Vitals Check On The TabCats
You know, Tabernacle Choir At Temple Square AKA Mormon Tabernacle Choir
Introduction
The Tabernacle Choir at Temple Square (or Tabcats), formerly known as the Mormon Tabernacle Choir, is one of the most famous choirs in the world. It has been referred to “America’s Choir“ by former U.S. President Ronald Reagan. First formed in the year 1847 - 29 days after the Mormon pioneers arrived in Utah.
So, they have been around for a while. How are they doing today?
Data
As I was looking around online, I realized YouGov keeps publicly available tracker data on the greats in different fields including classical music. And, you guessed it, Mormon Tabernacle Choir is on this list! And, they even have some demographic breaks available. Not sure when they first started releasing this data, but I scraped everything they have and made a few charts of my own.
Charts
First, let's talk about some terms.
NameID, or “recognizers” refers to “% of people who have heard of “ the artist.
The line charts at the bottom talk about the “positives“. These are people who recognize the artist AND have a positive opinion of them.
About 7 in 10 people can NameID “Mormon Tabernacle Choir.“ This is slightly problematic because that is not the name of the choir anymore! But, that is what is asked in the survey, so we’ll continue to use this name in our post. But, we most note that the official name will likely not be as well known and perhaps wouldn't be on our Top 20 list here!
YouGov offers two demographic breaks: Generation and Gender. Looking through, there wasn’t much of a difference in gender, but for generation the differences were more substantive.
As you can see, there is a strong NameID among GenX and Boomers, but among millennials the NameID almost halves. And, before you say, “Oh just older people are more into classical music,“ while this is true, it is lower relative to other classical music artists as well. Whereas MoTab NameID is #3 and #4 for Boomers and GenX respectively, it’s around #15 for Millennials.
Now turning to the Positives or “people who recognize the artist AND have a positive opinion of them”…
There are a majority of “Positives” for the Mormon Tabernacle Choir, but other artists have more “Positives”. This means that more people are neutral or negative about the Mormon Tabernacle Choir compared to other similar classical artists.
When we break this down by generation, we can see that the lower number of “positives“ for MoTab is driven by generation. There are fewer MoTab “Positives” for Millennials and GenX, and more MoTab “Positives” for Boomers, but generally a lower number of “Positives“ compared to other similar artists. This is despite MoTab having one of the highest NameIDs of the group.
Conclusion
While the Mormon Tabernacle Choir is well recognized in the US, the new name (Tabernacle Choir at Temple Square) likely isn't. To me, the data suggests that MoTab may be falling into generational obscurity with much lower recognition in the younger generation and also fewer “Positives” relative to other similar classical artists.