How Likely Are You To “Push The Button”?

“Pushing the button” is probably one of the most coveted things in electronic music. It’s something that many of our staff members would do (nearly) anything to get the opportunity. We were curious if we could find out how likely you were to push the button and did some research. We looked at videos and pictures across all mediums to find out just what kind of person Above & Beyond would choose to “Push The Button” (PTB). We only took into account things that we could easily glean from our stand point, so this is NOT a solid reference; there were just too many factors that would have to be accounted for. It’s more like a commemoration of interesting factoids. Our data set is from the beginning of the “We’re All We Need Tour” to March 3rd.

So here is what evaluated in all these ‘Push The Button’ moments. We looked at gender, whether or not they had a sign, if they were wearing Kandi, what color hair they had, whether it was short or long, and how big the group size was. It is important to note this is an extremely small sample size; in no way is this considered statistically significant. It IS interesting, however! It required a ton of digging because there are not always photos of the PTB moment and people are really bad at holding their phones still during PTB. Side note: please learn how to focus your cameras! Also important to note is sometimes it can be hard to tell someone’s hair color, so this is no exact science here.

We put together some simple pie graphs to show you what all this information gave us.

For all the Push Button Moments, Women were selected 78% of the time

Of all the people that were chosen, 37% of them had signs

Kandi wont get you any closer with 35% of the participants wearing Kandi

Does it matter what color your hair is? Not really. Although it might help if you have black hair.

28% had Blonde Hair, 48% had Black Hair, 22% had Brown Hair, Sorry Red Heads you account for 2%

Does it matter how long your hair is? Absolutely! 96% of the people picked had long hair.

Finally, lets talk about group size. Generally they will choose two lucky fans, but they have chosen up to five in one instance.

Now these stats are from a small sample of just 18 shows. We doubt there is really any rhyme or reason to how Jono, Paavo, or Tony choose those lucky fans. In our research, we did not find any information on three shows & in one instance in Atlanta, we believe they didn’t actually choose someone to push the button. In every instance when we watched a video of someone pushing the button, we found that they played Blue Sky Action with a big and elongated build to make it easy for someone to push the button. In the video below, at the 7:30 mark, Tony hits the drop before a fan can be chosen. Jono comes to the laptop to tell the crowd “Tony is being mean”. We don’t know if it was made up for later in the show, but the whole thing is actually pretty humorous. Even though we’re sure the fans in Atlanta we’re pretty bummed they didn’t get the opportunity.

We hope you enjoyed this small sample that we put together. Let us know if you’re going to be at the show in Tacoma, but please don’t block us from the opportunity to push that button!