Data from Spotify Suggest That Listeners Are Gloomiest in February (economist.com) 40
Around the world, the most popular tunes this month will be depressing ones [Editor's note: the link may be paywalled.]. From a report: Residents of the northern hemisphere might think that their moods are worst in January. Christmas is over, the nights are long and summer is a distant prospect. Newspapers often claim that "Blue Monday," in the third week of January, is the most depressing day. To create a quantitative measure of seasonal misery, The Economist has analysed music consumption. Our calculations use data from Spotify, which offers 50m tracks to 270m users in over 70 countries, mostly in Europe and the Americas. The firm has an algorithm that classifies a song's "valence," or how happy it sounds, on a scale from 0 to 100. The algorithm is trained on ratings of positivity by musical experts, and gives Aretha Franklin's soaring "Respect" a score of 97; Radiohead's gloomy "Creep" gets just 10.
Since 2017 Spotify has also published daily tables of the 200 most-streamed songs, both worldwide and in each country. We gathered data for 30 countries around the globe, including 46,000 unique tracks with 330bn streams, to identify the annual nadir of musical mood. Drum roll, please. The global top 200 songs are gloomiest in February, when their valence is 4% lower than the annual average. In July, the perkiest month, the mood is 3% higher. The most joyful spike comes at Christmas. Strikingly, this February slump occurs in some countries near the equator, such as Singapore, and far south of it, such as Australia -- even though their musical tastes differ. A few Latin American countries lack such a dip, perhaps because the algorithm sees Latin music as mostly happy. The icy north shows the biggest seasonal swings. Finland's mood in July is 11% happier than usual. Overall, on days when a country gets one more hour of sunlight than its annual average, the valence of its streams increases by 0.6%. In contrast, wet days bring particularly downcast tunes.
Since 2017 Spotify has also published daily tables of the 200 most-streamed songs, both worldwide and in each country. We gathered data for 30 countries around the globe, including 46,000 unique tracks with 330bn streams, to identify the annual nadir of musical mood. Drum roll, please. The global top 200 songs are gloomiest in February, when their valence is 4% lower than the annual average. In July, the perkiest month, the mood is 3% higher. The most joyful spike comes at Christmas. Strikingly, this February slump occurs in some countries near the equator, such as Singapore, and far south of it, such as Australia -- even though their musical tastes differ. A few Latin American countries lack such a dip, perhaps because the algorithm sees Latin music as mostly happy. The icy north shows the biggest seasonal swings. Finland's mood in July is 11% happier than usual. Overall, on days when a country gets one more hour of sunlight than its annual average, the valence of its streams increases by 0.6%. In contrast, wet days bring particularly downcast tunes.
The Smiths (Score:4, Funny)
"The algorithm is trained on ratings of positivity by musical experts, and gives Aretha Franklin's soaring "Respect" a score of 97; Radiohead's gloomy "Creep" gets just 10. "
"Heaven Knows I’m Miserable Now" and "Girlfriend in a Coma" by The Smiths broke the scale.
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"Heaven Knows I’m Miserable Now" and "Girlfriend in a Coma" by The Smiths broke the scale.
I dunno . . . it made me very happy to hear that the annoying daft twat singer of The Smiths was miserable.
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I loaded it up with Pink Floyd to listen to all in a row, and even back then, they joked about putting our apartment on "suicide watch"....haha.
I don't understand it, Animals [wikipedia.org] is such a cheerful, uplifting album.....
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Where do "Dead Puppies Aren't Much Fun" or "Poisoning Pigeons in the Park" fall? Those songs are pretty up-beat.
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You're forgetting about Asleep.
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Like the Firemen and Blade Runners before us, a lot of people think my job of Monitor is dangerous and that I'm constantly groping through the darkness to find local-storage media users, getting shot at by femme fatales and decoding the backwards-recorded Satanic propaganda found in most 20th century music. They don't know. They don't know the mystery, wonder, and humanity's resilience.
The alert came in at 8pm. I had just got back from a confrontation with a user who had gone dark, so I cleaned the blood o
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There's one for you, nineteen for me
'Cause I'm the taxman, yeah, I'm the taxman
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Most people I know tend to get refunds during Tax Time.
If you are a 1099 employee or run a business, normally it is good planning to have scheduled tax payments sent out, so we are not dealing with a large bill when taxes are due. If you are responsible enough to hold enough tax money, and have it collecting interest until the day your payment is due, you can probably be better off.
For the bulk of W2 your employer deducts your taxes from your paycheck, they normally will over take, thus you get a refund bac
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Or are you angry that you saw a poor person using a 2 year old iPhone, walking down the street, who seemed happy that day.
Happiness? Poor person!?! What?!?!?
Of course one would be horrified to see a happy poor person. To them should go nothing but endless toil and labor until they can make a suitable presentation of themselves in public. One would feel moral outrage to even see a poor person who wasn't working. After all, if they were good people, God wouldn't have punished them by making them poor. QED, a
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Re: TAX TIME (Score:3)
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The gap is arguably decreasing right now, and has been for quite a while. Back around the time of the founding, you had men like our Founding Fathers - Hancock, Washington, Jefferson, Franklin, Astor - who would be in the league (or beyond, in the case of John Jacob Astor) of Buffet and Gates today (equivalent), and actual, literal slaves. In the 1800s and the early 1900s, you had Vanderbilt, Carnegie, Rockefeller, Mellon and others who were worth more - adjusted for inflation - than Gates, Bezos, or Slim
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I get refunds too. How nice of the government to return the money I was overcharged during the year. I hope it did well during it's stint in an interest free loan.
Well, considering post-holiday breakups rank high (Score:2)
It stands to reason that after denial runs out, acceptance sets in, and gloomy music is high on the list.
Coincidentally, Adele is showcasing her recent weight loss, which might help the OTHER post-breakup problem - stress eating.
How do you mathematically grade a song's perkiness (Score:2)
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My favorite. [youtube.com]
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How do you mathematically grade a song's perkiness? The lyrics? The tempo?
Depends on the model, they have natural language processing (NLP) models that look for positive/negative attitude - people use those to process news sites to predict if stocks will go up or down, for example. But if they achieve reasonable accuracy with just the tempo, I'd go with that. Remember what the experts rate it will be considered the "ground truth" as far as the model is concerned, whatever preferences/cultural bias they bring into it will still be there the model is just trying to mimic what they
Re: How do you mathematically grade a song's perki (Score:2)
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in another data point from Spotify, (Score:2)
majority of their audience lives in northern hemisphere. very important :)
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No playlist? (Score:2)
This article is useless without a playlist. Here's one I made https://open.spotify.com/playl... [spotify.com]
Another possible reason (Score:2)
Does Anyone Live in the North East anymore? (Score:2)
February has been gloomy before spottily.
Its cold, most days of the week are cloudy, the snow is a hard chunk of ice, dirty. The roads are always wet or Icy.
By March we will at least get some hints of optimism, a few warm days, perhaps some green grass. But February is just depressing in the North Eastern United States.
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February in New England isn't depressing if you love winter hiking/snowshoeing, snowmobiling, fat biking, or skiing. These days it snows in December, warms up in January, then real winter and its fun activities finally arrive in February.
Hadn't thought of this until just now: (Score:2)
The darkest, dreariest month makes people gloomy? (Score:2)
They're missing people (Score:3)
Folks like myself who don't give a rat's ass about streaming and instead play our CDs may play uplifting music at this time of the year.
Is not DragonForce and Sabaton uplifting?
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Like the Firemen and Blade Runners before us, a lot of people think my job of Monitor is glamorous. They look at the power I have (both to probe into peoples' activities to find subversion, and the enforcement power when I find wrongdoing), and imagine how fun the job must be. "He listens to people listening to music all day," they say, as if it's not just graphs and charts, with suspicious anomalies highlighted for investigation. They don't know. They don't know the terror.
The alert came in 7pm, the syste
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Nothing more uplifting that the Winged Hussars. And not having to worry about being tagged as potentially violent because you're listening to it from a CD and not streaming it. (Though make sure your phone is turned off if it's nearby.)
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Bah. CDs? Tapes and vinyl records! :P
Ahh February... (Score:2)
In other words: (Score:2)
If you like low insurance rates . . . (Score:2)
Spotify/Sono's Random function sucks! (Score:1)