Enter song lyrics below to find out if it will be a hit or not
The lyrics of your song will be compared to our dataset of 39k+ songs to determine its likelihood of achieving success.
Our metric of success was defined as the song having reached Billboard's Hot 100 Chart and remained there for at least one week.
Run the model to get your prediction
Paste the lyrics of your song in the text box! Here's what will happen:
1. The lyrics will be broken up into separate words;
2. The less important words ("stop words") will be removed;
3. The remaining words - the ones that would actually make a differece - will be stemmed. This means they'll be reduced to a version that would accept different variations. For example: 'amazing', , 'amaze' and 'amazed' will all be considered as 'amaz'.
Explore the dataset
Our dataset contains lyrics from over 39k songs with words that have been stemmed, meaning the words that have different variants have been stripped of what sets them apart to be considered as a single word ('times', 'timely', 'timed' -> 'time').
Additionally, the scope of the project was limited to songs written in English, so songs in other languages were excluded from the dataset.
39k
songs
1,500
words
Avg Word Count
Successful: 139
Unsuccessful: 97
We know that lyrics alone are not likely to make or break a song, many other factors can collectively lead to its success (or failure!). Find beautifully designed charts with insights including factors like Acousticness, Instrumentalness, Tempo, Energy, Loudness, and others through the years and for different music genres on the Tableau Dashboard.
Word Frequency in Successful Songs
Most of the top words in successful song lyrics are also the most recurring in unsuccessful songs. However, the majority of these words appear more often in successful lyrics in proportion to other words.
The word 'love', for example, appears twice as frequently in successful songs compared to unsuccessful ones.
Unique Words
Out of the top 100 most used words, these are the unique ones: the successful words seen here are unique to the top 100 words in successful songs and do not appear among the top 100 unsuccessful ones, and vice versa.
Notice how the general tone of the high-frequency words unique to successful songs is one of more positivity compared to the unsuccessful ones.
Words like 'friend' and 'dance' have a more positive connotation than 'die' and 'lie', and this appears to contribute to the success of the song.
Word Cloud Comparison
Use the dropdown to select music genres for a side by side comparison of the most common words in successful and unsuccessful songs.
Successful
Unsuccessful
Thanks for stopping by!
Please enjoy this loop of some of the most common words used in songs throughout the years. And for more insights and cool visualizations, don't forget to check out the Tableau Dashboard .