Emoji Usage Data at Coachella Shows That Kids Like Pills

The general consensus in mainstream culture is that what goes down at Coachella is a representation of what kids these days are into, y'know, with their Instagramming, and their Internet, and their EDM, and their sexting apps, et cetera. A study of the habits and behaviors of the kiddos who attended, conventional wisdom would suggest, would therefore provide a look inside at the forces shaping youth culture. Or something to that effect.

Newfangled group messaging app Blend thinks it does at least, so over the last two weekends they've been keeping watch on the 200,000 "Gen-Z millennial" users of their public chat service, many of whom were pinging cell towers in Indio, CA, in an attempt to glean some sort of insight into what all those kids were doing in the desert in between Kanye guest appearances and campground rendezvous.

What they found will surprise some, but seem totally obvious to anyone who has been in a dark room with loud music and flashing lights recently. Keep in mind, this data is just from the Blend app public chats (and they didn't reveal exactly how many users they had on site), and doesn't take into account what is said in your Whatsapps or Facebook Messengers or in private: Of users at Coachella over the past two weekends, approximately 25% of all emojis used in the public forums were either "Fire" and "Pill" The flame, of course, indicates that something is so good it's "fire," and the pill is a symbol, for, uh, pills.

For the record, the emojis in question:

It seems fair to extrapolate from this data that that many Blend users thought that something at the festival was very good, and are interested in drugs. Blend CEO Akash Nigam agrees: "That's what is insinuated, correct. We can't affirm that, but, yeah, that's the conclusion we drew." Which, uh, yeah. Makes sense.

In other stats, the most mentioned acts at the festival were A$AP Rocky, Kanye West, and Rae Sremmurd. Within dance music artists performing at Coachella, the most mentioned were Calvin Harris (21%), Jack U (11%), and Flume, which should give an indication as to Blend's user base––youthful, enthusiastic late-millennials who love Calvin Harris and think that molly is hot fire…or something.

Also notable in the data found by Blend researchers is that of users who suggested "hooking up," 79% were male, and 21% were female.

Jemayel Khawaja is THUMP's Editor-at-Large - @JemayelK