Now there are people who are actually trying to attempt some ‘scientific’ studies to determine which bands hipsters are listening to? There are a few things in this blog study that I find kind of problematic, but at least it is trying to follow the scientific method. The good people at Priceonomics asked themselves what kind of music is really listened by hipsters. Apparently I live in hipster country (Silver Lake), and I love science, so I got automatically interested.
To do science, you need data, and they collected their data from Pitchfork, quite logically since it is probably the music blog the most read among hipsters, the ‘hipster taste-maker’ as they described the famous website. But they really wanted to do some serious analysis, a correlation, so they also considered another set of data, the number of Facebook shares the Pitchfork review got.
See on one side, you have the Pitchfork scale going from 0 to 10 – and higher scores means higher on the hipster scale – and on the other side you have the Facebook shares, and here it works backward, the less shares, the more obscure the band, so the more hipster it is!
The result is this above correlation, Pitchfork Score versus Facebook Shares, separating, quite arbitrarily the hipsters from the non hipsters. Bands in red which got too many Facebook shares are definitively out of the hipster zone, whereas the very secret ones, very low on the Facebook scale, are in hipster (blue) heaven. Thus, Arcade Fire and My Bloody Valentine are way too famous to be regarded as hipster anymore, and Vampire Weekend is totally in danger to cross the line.
Of course, it is a crazy study, have you seen the Pitchfork scale? How on earth can you differentiate a 8.8 and a 9 album? And this has a big influence on the location of the band on the diagram, and so on the result. Anyway, if you believe this study has any value (I personally will take it with a huge grain of salt), here are the 25 most hipster bands: The Field, Julia Holter, Iceage, These New Puritans, Fuck Buttons, DJ Rashad, The Haxan Cloak, Juliana Barwick, DJ Koze, Autre Ne Veut, Waxahatchee, Phosphorescent, Oneohtrix Point Never, Savages, Dirty Beaches, A$AP Rocky, Disclosure, Bill Callahan, Forest Swords, Blood Orange, Sun Kil Moon, Drake, Youth Lagoon, Deafheaven, Danny Brown.
I have seen 6 of these 25 bands live, and have heard of at least 11 of them, what does it say about me? But wait a minute, Drake? What is he doing here? The guy is totally mainstream and it is probably a proof this study is not good enough!
