Are Metal Fans Angrier than Jazz Fans? A Genre-Wise Exploration of the Emotional Language of Music Listeners on Reddit

Music forms a big part of our identity and
as such, people with a shared preference for
certain kinds of music may also share similar
traits. In this study, we explore differences in
the emotional language of fan communities of
different music genres.

In focusing on Reddit, we analyze the utterances on online community forums of different music genres using lexicon-based sentiment (emotion) analysis. Upon clustering Subreddit forums, we obtained two clusters: forums discussing genres
like Rock, RnB, Country, and Jazz were found
to have a higher abundance of positively valenced emotions and a lower amount of negatively valenced emotions. Likewise, Subreddits discussing genres like Metal, Punk, and
Rap had a lower amount of positively valenced
emotions and a higher abundance of negatively
valenced emotion.

We observed a high correlation between counts in lyrics of a genre and
counts in a fan community for the emotions of
anger, disgust, fear, and joy.

In sum, we found
differences in the emotional language of fan
utterances by genre, and these could be partially attributed to the emotions contained in
the lyrics.

This work has been presented at the Second Workshop on NLP for Music and Audio (NLP4MusA), co-located with ISMIR 2021.