A Data Analysis of 100 Fruit-Named Bands

I was at Love Not Money, my friend's record store in New York City, when I discovered The Moldy Peaches and had a resulting epiphany: every fruit-named band I had listened to up till then made fantastic music. The Smashing Pumpkins, Strawberry Switchblade, The Cranberries… the list goes on.

Since then, I've ventured out and listened to many fruit-named bands, and along the way, I've noticed some patterns. "Guava" bands are underrated; "Plum" bands lean more indie/alternative; and "Cantaloupe" bands make the worst music, to name a few.

For this article, I put aside my own tastes to explore objective patterns across 100 fruit-named bands. Do some fruit types lend themselves to being more commercially successful? Are fruit-named bands more frequent in specific decades? Or maybe fruit-named bands are more popular in certain countries? These are some questions we'll answer in this article. But first, let's talk about how I collected the data.

Qualifications, Disqualifications, and Data Collection

For the sake of legitimacy, I established some rules regarding what qualifies a band to be included in this analysis. To qualify as a "fruit-named" band,

• The fruit that appears in the band's name cannot be specific to a person (e.g., "Larry Raspberry and the Highsteppers," "Chuck Berry," and "Fiona Apple" do not qualify),
• The name of the fruit has to definitely be referencing the fruit (e.g., "The Kiwi Animal," "Code Orange," and "The Dates" don't count), and
• The band must have a specific fruit in the name (e.g., "Fruit Bats" does not count, nor does "The Berries," but "The Blueberries" counts).

For the sake of simplicity, I disqualified:

• Any bands with multiple different fruits in its name (e.g., "Orange Guava Passion," "All Natural Lemon and Lime Flavors," or "Apple and the Oranges"),
• Any bands that refer to dried fruit (e.g., "The Raisins" or "Virgin Prunes"), and
• Any bands with identical names (e.g., "Love Apple" and "Love Apple").

To qualify as being substantial enough to discuss, I required that the band have at least one album (LP or EP) released (i.e., singles are insufficient).

For the sake of simplicity and feasibility, I limited the number of bands in this analysis to 100, hoping this sample size would be significant enough to find patterns. I included the first 100 qualifying bands I could find that met my requirements.

Here's the data I collected per band:

• Specific Fruit Referenced (e.g., Apple)
• Category of Fruit Referenced (e.g., Pome)
• Founding Decade (e.g., 1990s)
• Founding Country (e.g., United States)
• General Genre (e.g., Alternative)
• Monthly Listeners on Spotify (e.g., 1,000)
• Number of Plays of Most Listened to Song on Spotify (e.g., 50,000)

Note 1: although a band might have become more popular in a later decade, for the sake of simplicity in tracking data, I went with the band's founding decade.

Note 2: I use "General Genre" as an umbrella term for the sake of ease in finding patterns. For example, genres like "shoegaze" and "grunge" are lumped under "alternative."

Note 3: I abhor Spotify, both because of their lack of ethics and their product. That said, I opted to reference their data since it is readily available, easy to reference, and generally representative of listener popularity.

Note 4: If an artist's song has fewer than 1,000 plays on Spotify, Spotify will not show the song's "number of plays." Therefore, for any artists I encountered who did not have the "number of plays" listed on any of their songs, I used 500 since it is the rounded average of 0 and 999.

Note 5: The numbers I gathered for "Monthly Listeners on Spotify" and "Number of Plays on Most Listened to Song on Spotify" are from January 1, 2026. (You can pick apart which artists were one-hit wonders depending on how low the former number is relative to how high the latter number is!)

The Data

If you would like to look at the dataset and/or conduct your own analysis, feel free to download the Excel or CSV files here:

The Findings

Popularity by Categorical Type

Most Popular: Drupe
Least Popular: Nightshade Berry

Popularity by Specific Fruit

Most Popular: Strawberry
Least Popular (tied): Avocado, Blackberry, Cantaloupe, Clementine, Cloudberry, Cranberry, Cucumber, Dragonfruit, Fig, Huckleberry, Mango, Passionfruit, Pepper, Persimmon, Pumpkin, Watermelon

Average Number of Monthly Listeners per Specific Fruit

It's worth noting that the only "pepper" band was Red Hot Chili Peppers, the only "pumpkin" band was The Smashing Pumpkins, and the only "cranberry" band was The Cranberries. As you can see, these skewed the visualization quite significantly!

Highest Average of Monthly Listeners (excusing the aforementioned outliers): Orange
Lowest Average of Monthly Listeners: Grapefruit

Note: The standard deviation when calculating number of monthly listeners per specific fruit was extreme. In almost all cases in which there were more than one band referencing the same fruit, the standard deviation was greater than the average. Of course, when there was only one band referencing a specific fruit, the standard deviation was undefined (DNE). As such, I elected to omit standard deviation from the data visualizations. However, you can make reference to this data in Sheet 2 of the Excel or the second CSV file.

Average Number of Plays of Most Popular Song per Specific Fruit

Again, the usual suspects have skewed the visualization.

Highest Average of Number of Plays of Most Popular Song (excusing the aforementioned outliers): Orange
Lowest Average of Number of Plays of Most Popular Song (tied): Grapefruit, Watermelon

Note (similar to previous section): The standard deviation when calculating number of plays of most popular song per specific fruit was extreme. In almost all cases in which there were more than one band referencing the same fruit, the standard deviation was greater than the average. Of course, when there was only one band referencing a specific fruit, the standard deviation was undefined (DNE). As such, I elected to omit standard deviation from the data visualizations. However, you can make reference to this data in Sheet 2 of the Excel or the second CSV file.

Popularity by Founding Decade

Most Popular: 2010s
Least Popular: 1970s

Note: The 2020s decade has not yet passed. At this rate, 2020s may surpass 2010s as the most popular decade for fruit-named bands.

Popularity by Founding Country

Most Popular: United States
Least Popular (tied): Austria, France, Ireland, Netherlands, New Zealand, Norway, Scotland, South Korea, Wales

Note: this is most likely swayed by having exclusively sourced English band names. (Notice that United States, England, Australia, and Canada are the most popular, all of whom are English-speaking countries. The data is also probably swayed by the population size of each country.)

Popularity by General Genre

Most Popular: Indie rock
Least Popular (tied): Folk, Funk, Hip hop, Instrumental, Reggae

(Nothing says "twee" quite like fruit!)

And there you have it! Despite drupes being the leading category, strawberries won the popularity contest by a landslide. Indie/alternative bands also seem to have a penchant for fruit in their names, and this shift towards fruit-oriented names has picked up most significantly since the 2010s.

I'm probably not going to start a band anytime soon, but if I do, I might have to stop by the produce section for inspiration. 👊