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.