Hip-hop fans, get ready to tell your stubborn older relative that they were wrong. EDM diehards, get ready to be a little humbled and encouraged to branch out. It turns out, listening to hip hop music more than any other genre actually increases your exposure to new vocabularies, while hearing too much EDM stifles an awareness of lyrical complexity. This has emerged after the release of a study by MusixMatch, which weighed the most widely listened to genres in terms of popularity and lyrical variety.
Google served as the source for the sample, which included the 51 most searched artists. These artists were then classified by genre and given rankings based on their number of Spotify followers and on average, how many uncommon words per 10,000 these artists used in their songs. Hip hop music scored number one in vocabulary with heavy metal following closely behind. And while hip hop was 3rd in popularity, heavy metal seems to have the most distance between popularity and vocabulary, scoring pretty low on number of followers. Pop and electronic music were rated highest in followers, but were on the lower rung of the lyrical variety standings, with EDM coming in second for overall average followers.
via Musixmatch lab | H/T: The Dancing Astronaut
