Adele’s new album: It’s all about the lyrics
A study of search trends and user engagement
Originally published at lab.musixmatch.com.
Adele released her new album ‘25' on 20th November. Within 3 days of its release it already became the best selling album of 2015. The last weekend it generated some interesting search trends and user engagement data. Let’s take a look at these.
Lyrics dominate ‘Adele 25’ search trends
Comparing the search volumes for ‘adele 25 lyrics’, ‘adele 25 torrent’ and ‘adele 25 youtube’ using Google trends, we see a peak on release date which could indicate the listeners looking for lyrics, music and videos of Adele’s new album.
The lyrics search volume is 2 times higher than the search volume for ‘adele 25 torrent’ and ‘adele 25 youtube’ on the album release date.
If we instead look at the same trends over the last 2 months we see that lyrics search volumes are still huge.
The lyrics search volume is quite similar to the search volume of ‘adele 25 torrent’ and ‘adele 25 youtube’ over the last 2 months.
On October 23rd the first single from the album ‘Hello’ was released and we see a massive jump in all the search trends. The lyrics search volume is higher than the other two on this day as well.
This interesting trend was spotted by Andrew Weissman. Adele has not yet released the album on streaming services (Spotify, Apple Music, etc.) and the torrent searches also start peaking out on release date.
Subscribers of streaming services could be searching for Adele’s 25 on torrents.
Musixmatch user engagement for Adele’s 25
Musixmatch’s apps are amongst the most used music apps worldwide. Also, our website is one of the top lyrics sources on the internet. We gather a lot of lyrics reading data (anonymised) every minute like the amount of time spent on lyrics pages in our apps and the website. This is called user engagement. We will zoom in on this data over the last weekend for Adele’s 25.
Here we see the total time spent reading the lyrics for Adele’s 25 over the last weekend.
From 19th November to 22nd November, Musixmatch users spent 4364 hours (~182 days) reading the lyrics for Adele’s 25.
Digging deeper into this data, we find that the user engagement in Musixmatch’s apps is much higher than the website. The engagement across the days of the weekend remains almost constant (~ 1100 hours on the apps and ~50 hours on the website).
‘Hello’ is the most read track across Musixmatch apps and website.
‘Hello’ is closely followed by the second single ‘While we were young’ on the apps, while on the website ‘Send my love’ is more popular. The other 8 songs are still not that popular.
Conclusion
Adele’s fans were eagerly waiting for this album since 2011, the huge search and Musixmatch engagement patterns go hand in hand with the immense popularity of this album. The dominance of the lyrics searches over music and video searches are testament to the importance of the lyrics of new album releases.
