From Bad Bunny and Fuerza Regida to Kendrick Lamar, Taylor Swift and Morgan Wallen, national streaming trends reveal the artists shaping teenage music culture across racial and cultural backgrounds.
SEAGOVILLE/CRANDALL — Walk through the hallways of Seagoville High School or Crandall High School, and students may be listening to entirely different musical worlds: Mexican regional music, hip-hop, R&B, country, pop, rock and Latin urban hits.
The two high schools serve communities with distinctly different racial and ethnic compositions, raising an interesting question: Do Hispanic, Black and White teenagers, including boys and girls, have different musical favorites?
Although neither school’s favorite artists can be established without a student survey, enrollment statistics and national streaming data provide a revealing comparison of the musical influences reaching today’s teenagers.
Two Schools, Different Demographics
The schools’ 2024–25 demographic profiles illustrate the differences between the Dallas County and Kaufman County campuses.
| Student group | Seagoville High | Crandall High |
|---|---|---|
| Hispanic | 72.9% | 41.8% |
| Black | 19.0% | 27.1% |
| White | 6.8% | 26.1% |
| Other racial groups | 1.3% | 5.0% |
Seagoville High has a substantially larger Hispanic student majority, while Crandall High has greater representation among Black and White students.
The contrast does not establish musical preferences. Rather, it offers a starting point for examining how cultural influences and nationally popular artists might intersect at the two schools.
The Artists Dominating American Music
Spotify’s 2025 year-end rankings offer a national benchmark for which musicians could be familiar to students at both schools.
America’s 10 Most-Streamed Spotify Artists, 2025
| Rank | Artist |
|---|---|
| 1 | Taylor Swift |
| 2 | Drake |
| 3 | Morgan Wallen |
| 4 | Kendrick Lamar |
| 5 | Bad Bunny |
| 6 | The Weeknd |
| 7 | SZA |
| 8 | Zach Bryan |
| 9 | Tyler, The Creator |
| 10 | Kanye West |
Music research company Luminate reported that approximately one-quarter of U.S. on-demand audio streams in 2025 belonged to R&B and hip-hop. Latin, country, pop and rock also attracted substantial audiences.
Hispanic Students: Latin and Mexican Music
For Hispanic students at both schools, Latin music provides a particularly relevant cultural comparison, although listening preferences vary substantially among individuals.
Among nationally prominent artists are Bad Bunny, Fuerza Regida, Peso Pluma, Junior H and Ivan Cornejo. Female performers including Karol G and Shakira represent other major Latin styles.
Spotify reported that 66% of Ivan Cornejo’s U.S. listeners and 55% of Junior H’s U.S. listeners belonged to Generation Z, demonstrating the genre’s connection to younger audiences.
Bad Bunny accumulated 19.8 billion global Spotify streams in 2025, finishing first worldwide.
Black Students: Hip-Hop and R&B
Hip-hop and R&B remain powerful forces in American youth culture, with prominent performers including Kendrick Lamar, Drake, SZA, The Weeknd and Tyler, The Creator.
The popularity crosses racial boundaries. Kendrick Lamar and SZA’s collaboration “luther” topped Spotify’s American song rankings for 2025.
Luminate also reported a 9.1% increase in R&B streaming volume during the first quarter of 2025 compared with the same period in 2024.
Those findings establish national popularity, not that Black students at either campus favor these performers over others.
White Students: Country, Pop and Beyond
Country performers Morgan Wallen and Zach Bryan, alongside pop stars Taylor Swift, Sabrina Carpenter and Billie Eilish, provide another nationally prominent group of artists to examine.
Wallen finished third among Spotify’s most-streamed American artists in 2025, while Swift ranked first. Bryan finished eighth.
However, these artists cannot be classified as exclusively White audience favorites. Their popularity extends across different communities, as does the popularity of Latin and hip-hop musicians.
Do Boys and Girls Have Different Favorites?
Enrollment figures permit a gender comparison, even though music preferences remain unmeasured.
| 2024–25 Enrollment | Male | Female |
|---|---|---|
| Seagoville High | 908 (50.8%) | 878 (49.2%) |
| Crandall High | 1,061 (53.1%) | 938 (46.9%) |
An accurate musical breakdown would require six separate comparisons: Hispanic boys and girls, Black boys and girls, and White boys and girls.
No verified school-level rankings exist for those six groups in the information reviewed.
Consequently, claiming that Hispanic boys prefer Fuerza Regida, Black girls prefer SZA or White girls prefer Taylor Swift would be speculation rather than reported findings.
A student survey could determine whether such differences actually exist.
More Alike Than Different?
Music streaming increasingly allows teenagers to explore performers across languages, cultures and genres.
A Hispanic teenager may favor country music. A Black teenager may prefer Mexican regional music. A White teenager may listen primarily to Kendrick Lamar or Bad Bunny.
That crossover may prove more important than the demographic differences between the two campuses.
The unanswered question is which artists students actually choose when given the opportunity to name their favorites.
Until comparable surveys are conducted, national music charts reveal the biggest stars reaching American listeners, but not the musical winners inside Seagoville High School or Crandall High School.
