Music

Music is an important part of every culture, and we can't stop the beat. From top 40 to 18th century composers to folk traditions, we love music.

SMILE AND WAVE

The Happiest And Saddest Popular Artists On Spotify, According To Their Lyrics

A sentiment analysis of the lyrics of some of Spotify's most popular songs and artists categorizes them as either optimists or pessimists. Kind of.

1 year ago · 11.8k reads ·

·

·

Crossworld Solver used the NRC Emotion Lexicon (EmoLex) and scanned some of Spotify's most streamed songs to determine if the artists on the list steered more towards happy or sad when it came to their lyrics.

EmoLex was created by Dr. Saif M. Mohammad and Dr. Peter Turney, and it attributes eight basic emotions (anger, fear, anticipation, trust, surprise, sadness, joy and disgust) and two sentiments (positive and negative) to a list of English words. It was last updated (as of April 3) in August 2022.

Key Takeaways:

With a 72.3 percent rating, "What Lovers Do" by Maroon 5 was determined to be, at one point, the happiest song in the charts.
Nearly one-fourth (24.6 percent) of all of Olivia Rodrigo's lyrics are positive and that makes her one of the happiest artists in the charts.
Among chart-topping artists, Jason Derulo (18.8 percent), Hailee Steinfeld (19.2 percent) and GIVĒON (19.2 percent) had the lowest happiness ratings.
With 18.1 percent of her lyrics dubbed sorrowful, Billie Eilish led chart-topping artists with the highest percentage of sad lyrics.

Click to enlarge images

Liked this? We've also got charts on pop musicians and their vocabularies and all-time Grammy leaders.

Via Crossword Solver.

Comments

Jeff Carter 1 year ago

Wait, so Olivia Rodrigo had the highest percentage of happy words but also a fairly high percentage of sad words as well. (Each of these charts is showing the top 20 out of 120 chart-topping artists, so ALL of these artists rank highly.)

I'm thinking that this analysis REALLY should have done a "net happy" rating subtracting the % sad words from the % happy words. As is, this seems to be a lot of nonsense.
1. Stephen McGloughlin 1 year ago
  
  Agreed. Look at Olivia Rodrigo's song "Happier". It would score high on happy words but is a very sad song. Her song "jealousy, jealousy" is sad, melancholy and depressive. It certainly won't uplift the listener. Lyrics like "rather be anyone else" compound sadness, loss or grief.
Stephen McGloughlin 1 year ago

This is where we need AI. Extracting such scales by counting out-of-context words in lyrics gives misleading results. For instance, if you listen to the meaning and messaging behind Olive Rodrigo's lyrics, she should rank among the most saddest of artists.

Cut Through The Chaos With Digg Edition

Sign up for Digg's daily morning newsletter to get the most interesting stories. Sent every morning.