Adele's new album: It's all about the lyrics

A study of search trends and user engagement

By Varun Jewalikar and Federica Fragapane at Musixmatch

25th November, 2015 (3 min read)

Lyrics dominate 'Adele 25' search trends

We compare the search trends for 'adele 25 lyrics', 'adele 25 torrent' and 'adele 25 youtube' using Google trends.

Searches on the last weekend

The searches start peaking out on release date which could indicate the listeners looking for lyrics, music and videos of Adele's new album.

The lyrics search volume is 2 times higher than the search volume for 'adele 25 torrent' and 'adele 25 youtube' on the album release date.

Adele's fans are searching far more for the lyrics than the music or videos for Adele’s 25 on release day.

Searches over the last 2 months

If we instead look at the same trends over the last 2 months we see that lyrics search volumes are still huge.

The lyrics search volume is quite similar to the search volume of 'adele 25 torrent' and 'adele 25 youtube' over the last 2 months.

On October 23rd the first single from the album 'Hello' was released and we see a massive jump in all the search trends. The lyrics search volume is higher than the other two on this day.

Torrents to the rescue of streaming subscribers ?

This interesting trend was spotted by Andy Weissman. Adele has not yet released the album on streaming services (Spotify, Apple Music, etc.) and the torrent searches also start peaking out on release date.

Subscribers of streaming services could be searching for Adele's 25 on torrents.

Musixmatch user engagement for Adele's 25

Musixmatch's apps are amongst the most used music apps worldwide. Also, our website is one of the top lyrics sources on the internet. We gather a lot of lyrics reading data (anonymised) every minute like the amount of time spent on lyrics pages in our apps and the website. This is called user engagement. We will zoom in on this data over the last weekend for Adele’s 25.

Overall

Here we see the total time spent reading the lyrics for Adele's 25 over the last weekend.

From 19th November to 22nd November, Musixmatch users spent 4364 hours (~182 days) reading the lyrics for Adele's 25.

Track & platform wise user engagement for Adele's 25

The user engagement in Musixmatch’s apps is much higher than the website. The engagement across the days of the weekend remains almost constant (~ 1100 hours on the apps and ~50 hours on the website).

‘Hello’ is the track driving the most user engagement for Musixmatch on mobile and web.

'Hello' is closely followed by the second single 'While we were young' on the apps, while on the website 'Send my love' is more popular. The other 8 songs are still not that popular.

Conclusion

Adele's fans were eagerly waiting for this album since 2011, the huge search and Musixmatch engagement patterns show the immense popularity of this album. The dominance of the lyrics search over music and video search are testament to the importance of the lyrics of new album releases.