Background research
Our search to find information on the popularity of Lady Gaga’s music began at the Google Search Engine, (Google). We first searched “lady gaga males vs females.” This search yielded irrelevant links since we mostly encountered websites questioning her gender. We modified our search to “lady gaga popularity research.”
Again, we ran into a dead end with most of the links talking about Lady Gaga being involved with occult practices. Then, we decided to search “top google searches 2009” and we found an interesting study. According to ABC News, Lady Gaga was one of the top 10 searches for Google, Yahoo, and Bing. This article can be found at (ABC News). We then put in “lady gaga most searched” into Google and found that Google declared Lady Gaga is the most popular women on the web based on top searches. We were unable to find anything relating to differences of popularity based on gender.
At this point, we switched search
engines to Bing, (Bing).
We decided to search “lady gaga billboards” to determine how
many of her singles had topped the charts. We clicked on the
link to the official Billboards website and found out that Lady
Gaga made the Top Artists of the Year Chart in 2009. She
is also the only artist to have four singles from her debut
album in the number one spot on the charts. Again, these
studies were useless to us because they gave us no indication
of whether more males or females were buying her music
(Billboard).
We went back to Google and decided to modify our search to allow us to find differences between males and females. We searched “male and female music studies” and came across a website called Realizations Inc. Arlene Taylor, phD wrote an article where she conducted a study to find how the male and female brains respond to music. However, the study did not specify what type of music or specifically name an artist so this study was not relevant to our study (Arlene Taylor).
We went back to Google and searched “male vs female pop music preference” and found a website where a study was conducted by Nicholas T. Boeglin to test for “The Correlation Between People’s Music Preferences and Their Sex Role Perceptions.” (Clearing House). The population of interest was freshmen psychology majors at Loyola University and the sample of 34 students was selected through convenience sampling. This study concluded that “The femininity scale of the BSRI correlated strongly with pop (r = .283, p = .052).” The BSRI is the Bem Sex Role Inventory. Female’s generally like pop music, so although the study did not specifically mention Lady Gaga, it can be assumed that females generally like Lady Gaga.
Through our research, we were unable to find studies examining interest in Lady Gaga’s music according to gender. We found studies that concluded females like pop music more than males, which allows us to assume that females generally like Lady Gaga’s music more than males. Our study will allow us to determine gender differences in interest of Lady Gaga’s music.