That's probably a good thing for the stock market.*
From The Economist, January 19:
Analyses of top-charting songs find a rise in blue moods
“DIE WITH a smile” by Lady Gaga and Bruno Mars was, by many measures, the song of 2025. The soppy ballad led the charts in more than 30 countries and holds the title of longest-running daily number one on Spotify, a streaming platform. Collaboration between two musical heavyweights goes some way to explaining the song’s success. But its appeal may also owe something to its tone: melancholy is the mood of the moment.....MUCH MOREThis conclusion comes from examining song lyrics. In analysis for The Economist, MusixMatch, a data firm, gathered lyrics from the Billboard top 100 songs for each week over the past 25 years. Using artificial-intelligence tools, the company assigned moods—such as angst, heartbreak, joy and love—to each track....
.... Positive emotions have not disappeared, as can be seen in the enduring popularity of “love”. But the results suggest that pop has grown gloomier. The share of hits with lyrics invoking “angst” has increased by 13 percentage points in the past two decades. This puts “angst” neck and neck with “heartbreak”, which has also been on the rise, over the past five years. (The categories are not exclusive; many songs about heartbreak are also classed as angsty.) “Despair” also began to increase sharply after 2020. Now a quarter of songs in the top 100 have lyrics that hint at misery—think of moody hits by Billie Eilish and Sam Smith....
*April 2020 - Recapitulating Ramones: "Song and Stock Volatility
In December 2019, based on research from NYU we proposed* as our new theme song an extremely fast cover of The Ramones "Blitzkreig Bop," in a post which mentioned that we've looked at this paper a few times:
Volume 23, Issue 1, January 2012, Pages 70–85
Philip Maymin, NYU Poly - Department of Finance and Risk Engineering
Popular music may presage market conditions because people contemplating complex future economic behavior prefer simpler music, and vice versa. In comparing the annual average beat variance of the songs in the U.S. Billboard Top 100 since its inception in 1958 through 2007 to the standard deviation of returns of the S&P 500 for the same or the subsequent year, a significant negative correlation is observed. Furthermore, the beat variance appears able to predict future market volatility, producing 2.5 volatility points of profit per year on average.
Highlights
► Popular music may presage market conditions because people contemplating complex future economic behavior prefer simpler music, and vice versa. ► In comparing the annual average beat variance of the songs in the U.S. Billboard Top 100 since its inception in 1958 through 2007 to the standard deviation of returns of the S&P 500 for the same or the subsequent year, a significant negative correlation is observed. ► Furthermore, the beat variance appears able to predict future market volatility, producing 2.5 volatility points of profit per year on average.
Here's the 29 page PDF
*"...So, trying to
stay ahead of the curve I am going to propose the Ramones Blitzkrieg Bop as our next theme song.
Here's a very fast (200+ beats per minute) cover:"
During the Great Unpleasantness of Sept. 2008 - Mar. 2009 our theme song was also from The Ramones, "I Wanna Be Sedated". The tempo is 163 - 165 beats per minute, putting it somewhere between allegro vivace and presto (lively and fast to very, very fast)
