Pop music stars under AI lens

Intro

The image of pop stars attracts millions of audiences, it consists of the appearance, music, actions, and of course the lyrics of their songs.
What are popular artists singing about? At all times, the themes are the same: love, loneliness, sex, entertainment, eternal values.

However, surely you yourself felt that from each performer there is a sediment in the soul, a taste. And the words seem to be the same, but the shades are different. And each has its own.

The picture that the artist draws in his own words is unique and reflects an inner world, his or her psychological portraits.

In the article, we try through the prism of AI to look behind the veil of words and distinguish behind them the soul of such popular stars as Drake, Rihanna, Coldplay, Twenty One Pilots, Dua Lipa, The Chainsmokers and Katy Perry.
Found someone from your favorite artists and want to know their hidden emotions and experiences?

Read on to learn how modern technology of natural language processing from IBM Watson Personality Insights helps to “read between the lines” of emotions, needs, values, and psychological characteristics.

Verse

So… In the left corner of the ring — the subjects of our research, namely, 7 super-duper top pop stars of international level, as well as verses from their songs. All attention to spotlights:

1. Drake with the 2018 album — Scorpion
2. Coldplay with the 2015 album — A Head Full of Dreams
3. Katy Perry with the 2017 album — Witness
4. Dua Lipa with the 2017 album — Dua Lipa
5. Rihanna with the 2016 album — Anti
6. The Chainsmokers with the 2016+2017 album — Collage + Memories…Do Not Open
7. Twenty One Pilots with the 2015 album — Blurryface

To understand the article familiarity with their work is not necessary. But if you are familiar with them, it will be especially useful for understanding the nuances of their image matching the results of the analysis.

In the right corner is the IBM Watson Personality Insights service.

A few words about it.

The service is designed to analyze a coherent conversational text that people communicate in social networks, letters and forums. Based on this text (it is desirable that the text length exceeds 500 words), the service provides 4 sets of characteristics:

1. Psychological characteristics of the person according to the theory of “Big 5”
2. Needs
3. Values
4. Consumer preferences

I’ll just make a reservation that the service does understand just a limited set of languages, you can bypass this restriction by direct online translation into English, losing some of the original information, but keeping the context sufficient for automated application of the service. By the way, for instance that article was translated from Russian almost automatically by Google.Translate.

Some words on the research methodology.

The last most successful marketing albums of several top stars were selected for analysis. A complete set of poems from each album as a solid text was sent to the Watson Personality Insights service provided by IBM. CSV responses to each request were received from the service and transferred to Excel.

The obtained data were analyzed using Excel. The most bright features of each of the artists were highlighted in the tables below.

Without in any way claiming to be the ultimate truth, nevertheless, this study is of interest for understanding the limits of the applicability of natural language processing methods and the objectivity of the results.

Poems can be considered as the most artificial form of textual information, images and words used by poets are often hypertrophied and have many portable meanings, allusions and information hidden “between the lines”. It’s interesting to see how IBM’s algorithms coped with such complex material.

Chorus

So, we have a table of values of each artist according to the results of the described analysis:

Look at the table. We have 3 artists which beat others in one or several metrics: Drake, Dua Lipa and Rihanna. As we will see later the personal psychological profile of each of them is very solid.

It’s a little bit unexpected but Rihanna shows the most prominent value of conservation, while second is Drake which fits his masculine image very much.

Hedonism or seeking pleasure and sensuous gratification for themselves is 2nd much prominent feature of Rihanna along with Drake which is much less unexpected.

Openness to change is very high metric of Drake (again!), Dua Lipa (it’s normal for a young girl) and Katy Perry (which supports her completely new image).

A similar analysis was conducted for the category of “Needs”. The results are in the table below. The highest values in each of the needs are highlighted, which means that this need is translated most strongly in the lyrics of a given artist.
I invite you to participate in the analysis of this table, for sure you will discover something interesting for yourself.

For instance: Drake has highest Structure, Stability, Practicality, Ideal — real Alfa-male! By the way, his album includes approximately 2 times more words then any album of other our artist.

Just for your interest, I’m citing a graph on which it’s difficult to sort something out, but you can see several prominent lines. For example, yellow and orange in curiosity have Katy Perry and Drake, blue and gray in closeness have Rihanna and Dua Lipa, the need for challange has Rihanna, etc.

Outro

The purpose of this article was to give a general idea of the capabilities of the Watson Personality Insights service (used categories and their parameters), to recall the beautiful things (music and poetry) and to invite to discussions about the role of artificial intelligence in the future of creative professions.

I hope that managed at least something of my plan.

If you like the article, please, I encourage you to write comments, follow me and listen some beautiful pieces on my SoundCloud where I share my melodic electronic and indie pop music.

If I will see that you my dear readers love the stuff I’ll share some interesting material on the insights of what is common in the lyrics of the “newcomers” of the music scene, i.e. what values are translated by successful new stars who have made a breakthrough.

In addition, I can share an analysis of how the image of the Coldplay evolved based on their lyrics over 20 years of band’s history. Interestingly, Personality Insights really capture the development of a psychological portrait from teenagers to mature men in their work.