What do Barlow students listen to?

Albums

Isabella Espino Hernandez

While the world was shut down, musician creativity was not.

Music has been around for hundreds and hundreds of years and has evolved tremendously. From Beethoven playing the piano with lyrics to Ariana Grande singing about what 34+35 is. 

The average human listens to music about 18 hours a week which is about 2 hours a day and adds up to about 938 hours of music in a year. It probably sounds like a lot, but music is a part of every person’s everyday lives and there are songs for every mood. There are hundreds of genres to choose from and there are some that you might not even know existed that other people enjoy listening to often.

“The only thing that can stop me is death, and even then my music will live forever.” – Tupac Shakur.

Thinking about that quote, his music has lived on and you still hear it being played by younger teens who are influenced by it even if they weren’t alive when he was. I decided to take a survey from Sam Barlow students to see what genres they enjoyed and what album they were looking forward to coming out in 2021. 

I was curious to see if maybe there were some genres that I had never heard of that were enjoyed or more common genres. There were about 163 responses from students sharing their favorite music genre and the top 3 genres that were most popular were Pop with 39.9%, Hip Hop with 31.3%, and Rock with 25.2% . 

Then for artists that are dropping new albums that they are looking forward to this year, the top 3 were:

  1. Travis Scott – Utopia – Rumored 2021 Release
  2. SZA – Album 2 – Rumored 2021 Release 
  3. Taylor Swift – Fearless (Taylor’s Version) – April 9, 2021

Coronavirus has impacted the world all in very different ways and everyone has different ways of coping. For a lot of teens their way of coping is listening to music , it makes you feel free of your problems and have time to yourself to relax. Over quarantine was the perfect time for artists to release their music and albums and would be streamed a lot since most of us have been on our phones all the time. 

Popular music artists such as Giveon, Kid Cudi, Justin Bieber, Kali Uchis, Lana Del Rey, Bad Bunny and so many more have released new songs and albums throughout 2020-2021 and have gotten super popular. During quarantine was also time for everyone to explore different genres of music and change their taste in music which for a lot of people was something totally new to find out there’s so much more out there; music in different languages, different beats, tones, etc. 

Something you could do in your spare time is explore different music that you don’t listen to regularly and maybe there is something out there that you will end up enjoying, or even ask some of your friends to send you their playlists and try something new!