Between the feuds, trending news stories and sharing new songs that a person is #NP, Twitter is often used as a platform to talk about users' favorite artists.
Since music plays a pivotal role in getting through a semester worth of papers and study sessions, it should be no surprise that many college kids send out quite a few tweets in support of the musicians they can't stop listening to.
So much so that CollegeStats.org was able to conduct a study to determine which artists exactly are the most talked-about on Twitter in college cities.
The higher education organization looked at 54,000 tweets from April to May of this year to see which artists where the most popular on the social media site among those users living in college towns that included only four-year public and private schools based on the Integrated Postsecondary Education Data System (Ipeds).
To find which artists were tweeted the most, the study's authors searched for those that are most popular on the Billboard charts for 2016. They then took a sample of tweets to see if that majority matched the context of the particular artist they were looking up. This allowed the researchers to determine that, although artists like Flo Rida, Future, Pink and Pitfall were often mentioned in tweets, based on the content of those tweets, they were excluded from the ranking.
As a result, CollegeStats.org found that Prince was the most-mentioned artist from the sample size of tweets based in areas with college towns.
According to the study, Prince was the top reigning artist with slightly more than 16 percent of all mentions, which is pretty impressive considering the artist's almost-40-year career and the age of college kids.
Then again, this is most likely linked to the death of the "When Doves Cry" star in relation to the timeframe when the researchers conducted the study.
"When we manually look at a sample of tweets associated with #Prince, we see a lot of mentions of words like 'tribute' and 'celebrate' which does lead us to believe that his popularity in college towns was largely influenced by his death," Nelson Garcia, a rep from CollegeStats.org, told Tech Times.
The study found that Prince was most popular on Twitter in his hometown of Minneapolis, Minn., with him having over 82 percent of all mentions that included musicians.
College students at the University of Hawaii at Manoa also tweeted about Prince a lot, with 40 percent of tweets featuring the "Purple Rain" singer, whereas Jersey City and the Bronx also showed him love on Twitter.
Right behind Prince was Justin Bieber with just over 7.29 percent of mentions, followed by Rihanna with 7.08 percent of mentions by users in college towns.
Although Bieber was born in Canada, Cleveland, with its Cleveland State University, along with Louisville, Ky.; Kansas City, Mo.; Houston, Texas; Boston, Mass.; and Brooklyn, N.Y. were all found to be the top college towns with the most Beliebers.
Interestingly enough, the Bieber fever seemed unrelated to the release of his latest album.
"When we read a random sample of Bieber tweets we saw lots of mentions of his tour and performance; that timing could have had a lot to do with this," Garcia said. "Considering the dates of when we collected the data, his popularity doesn't look to coincide with his latest CD release which was November."
Rihanna's main college fan base resides in Newark, N.J. and Rutgers University, with 74 percent of those students' tweets having love for the Barbadian beauty on the brain.
"With Rihanna you see a lot of posts mentioning the Anti World Tour. With her, we saw her last CD released in January which launched this tour (similar to Bieber), and while still closer to our collection date, it was still a couple months earlier," Garcia added.
Rounding out the top 10 most tweeted-about artists among college towns include Rihanna's rumored boyfriend Drake, followed by Fall Out Boy, Kendrick Lamar, Ellie Goulding, Maroon 5, Luke Bryan and Carly Rae Jepsen — yes, the "Call Me Maybe" singer made the list.
The popularity of Drake had much to do with Twitter users sharing their opinions about his latest album Views, as well as his single "Started From the Bottom."
"With Drake, we saw a few posts mentioning a future show, his beef/rivalry with Meek Mill, and then some tweets quoting lyrics," Garcia said. "His latest album release (in April) combined with the release of diss tracks, might have influenced people to post."
The results from CollegeStats.org could help musicians see which college campuses have the truest fans and then plan future tours in those cities as a way to connect with their fans and sell concert tickets.
Source: CollegeStats.org
