Both Coachella and Governors Ball got Twitter riled up when the respective music festivals announced their 2015 lineups this week, with many a rant and many a joyous declaration of thanks to the music gods. CrowdFlower, a data-mining and crowdsourcing company out of San Francisco, gathered the numbers on the more local of the two festivals from those tweeting and sent the results out for Music Times to check out. Drake, AC/DC and Steely Dan got the most attention.
The first bit of information really shouldn't be that surprising: 60 percent of tweeters felt positively about the lineup, compared to 25 percent with "neutral" feelings and 15 percent who had a more negative opinion. When a festival sells out in less than 40 minutes, you can typically trust that people like what they see.
If the numbers are to be believed, no performer really took too much hate. Most of the controversy involved in the lineup revolved around Steely Dan, a jazz rock act typically associated with parents versus younger festival-goers. Indeed, Dan did take the most heat for its presence, but the total number of disparaging tweets only accounted for 25 percent of the total tweets mentioning the act's name. Barack Obama would love to have those kind of numbers. And of course, the smaller the act the less likely it is to draw flack. Drake, AC/DC and Jack White (in that order) were the next three acts with the highest percentage of negativity and they comprise this year's headliners.
One of the more interesting pieces of data gathered by CrowdFlower was the disparity between men and women tweeting about respective acts. For example, women were much vocal about Drake than men, and although AC/DC drew the most male attention, dudes tweeted more than twice as much about Steely Dan than the ladies did. Take that as you will.
