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# Who's on the list?
- URL: https://digmeoutliers.com/whos-on-the-list/
- Published: 2026-10-24T16:00:00.000Z
- Updated: 2026-10-24T16:00:00.000Z
- Author: John
- Tags: Heavy, Annual Lists, Data Project

Twenty of the 25 albums that have ever hit #1 on [KEXP](https://www.kexp.org/?ref=digmeoutliers.com)'s Annual Listeners' Favorite lists were put out by bands. Only five came from a solo artist, with four of those five arriving after 2014\. Does this suggest a trend in the types of artists that are popular with KEXP listeners? Answering this question led to the analysis presented below.

While the last post looked at how prolific an artist has been over the 25-year list window, this one is about what kind of artists they are: bands or solo acts and, for the solo artists, women or men. I tagged every entry on every list, 2001 through 2025, and captured all of the data in the charts below. Click and hover around.

So the lists have always been mostly bands, and they still are. But the mix has shifted, and nearly all of the shift is solo women, who went from five or six albums a year to more than twenty in most recent years, while solo men held steady. The surprise is where they came from. It wasn't a few favorites returning year after year. It was a steady stream of new names: about four new solo women a year made a list for the first time in the early 2010s, and about eight a year do now, while new solo men fell from about nine a year to about six. Solo men didn't stop making albums, either. Their albums just made the lists less often (16% of them, against 37% of the women's). And once artists are on a list, women, men, and bands come back at similar rates. Next up: how long these artists have been at it by the time they make the list.