Popular Music/Music fan statistics

This page gives statistics on the fans of several genres of music, as well as the fans of several musical artists. Music unites us, and as humans, we enjoy listening to music. Different people have different tastes, and this diversity should be celebrated and embraced every day. Good friends celebrate both their differences and their similarities when it comes to musical tastes. So, without further ado, here are some statistics for genres and artists.

Part 1: Genres

In July 2018, a study was conducted to find the general population's taste in music. This study collected a sample of 3,000 respondents. The respondents were collected fairly in accordance with official information from the 2010 U.S. census to ensure national representation. As you would expect, both males and females enjoy music, and people of all ages enjoy music, though the genders and age groups have slightly different probabilities of choosing certain genres of music.

Overall, classic rock is the most preferred genre, being chosen by 48% of the 3,000 respondents. Forty-one percent (41%) chose pop music, while 40% chose rock 'n' roll.

By age, classic rock, rock, and rock 'n' roll all skewed older, with preference generally increasing with age. For example, 62% of people aged 45-54 preferred classic rock, while only 26% of people aged 16-19 preferred classic rock. On the other hand, pop music, hip hop/rap, and indie/alternative were biased toward the younger age groups. Fifty-two percent (52%) of people 16-19 and 54% of people 20-24 preferred pop music, while only 25% of people above 65 preferred pop music.

By gender, pop music fans and country/western music fans skewed female while EDM fans skewed male. The bias is not particularly large, as none of the genres broke a 2:1 ratio on the dominant gender. Forty-one percent (41%) of pop music fans are male while 59% are female. On the other hand, 63% of EDM fans are male while 37% are female.

Part 2: Justin Bieber

Justin Bieber rose to stardom in 2007 at age 13, when he started his first YouTube channel and was discovered by Scooter Braun, who later became his manager. In 2009, he began releasing music as a singer and songwriter, releasing "One Time" on May 18, 2009. It was also around that time when Vevo, a Hulu-like platform for music videos, was just starting. He started his second YouTube channel, his Vevo channel, on September 25, 2009. Five months later, he released the video for his single, "Baby", which, after another five months, went on to become YouTube's most viewed video with over 250 million views.

He has a huge following, having over 255 million Instagram followers and 114 million Twitter followers as of September 2022. While it is surprisingly hard to get an explicit number for how many Justin Bieber fans there are today, there are several online pages I could find that can give us clues as to that number's ballpark and magnitude.

In the week of April 7-11, 2014, several news outlets reported the prevalence of "Bieber fever" in the United States. A Huffpost article, dated April 8, 2014, published the results of an Estately survey that was used to find the Belieber proportions in the states and the Canadian provinces. The people who conducted the survey were kind enough to give the percentages down to hundredths of a percent. All 50 states ranged between 6% and 10%. Washington State had the lowest percentage of Justin Bieber fans, at only 6.82%, while Rhode Island had the highest percentage (9.33%). Rhode Island is tied with Wisconsin at 9.33%, and Alabama is not far behind (9.23% of Alabama's residents are Justin Bieber fans). Although April 2014 is a long time ago in the context of Justin Bieber and his timeline as a famous star, a string of news articles that are generous enough to give precision on the level of 10⁻⁴ is way too good to pass up. And hey, given the shortage of online information about statistics of Justin Bieber fans, I'll take what I can find.

Using the information in the above paragraph, since the minimum was 6.82% and the maximum was 9.33%, that means the overall percentage was somewhere between 6.82% and 9.33%. Using the fact that the U.S. population was 318,400,000 in 2014, we can multiply this number by 6.82% and 9.33% to see that the Justin Bieber fan population was somewhere between 20 million and 30 million.

318,400,000 × 0.0682 = 21,714,880

318,400,000 × 0.0933 = 29,706,720

On February 14, 2011, the Weekend Box Office revealed that the audience for Justin Bieber's Never Say Never movie was 84% female. In the same audience, two-thirds of the viewers were under 25 years of age. A handful of other articles about concerts in 2010, 2011, and 2012 also gave estimates of 80%, 85%, or 90% female when describing those who attended the concerts.

Part 3: BTS

The BTS Army has sampled over 400,000 BTS fans around the world. Of the 403,500 fans surveyed, 348,377 (86.34%) identified as female, while only 45,600 (11.30%) identified as male. In a sign of the times, 2,962 fans identified as non-binary.

The sample also found that BTS has attracted a largely younger audience. More than half (50.31% to be more precise) were under 18, and fans 18-29 accounted for 42.59%. Only 6.26% of fans were in their 30s or 40s (30s: 4.24%; 40s: 2.02%).

Other samples found a far more feminine gender ratio. The official results on the official BTS Army Census website found 96.23% of 562,275 fans to be female.