Music is all around

Music is all around us. When you turn on your television, radio or enter an elevator, a shop, walk on the streets or even when you go to sleep you think of music. It’s a great influence in all of our lives. Believe it or not, music is always present when you’re in a bad or even in a good mood. It helps us pass through the bad days or just cures boredom.

But how influential is it when we play games? How can it help? We see many famous streamers, like Carlos 'ocelote' Rodríguez Santiago, 'PhantomL0rd' , Stephen 'Snoopeh' Ellis or even Guardsman Bob, always listening to music, but they have different tastes. Ocelote is more of an Electronic music listener, but also listens to Metal/Rock. Phantoml0rd is a big fan of Metal music. Snoopeh is more of Rock/Pop music listener and Guardsman Bob listens to Rock.

What does this mean? What do these players have in common? First off, they frequently listen to music while streaming, and are High Elo players. Does listening to music actually make a difference in our gameplay?

Survey results

We held a survey amongst regular and casual players of the League of Legends community. More than 150 players responded to every question in the poll, and the results were pretty interesting!



With the double difference between Often and Don’t Play Ranked, and triple of the people who don’t listen to music while playing Solo queue, most of the players interviewed always listen to music as they progress through Ranked mode. Still, among the players who don’t play Ranked mode, a majority listen to music anyway.




Among those that listen to music, most of them are between 1500 and 2000 ELO, in comparison to the players that don’t listen to music during games. There’s a vast majority of players in the low and mid elo ranking that listen to music while grinding ranked, compared to the people who don’t listen.



This chart is pretty much general, as everyone has different tastes in music of course, but there’s many types of calm music that players listen too, like R&B, Reggae or even Classical music, but there are also more energetic picks like Rock, Dubstep or even Metal.



The last chart shows us a balance between the people who think music actually helps them concentrate and improve. There's a medium sized number of 33 players that aren’t sure if it actually helps or not. Only 21 players are of the opinion that it doesn’t make any difference.

Conclusion


The players in the survey are mostly between 1200 and 1600 elo. In the first chart a difference of 1% of players voted that they "Often" (22%) listen to music during Ranked and "Don't play ranked" (21%), though the majority that doesn't play Ranked listens to it (More than half).

Those that chose ”Often”, may or may not listen to music because it can be helpful or distracting. There's a 12% of players in the survey who have a serious approach towards ranked games and don't listen to music while playing them. But there's still a large number of players answering "Yes", who believe it is helpful for concentration and improvement.

Also playing certain kinds of music can give a hint on what type of gameplay you have. This isn’t 100% accurate, but i.e.: Phant0mlord, listens to metal music and always has a "Balls Deep" aggression playstyle.

This being said, there's no simple solution to focus, as every player needs to find their own way to calm down, concentrate or improve during the game. Music can be one helpful tool or your enemy.

Credit to Viru5z for the awesome research info!