Genre-Conformity in the Topics of Lyrics and Song Popularity (2024)

Abstract: The genre of a song defines both musical (rhythmic, timbral, performative) aspects of a song, but also the themes of lyrics and the style of writing. The audience has certain expectations as to emotional and thematic content of the genre they listen to. In this paper we use Music4All database to investigate whether breaking these expectations influences song popularity. We use topic modeling to divide song lyrics into 36 clusters, and apply tag clustering to separate the songs into 15 musical genres. We observe that in some genres (metal, hip-hop) lyrics are mostly written in specific topics, whereas in other genres they are spread over most topics. In most genres, songs that have lyrics that are not representative of the genre, are more popular than songs with genre-conforming lyrics.

## introduction for different listeners, different aspects of a song might be important: rhythm, lyrics, timbre, or epoch that a recording comes from @xcite . moreover, these principles might vary for different genres and even countries @xcite . lyrics seem to be a universally important aspect of a song for many listeners, influencing perceived emotion, enhancing experience and shaping preferences @xcite . however, lyrics are an often overlooked aspect in music information retrieval. in a recent survey on content-driven music recommendation, 70% of the studies used audio signal in content based music recommender system, while only 30% used any embedded metadata, including lyrics @xcite . the genre of a song plays an important role in shaping the content of its lyrics. for instance, pop music typically focuses on the topics of romantic love and heartbreak. in hip-hop and rap genres, it is typical for the lyrics to contain slang and obscene vocabulary, and cover topics of social justice and politics. in @xcite the songs were classified by genres using lyrics with high accuracy, showing that specific words can be indicative of the genre with a high certainty. in this paper we will apply topic modeling to song lyrics, and answer the following research questions: ## data in this research we will use the lyrics and listening history from music4all database @xcite . this database contains 109269 songs, out of which 91% contain lyrics, and the rest are instrumental. the songs come with more than 5 million listening events, generated by 14127 users. out of the songs that have lyrics, 84% are in english, and the rest of the songs are in 44 different languages. for our purposes we do not need instrumental songs and their listening history, hence we discard them. we translate the lyrics in foreign languages into english using google cloud translation api foot_0 . some of the english songs contained mixed english and korean text, and occasional korean words were translated as well. the cleaned dataset is available at the project repository: foot_1 . ## results in this section we describe the results that were computed on the following processed data: for each song, we determined a genre cluster that the song belongs to, a lyrics topic, and aggregated play counts for that song over a whole period reflected in the dataset. ## conclusion in this paper we showed that artists writing lyrics vary in how much they restrict themselves to certain topics, depending on musical genre, with the most restricting genres being hip-hop, black metal and new age. also, we showed that when the lyrics are written in a topic not representative for that genre it has a beneficial effect on popularity, for most genres, but not for hip-hop and rock.