A study has discovered that fans of jazz music are happier than those who follow other genres.
Music has been scientifically proven to improve health by stimulating changes in your brain and, as a result, listening hours have soared in the past year as it has been crucial to lifting moods. But alongside music comes the fans, who have proven to be just as important in keeping spirits high, especially on social media.
A study has been carried out to find out which music genre has the happiest fans. Researchers analysed more than 2.1 million Reddit comments from the subreddits of 27 different music genres, calculating the number of times positive or happy expressions were mentioned.
Which music genre has the happiest fans?
The findings reveal that jazz fans are the happiest of all. Based on activity within the r/jazz subreddit, there are a whopping 77 positive words mentioned for every 100 comments on average. Research has found that the relaxing effect of jazz music can have an incredible healing influence – improving verbal memory, focus, and mood.
With a whopping 1.3 million members in the r/metal subreddit, in second place are metal fans. With 62 positive statements for every 100 comments made, they were surprisingly found to be among the happiest music fans, despite the negative stereotypes held about them.
Accept guitarist Wolf Hoffman recently commented on how the metal audience has chilled out over the years, and that fans in the 80s were a ‘totally different game’.
The third most positive online are opera fans, mentioning 56 positive words per 100 comments.
Following as the fourth happiest, according to social media, are folk fans with 55 positive words mentioned per 100 comments. Although the community is small (23,00 members), they clearly keep spirits high.
In fifth place are indie fans with 52 positive mentions for every 100 comments. The top ten continues with Rock – 51:100 in 6th place, 7th was Trance – 50:100, while Blues – 50:100 was at 8th and Grunge – 44:100 at 9th with the final spot going to Classical – 43:100.
Which fans are least positive online?
After analysing the number of positive and happy words commented by fans the researchers at OnBuy.com also looked at the number of times swear words were mentioned.
Placing at the bottom of the table are drill fans, with the commenters in r/ukdrill only mentioning 11 positive words per 100 comments. Additionally, the study found that there are 15 swear words for every 100 comments on the subreddit. Considering that drill music is used as evidence in criminal prosecutions, their ranking is unsurprising due to the darker topics talked about online.
The second least positive are grime fans, with just 22 positive words mentioned for every 100 comments posted – similarly to drill, there are 15 swear words mentioned per 100 comments.
Drum and bass, rap, and dubstep fans place in third, fourth, and fifth place, respectively. Drum and bass comments have 23 positive mentions (7 swear words) per 100 comments, rap has 29 (25 swear words), and dubstep has 30 (15 swear words).
More details at OnBuy.com
OnBuy.com used a range of articles to collate a list of the most popular music genres. Using Reddit, they then located the most popular subreddit of 27 different music genres, after removing those with less than 20,000 members. They then looked at 15 of the most commonly used positive words on social media, using Positive Words Research.
These positive words were then used to analyse the comments of all posts on each music genre’s subreddit in the past year. The number of mentions per positive word was noted and added together to create an overall total of positive mentions. Using these numbers, OnBuy then calculated the number of positive words mentioned per 100 comments to create the final ranking.
