Everyone knows that writing a feel-good love song can net an artist megabucks, but should media moguls such as Simon Cowell and his cohorts be mindful about when they push the sad stuff?
Judging by the Top 20 iTunes chart, the answer is a heartfelt "yes".
We've mapped the performance of 2010's pro and anti relationship songs in iTunes' Top 20 - what emerged were some interesting results!
Spring break
- Pro-relationship songs soar
- Anti-relationship songs plummet
- Trends begin reversing in mid-March
The graph above shows the number of 'positive' and 'negative' songs about love and relationships that made it to the Top 20 iTunes chart in 2010 (see the 'Methodology' section below for more detail on how we worked this out).
A few of the key dates are mapped out in text above, but if we look a little closer we can see some interesting patterns emerge.
What to make of all this? Firstly, and perhaps most obviously, is the huge spike in love songs following Valentine's Day. Curiously, February 14th itself isn't the year's peak but rather the starting point of the uphill climb. This could be explained by the onset of 'love in the air' as we move into Spring, or simply because the lovey-dovey songs released for Valentine's Day take a little while to pick up sales steam.
Either way, once the honeymoon period ends, the number of love songs in the chart quickly declines and anti-relationship songs outnumber them by late-May. They don't surface again until late October, and even then never quite reach the giddy heights enjoyed during the Spring season.
The Summer Slump
- May and June prove to be the 'unhappiest' months
- Both types of song give way to the Summer's dance tracks
Moving onward, another point to note is that throughout the year the two lines nearly always do opposite things - if love song sales are up, tracks about broken hearts and unrequited affection are down.
You may be thinking, "There are only a finite number of places in the charts, so of course a higher volume of love songs will push the latter out!" This isn't strictly the case, as the performance of both types of song can be massively affected by tracks that aren't about relationships at all (such as Jay-Z's Empire State of Mind, an ode to NYC).
This added influential factor not only backs up the notion that the results have a definite trend, but also explains the dip in the number of both pro and anti love songs in the summer - here, the charts are dominated by dance tracks and club hits which DJs prefer to hold back during the holiday season.
Football and other sporting anthems also enjoyed a rise during this period, especially in the wake of the 2010 FIFA World Cup.
Winter of our Discontent
- Number of charted love songs drop to lowest point mid-October
- Anti-love songs begin declining after late-October peak
- Christmas cheer kicks in, love songs takeover in mid-November
From September onwards, fewer love-positive songs got into the Top 20 (hitting their lowest in October) and moodier songs ruled supreme until a scant two weeks before Christmas.
It seems this decline towards the lowest point for love songs begins when the days start to get shorter in the Northern Hemisphere (the Autumn Solstice in mid-September). However, if the seasons were such a strong factor we'd expect to see love songs perform better than they do over the summer months.
There could be another explanation. Check out this interesting graph by David McCandless and Lee Byron and notice the dramatic increase in break-ups from October through to just before Christmas.
The correlation between the McCandless graph and the one above is strong, with the exception of the peak break-up period they identify in February and March. The reason this isn't echoed in our graph when everything else lines up so well is likely to be because we compiled ours using data from the UK charts - the spike on the McCandless graph is attributed to Spring Break, primarily a US phenomenon.
Conclusion
Holli Mcmenamin, a psychology graduate from London, says "It's an interesting snapshot of the general population's mood, and the fact that there are such definite peaks and troughs suggest that it's not as random as you would expect, or at least not just the result of the 'powers that be' (Apple, marketing executives, etc.) pushing certain tracks. If that were the case, both lines would probably be fairly straight throughout the year. It's hard to say how big an influence heartbreak is or by what mechanisms it affects the charts, but we can see here that its presence is definite."
The take home message for producers? If you're going to release a single between May and mid-November, it'll have an increased chance of making the iTunes Top 20 chart if it has negative undertones - otherwise, get it out between Christmas and mid-April.
Of course, we can't forget that just because there's more of one type of song in the chart than the other it doesn't necessarily mean that they're charting better. So we also worked out the mean average chart position for each group (pro-love and anti-love) for each given week to get a different picture of which is more prominent. We'll let you make of this what you will...
Methodology
After compiling an archive of iTunes Top 20 charts for each week over 2010, we set about categorising each song as 'pro-love', 'anti-love' or 'non-relationship'. Each song was assigned a number, either 1, 2 or 3 respectively, to aid in data compiling.
1) Pro-love: Any song regarding or declaring the positives of being in a relationship, how much the singer is in love with the subject of the song, optimism at having worked out past issues, feeling great about being with someone, etc.
2) Anti-love: Any songs in which the singer displays hurt or despair over a break-up or unrequited/unworkable love. Also includes double-negative songs - that is, those which are positive about not being in a relationship.
3) Non-relationship: Neither of the above. This category included songs about things other than romantic relationships, egocentric songs (e.g rapping about one's own success or career) and songs with no lyrics or discernable subject matter.
Data derived from type 3 (non-relationship) songs was excluded from both graphs.
We tried to keep the process as objective as possible. In fact, there was very little difficulty in deciding whether a song was 'pro' love or not, and only two or three were so ambiguous that we had to class them as non-relationship songs.
All commentary on the data is, however, the conjecture of money.co.uk's writers. Feel free to draw your own conclusions on this research - be sure to reference us if you do so.
Chart data compiled through http://www.bigtop40.com/
