A recent study by whiskey brand Flask & Barrel identifies Ohio’s most popular drinking songs and artists. Photo credit: Allie Healy Howard via TNS (Original caption: A beer tasting at Woodland Farm Brewery in Marcy.)
For Buckeyes of legal drinking age, a recently published study offers what it calls the “perfect” playlist for drinking and dancing.
Flask & Barrel – a Tennessee-based whiskey brand that owns the largest free whiskey and distillery database – has identified the 100 most popular drinking songs and the 50 best artists in each state, and announced June 13th.
Nick Rizzo, head of research at Flask & Barrel, said the company collected data from over 24,000 user-generated Spotify playlists, using drinking-related keywords in the playlist titles as the basis for analysis to examine more than two million tracks in total.
The results of the study showed that the five most prolific drinking artists in Ohio are rapper Polo G, rock band Queen, rapper Kanye “Ye” West, pop and R&B singer Rihanna and pop singer-songwriter Taylor Swift.
The study also found that the five most popular drinking songs in Ohio are “Something in the Orange” by country singer-songwriter Zach Bryan, “Low” by R&B star SZA, “Lovin on Me” by rapper Jack Harlow, “Chop Suey!” by heavy metal band System of a Down and “Drip Too Hard” by rapper Lil Baby.
Rizzo said his own experiences with music and alcohol were the inspiration for the study.
“When you think about drinking, it’s almost always about drinking with other people. It’s less about the drinking itself and more about the environment and the people you’re with,” Rizzo said. “For me, music has always been an important part of any kind of social setting, so it was just a natural connection.”
Rizzo said the Spotify Web Application Programming Interface – a computer system that allows programmers to access and manage Spotify’s data and services over the Internet (also called an API) – played a key role in the investigation because it was used to identify user-generated Spotify playlists.
“By entering keywords specifically related to drinking — including ‘drink,’ ‘drinking,’ ‘brews,’ and ‘brewskis’ — we were able to extract 500 to 1,000 playlists,” Rizzo said. “Then we extracted all the songs from each of those playlists — so about 24,000 playlists and over 2 million songs to start with — and counted how many times each song appeared on all of those playlists, and that gives the overall popularity of the drinking songs.”
To determine the most popular drinking songs and artists in each state, Rizzo took the top 100 songs from over 24,000 playlists, then counted the three to five best songs by each artist and combined them into one playlist.
The playlist, Rizzo said, was then run through Google Trends to determine which songs were most popular in each state.
“We tried to be as objective, data-centric and user-centric as possible – using actual searches from people in Ohio and other states,” Rizzo said. “That way, the data comes from the users and the actual trends for the locations where those users live.”
Flask & Barrel co-founder Andrew Ansley said the goal of this study – along with the rest of Flask & Barrel’s extensive database – is to provide users with a more accessible, resource-based whiskey site. This includes articles on whiskey nutrition, recommendations, flavor profiles, recipes, pairings and more.
“Most whisky websites look like they were created in the 90s, so we just wanted to make something that was more pleasant to read,” said Ansley.
Ansley said that while Flask & Barrel is still in its early stages, releasing its first article in September 2023, he is certainly excited about the future of the brand.
“We’ve been compiling our database for over a year and hope to continue to cover stories about new whiskies and things like that in the future,” said Ansley. “I also want to create an app that will give users new whisky suggestions based on whiskies they know they like or based on their flavor profiles.”
Rizzo said he hopes to conduct more studies for Flask & Barrel in the future.
“For me, it was, ‘Can I do some cool research that I find interesting and share it with people who also find it really interesting or insightful?'” Rizzo said. “The goal is to eventually do one or two every few months.”
The full study, “What Are the Most Popular Drinking Songs in Each State?” can be found on the Flask & Barrel website. website.
