> select age, count(age) as numUsers from
quickSurvey group by age order by numUsers desc limit 17;
+------+----------+
| age  | numUsers |
+------+----------+
|   18 |       65 |
|   17 |       65 |
|   15 |       52 |
|   16 |       49 |
|   19 |       42 |
|   21 |       37 |
|   20 |       33 |
|   14 |       27 |
|   25 |       25 |
|   22 |       25 |
|   13 |       25 |
|   23 |       22 |
|   26 |       17 |
|   24 |       15 |
|   27 |       11 |
|   28 |        7 |
|   29 |        7 |
+------+----------+
17 rows in set (0.00 sec)

If you want to run your own tests on the data, you can grab a copy of the mySQL dump of the stats.