Hip hop has the largest average vocabulary size followed by Heavy Metal

Last places taken by Pop and Electronic

By Varun Jewalikar and Federica Fragapane at Musixmatch

3rd December, 2015 (4 min read)

A few months ago, we conducted a study titled ‘The largest vocabulary in music’ (we suggest you to give it a quick read). The vocabularies of the 99 top selling musicians were studied. Now we look closer at comparing the average vocabulary sizes of popular genres.

There are a lot of genres out there. To simplify the study we consider the following 8 popular genres.

Genres selected for this study

The list of most searched artists for each genre is used to represent it. More details and definitions can be found in the analysis section of this page.

Overview of the data

Vocabulary sizes of popular genres

Hiphop at the top

It should be no surprise that hiphop is the genre with the highest average vocabulary. In our previous study, hiphop artists had dominated the overall vocabulary rankings. The lyrics are dense and lots of slang is used which gives rappers a big lead over other genres. Also, hiphop has the highest words per song and new words per song.

Surprise

We expected a more poetry driven genre like Folk or Country to take the second place but were pleasantly surprised to find that it is actually Heavy Metal. A naive guess for this could be the myriad of complicated concepts heavy metal lyrics try to address which calls for using a lot of new words.

Avg. vocabulary size vs spotify followers for popular genres

The runners up

Folk and Rock come in at #3 and #4 respectively. The difference in the average vocabulary sizes for these two is around 31 words. They are followed closely by Country and Indie Rock at #5 and #6.

Last but not the least

Pop is ranked at #7. But it has the highest Spotify followers on average. The lyrical simplicity could be a major factor for its popularity.

Electronic music comes in last. Since it is predominantly instrumental, this should not be surprising. It also has the second highest Spotify following as compared to the other genres.

Conclusion

There is no direct correlation between the average vocabulary size and the popularity of a genre (average spotify followers).

It goes without saying that vocabulary size is just a number and it can’t quantify the beauty, complexity or profoundness of what a song conveys. It is an interesting metric to look at our favourite genres and artists in a new light.

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Analysis details

These are some of the issues encountered and respective choices taken for simplifying/reducing the scope of the study.

Representative artists for each genre

We use the lists of most searched artists for each genre to represent it. More details can be found in the analysis section of this page.

Ideally, we would want a crowdsourced list of artists for each genre (musicologists selecting representative artists for each genre). This would be quite a task in itself. Instead, we use the lists of most searched artists for each genre to represent it. These lists can be easily retrieved from Google.

Most googled artists

Google returns 51 artists for each genre. These lists are then cleaned (leaving indie rock with 50 artists since 'Sub Pop' is returned as an artist) and matched to the corresponding entries in the Musixmatch database.

Most googled artists for each genre

There are some issues with this approach. First being that only 51 artists are considered for each genre, which is an arbitrary number decided by Google. Also, some genre bending artists (Kanye West, Iggy Azalea, Beyoncé, Radiohead, Ellie Goulding,etc. ) appear in multiple genres, which might seem outright wrong (Kanye West classified as 'Electronic') but on closer inspection their songs do include musical elements of these other genres. We think these are small tradeoffs for the simplicity of this approach.

Disparity in catalogue sizes of artists

Some artists are very prolific (releasing more than an album every year) while some only release a few albums during their whole career. If we directly compare the vocabulary sizes of these artists the analysis will be skewed in favour of the more prolific artists. Instead we use the following definitions:

Vocabulary Size is the number of unique words used by an artist across the first 10000 words (or less) written by them.
Average vocabulary size of a genre is the average of vocabulary sizes for the artists of that genre.

Generally, the first 10000 words written by an artist covers their first 4 albums and is a good representation of their overall writing style.