Sentiment analysis of top 100 songs

When I set out on this exploration I was unsure as to what I would find. Or even, to be truthful, what I was looking for. I knew, however, that there was something to discover in the years of music data I found at my finger tips. That is where this story begins.

Music is an almost universal form of communication. It transends language barriers and gives voice to our innermost emotions. Those emotions are ours to share. Which then leads us to the questions at hand. Has music been affected by the seemingly inevitable downward spiral of society and values? Are we drawn to increasingly negative songs because it reflects our own communal emotional state? Or, in opposition, is music an inherently positive medium of communication that optimistically refuses to be weighed down by the tides of time?

In this visualization, I use data collected since 1965 of the top 100 billboard songs of each year. The lyrics are run through a NLTK sentiment analysis model and given a score from -1 to 1 corresponding to the negativity or positivity. An extremely positive song would have a score close to 1, while a very negative song would have a score near -1.

In this graphic on the right - we see a color encoding of the sentiment of each year. Yellow represents 1 and Blue represents -1.

Here in this graphic we see the sentiment scores are translated directly onto the graph as a line. One thing I noticed while playing with the data is that music is generally a positive form of communication. While there are songs that are quite negative (e.g., sad or angry), as a whole music is resilient and happy. In other words, there was never a year that dropped lower than 0.0 which means the top 100 songs - every year - on average are quite positive.

Intersting Insights

Most Negative Year: 2013

2013 was a year of political discomfort and unrest - a large majority of people were beginning to become more involved in world politics and interactions. They, in general, did not like what they saw.

• Feb 8 100,000 people march to demand justice for the atrocities of the Bangladesh Liberation War in Dhaka
• Feb 11 Pope Benedict XVI announces his resignation from February 28, the first pope to resign since 1415
• Feb 12 North Korea confirms it has successfully tested a nuclear device that could be weaponized
• Apr 15 Boston Marathon bombings: 3 people are killed and 183 injured after two explosions near the finish line
• Jul 18 Detroit, Michigan, files for bankruptcy, becoming the largest US municipal bankruptcy ever at $18.5 billion

Most Positive Year: 1991

This year is usually considered the final year of the cold war that lasted for decades. It was a time of celebration and opportunity in a world that was, up to this point, filled with uncertainty. Some important events are:

• Feb 27 Gulf War ends after Iraqi troops retreat and Kuwait is re-taken by the US
• Jun 19 Colombian drug lord Pablo Escobar surrenders to police
• Jul 10 Boris Yeltsin sworn in as 1st elected President of the Russian Federation
• Aug 6 Tim Berners-Lee releases files describing his idea for the World Wide Web. WWW debuts as a publicly available service on the Internet.
• Aug 19 Conservative members of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union attempt to depose Mikhail Gorbachev in a coup d'état
• Aug 21 Conservative coup in the Soviet Union is crushed by popular resistance led by Boris Yeltsin in three days
• Dec 12 Maastricht Treaty signed to create a European Community
• Dec 21 Soviet Union formally dissolves as 11 of 12 republics sign treaty forming Commonwealth of Independent States

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