An email popped up in my inbox this morning that made me grin a little. A study landed in my press feed claiming that rock music isn’t just surviving down here in Florida - it is absolutely wiping the floor with every other genre.
Now, full disclosure: the study was put together as a PR press release by Sabaton, a Swedish power metal band...so yeah, take it with a slight grain of salt. But the raw data itself comes straight from Google Keyword Planner over the last 12 months, looking at search terms like “rock music” or “rock songs” across the state, which makes it pretty hard to completely ignore.
- Rock - 58,280 searches
- Country - 12,619 searches
- Electronic/Dance - 10,877 searches
- R&B/Soul - 9,318 searches
- Pop - 8,620 searches
- Classical - 7,430 searches
- Metal - 7,258 searches
- Reggae/Ska - 4,902 searches
- Gospel/Christian - 4,800 searches
- Latin - 3,758 searches
According to the data, rock music pulled in over 58,000 monthly Google searches in Florida. To put that in perspective, country came in second place with around 12,600 monthly searches. That means rock got nearly five times as many searches as second place did. Electronic dance music landed third with under 11,000, while pop sat down at fifth with under 9,000.
It makes a lot of sense when you think about the history rooted right in our backyard. Beyond Jacksonville’s deep Southern rock lineage with Skynyrd and 38 Special, or Tampa’s heavy metal roots in the ’80s, there’s just something about hot weather and guitars that go together. Is Google search volume a flawless science for measuring what people are listening to? Probably not. But seeing rock blow away every other style by that wide of a margin is hard to ignore. It turns out a lot of us are reaching for the volume knob for the exact same reason every single day.
