We analyzed 1587 songs that made it to the USA Spotify Viral 50 charts during 2019 and 2020 to find out:
- Which of 3001 tagged Moods were most prevalent in the entire set.
- The average Hit Potential score that songs with a particular Mood received.
What Is Hit Potential?
Our Hit Potential Algorithm uses AI to assess how likely your music is to achieve commercial success. Knowing your score is a great and reliable way to get a quick idea of where your music stands in today’s market.
For those of you who are familiar with our tech, but need a refresher on how Hit Potential works, read this article.
What Are Moods?
We have 15 moods available in our taxonomy that describe the emotional content of a piece of music (music only - lyrics are not taken into account). Here are a few examples:
Powerful
Highly impactful music, usually loud and with strong transients
Quirky
Music that typically contains very distinctive and sometimes whimsical sounding hooks
Romantic
Music that typically contains flowing and emotive vocals. The backing tracks can vary significantly but typically are not extremely fast or loud.
Which Moods Were Most Popular?
These moods were the most popular, or prevalent, in the entire set of 1587 songs. Note that the Powerful Mood was observed in 25% of all Mood tags - extremely popular.
Which Moods Received The Highest Hit Potential Scores?
These Moods, on average, were found in songs that received a Hit Potential score of 67 and above. We consider a score of 67 a benchmark below which a song becomes very unlikely to achieve commercial success - failure is not guaranteed, but likely.
The highest-scoring Mood was Quirky, which is unsurprising given its common association with Hip Hop music which is very popular in the USA.
These two sets of 6 Moods demonstrate an approximate 84% overlap, suggesting that the average Hit Potential scores of these individual Moods are highly correlated with real-world performance in the US market.
Out of 14 unique moods that emerged from the 3001 mood tags, only 6 received a Hit Potential score of 67 and above (with everything else scoring 63 and below).
What Does This Mean For Artists?
Simply put, if you are an artist or label intending for a music release to achieve a level of virality in the USA, you may benefit from ensuring the inclusion of at least one (if not two) of the following moods in their songs:
Quirky, Powerful, Energetic, Angry, Romantic, Relaxed
Without at least one of these tags, a song may be less likely to achieve virality in the USA.
Want to find out if your music has one of these tags? Tag a song for free at www.tag.musiio.com!
