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