Hip hop has the largest vocabulary while EDM the least
Hip hop has the largest vocabulary out of all other musical genres. The results of this survey seems a little obvious but at the same time must have every hip hop fan all over the world feeling a little smug.
While there are many different variants of genres the researchers opted to narrow musical genres down to the eight most popular ones. Fifty one artists were chosen using Google search. The figures were gathered using the word count of the artists’ most popular songs which were then broken down into how many unique words per song appeared. The results were calculated based on how many unique words appeared per every ten thousand and hip hop has the largest vocabulary.
Then they used Spotify follower results to determine whether or not there was a connection between popularity and the broadness of the vocabulary.
Hip hop largely has the stereotype of being thug and ghetto music, at least for those who don’t know too much about it. So it must be an opener for anyone unaware that the poetic and storytelling culture of hip hop is alive and thriving.
Hip hop has the largest vocabulary averaging four hundred and seventy eight words and ninety four new ones per song. While heavy metal made it into second place in the survey.
On the opposite spectrum you have EDM, again not surprising that electronic dance music doesn’t have much of a vocabulary going on.
For Spotify followers hip hop came in at third place and heavy metal ranked in at the bottom of the list on Spotify. EDM reigns high on Spotify though, boasting the second largest following on the streaming site.
The conclusion of the study found that the popularity of music has no solid connection to the extent of the vocabulary of that genre.