Finns love cultural activities as few other nations in the world do. According to the last survey published by Statistics Finland of participation in leisure activities, 83% of the persons aged 10 or over had attended at least one cultural event during 2017. Cultural events include movies, concerts, theatre, art museums and exhibitions, other museums, dance performances and opera.
The results of the survey show that going to movies and attending concerts were the most popular activities and, at the same time, the ones that registered the highest growth. On the contrary, “going to the opera is still clearly the most uncommon form of cultural participation”, as highlighted by Statistics Finland in the press release on the Leisure Activities Survey 2017.
As for the type of music preferred by the Finns, the survey shows that attendance at pop-rock and heavy metal concerts continues to grow non-stop. In fact, going to pop, rock and popular or dance music concerts has increased from decade to decade since the 80s, but “the largest increase has taken place regarding pop or rock concerts”.
Statistics Finland points that “in the new millennium, Finn’s taste in music has changed, which is visible, for example, in the fact that going to techno and hip-hop concerts has increased six- or seven-fold and going to heavy metal concerts has quadrupled in one and half a decade”. Going to concerts of classical music is stable, but not quite as popular any more as it was in the beginning of the 1980s
However, official statistics also show that in Finland –a country with one of the highest rates of readers and consumption of books and newspapers- “writing as a hobby has decreased”. Especially writing traditional letters has plummeted in all population groups.
Nowadays the most popular form of writing is “keeping a diary”. However, that has also decreased so that around “every tenth person keeps a diary today, when one-quarter of persons aged 10 or over kept a diary at the beginning of the 2000s”. In any case, writing as a hobby is much more popular among women than among men, as figures show.
The statistical office of Finland indicates that “if one contemplates whether writing as a hobby has moved over to the internet, this does not seem to be true when it comes to long texts: only 2% of persons aged 10 or over wrote a blog”. “Apparently, electronic communication has in a short time changed the culture of writing profoundly”, concludes.
The data for the Leisure Survey were collected between October 2017 and January 2018. The data were collected with face-to-face interviews regarding persons aged 10 to 14 and 75 and over, and with either a web form or mail inquiry regarding persons aged 15 to 74. Altogether, 7,155 persons participated in the survey.
