If you’re no music nerd, but want to impress that cute “Hipster‰” girl or guy in class with your taste in music, look no further than the Internet. Priceonomics.com, a polling and research website has created what it believes to be a formula to determine whether ones taste in music is hipster or not. In order to establish whether a band is considered to be hipster, Priceconomics used two key determining characteristics comprising of a band‰’s popularity and reviews it received. In Priceconomic‰’s case, they used the number of Pitchfork reviews shared on Facebook to represent band popularity compared to Pitchfork‰’s music site to signify the quality of reviews, starting at 8.2. For those who don‰’t know, Pitchfork is an influential independent music review site.

Although some would consider Arcade Fire to be one of the most iconic hipster bands of the 21st century, Priceconomic‰’s chart heavily judges bands upon the amount of shares they get in Pitchfork reviews on Facebook. This leads to the majority of highly ranked Hipster bands being placed in the lower middle instead on the top right of the graph. Unfortunately for Arcade Fire regarding the huge commercial success of their 2013 release, Reflektor, they can no longer be considered a legitimate hipster band as shown by the graph. However for bands like Vampire Weekend who scored the second highest on Pitchfork‰’s rating scale and have had over 4000 shares of Pitchfork reviews on Facebook, they barely reach the title of being a Hipster band in the eyes of the graph.

Courtesy of Priceonomics.com

Though this formula can be considered to be controversial, some must admit that it does spike some truth when it comes to determining band obscurity and the daily Pitchfork subscriber. However words like Hipster are freely interpreted and over used. In today‰’s social society just like the titles of “Hick‰” or “Gangster‰Û, the word Hipster is usually thrown around to make fun of, label, or degrade people and their preconceived characteristics. The title Hipster is nothing but a loosely used word. This formula only displays what it considers to be a Hipster genre of music and not Indie music, which it could be mistaken for.