A Head Full of Wishes is a site for Galaxie 500, Luna, Damon & Naomi, Dean & Britta and Dean Wareham. With news, articles and lists of releases and past and future shows.
Substack
A history of the annual AHFoW survey
For 25 years AHFoW surveyed the website and mailing list’s users it was all very innocent and was fun. I’d ask users for their favourite tracks and albums, I’d try to find out how old they were, and what country they lived in, purely out of interest.
Survey’s these days are rarely that innocent - every phone call to any service is followed by a survey, every list you sign up to want to find out more about you - people are surely getting survey-ed out, I know I am. I like to think that this is the reason that voters tailed off towards the end of the AHFoW survey’s run.
30 years ago this month, in December 1995, a year after the birth of the website and six months after the Galaxie 500 Mailing List came into being, I held the first of almost 30 annual surveys. I asked folk to email their responses in and spent hours compiling them into a readable form and then posting the results to the web site and mailing list - I must admit I was never really too sure how interested other people were in these numbers but I loved numbers… and, over time I loved that I could put them into a spreadsheet and do half-arsed, simplistic, and probably careless analysis on those numbers.
For this post I’ve dug into those spreadsheets to do some more of that. I must admit that this was a more interesting post in my head than it turned out to be!
By December of 1995 the mailing list had 124 subscribers and the first survey had 49 responses which seemed a fairly decent hit rate - the only demographic data I collected was age (intitially in five year and then later in ten year brackets) and country - here are a few idle thoughts on that
- We all got older - I guess that’s not a surprise - in that first survey over 90% of respondents were under 30, by the last survey in December 2020 almost the same percentage were over 50!
- In that first survey there was one person over 50… that was Bob, he’d finish top every year… although towards the end he was no longer alone in the over-60 category!
- The vast majority of folk were in the US, with the UK a distant second - I guess that’s not a surprise either.
- There was almost always one response from Lebanon.
- Over the run of the survey there were responses from 40 different countries.
The number of respondents grew over the years and settled down in the 100 to 150 range for most of its run, before dropping back to around 50 by the end.
The results tended to remain pretty consistent over the years…
Galaxie 500
- On Fire topped every poll as facourite Galaxie 500 album, Today and This Is Our Music vied for second place with Today generally edging it.
- The favourite Galaxie 500 track was generally Tugboat, although Fourth of July became more popular over the years and it was always pretty close between them with Blue Thunder just behind.
- Snowstorm would top the poll with UK-based fans though… I speculated that this was because of the band’s appearance on Snub.
Luna
- The first poll was in the year that Penthouse was released - it came third, out of three that year. By 1998 it was voted top and would never relinquish its top spot.
- 23 Minutes in Brussels followed the same trajectory for favourite track.
Damon & Naomi
- More Sad Hits topped the poll, although this was partly because there did seem to be a schism…
- Fans who had been Galaxie 500 fans first would buy Damon & Naomi albums.
- Fans who had been Luna fans first either hadn’t listened to D&N or had only heard More Sad Hits.
- I’d invariably plead with people to listen to Damon & Naomi’s later albums but the list remained heavy on Luna fans - generally more than half of the people who responded to the survey wouldn’t vote in the Damon & Naomi categories at all.
- This Car Climbed Mt. Washington was always voted favourite track.
Dean & Britta
- L’avventura was always the favourite Dean & Britta album, although I always found it hard to think of the soundtrack albums as proper D&B albums, so maybe others did too - I’d inlcude Mistress America as an option but it’s not really a D&B album, I didn’t even bother including The Squid and The Whale. Even 13 Most Beautiful didn’t feel like a proper D&B album to me because in my head it was tied into the visuals (and first appeared as a DVD).
- Night Nurse was the favourite track, nothing else came close!
Dean Wareham
- Dean only had a category of his own once Emancipated Hearts and the epomymous album were released and the survey had wrapped up before there were further options (I did inlude vs Cheval Sombre and Six Feet of Chain but they never really troubled the top of the poll).
- Holding Pattern and The Dancer Dissappeared swapped about as the favourite track.
So as you can see nothing much changed, even the new albums that arrived during the run of the survey never affected the results.
One thing I did add during the early run of the survey was the following open-ended question…
I Like Galaxie 500 what else would I like?
… and compiled a list, in 1997 this list was 219 artists long - if you want a 1997 listening list you can see all 219 here.