If you have not yet heard Rufus Wainwright's excellent new song "Going to a town", you should do so at once (here's a youtube link). While you're listening to it, you can also read an interesting (if somewhat erudite) analysis of the song here.
As a casual empiricist in the armchair mould, I decided to collect some hypothetical data on the usage of the word "America" in pop/rock songs. When I regress the usage of the word "America" in pop songs on the bodycount in Iraq using my hypothetical data, I find a significant positive effect. An increase of 5% in the yearly body count raises the probability of the occurrence of the said word in a pop song written in that year by 0.12. Hypothetical sales data confirm that sales of songs with the word "America" are positively correlated with the bodycount.
In an attempt at a more careful analysis, I ran a regression to estimate the partial effects of different catchwords/phrases on song sales and interacted each of these words with the bodycount. The catchwords I considered were "tonight", "laying down the days", "uh-huh", "get down", "yo mami", "how long", "everybody on the floor", "bitches in the backseat", "pocketful of rubbers" and "America" (by no means a comprehensive list, I admit). The results are gratifying: almost all interaction terms other than the interaction of bodycount with "America" were insignificant. Oddly enough, the coefficient on the interaction between "uh-huh" and bodycount was significant and negative. I'm waiting for someone to propose an explanation.
I can see you asking"So why do we care?". Simple: Record company executives should closely monitor the Iraq situation and suggest judicious insertions of the relevant words in pop songs to jog record sales. Methinks they'd be mighty interested in my model.
4 comments:
First of all, I want to commend Zero on his exemplary analysis. It is exactly what we are striving for here at the JCE.
A brief followup: Country music fans predominantly live in the red states, which tend to be more nationalistic than the two coasts. I'm willing to bet that the result would be stronger if you interacted body count with a country music dummy.
I concur. What is required is a triple interaction - bodycount, "America" and country music!!! I smell Econometrica.....
Excellent post. I had once come up with a brilliant research topic for those in dire need of one:
The relationship between how big or the "bigness" of the US's biggest pop song is and how well the US economy performs. The measure of the "bigness of the biggest pop song" could be something like "number of weeks spent atop the chart by the year's longest reigning number one" or "fraction of total single sales that the year's best selling pop song owns"
Economy performance - you pick your favorite ones.
Intuition:
The bigger the biggest pop song is, the more likely the entire nation is tapping their toes to the same beat. More importantly, the greater likelihood that the the country's investors all enjoyed the same kinds of party in the Hamptons. With more commonality, there is less disparity and therefore a more single minded economy.
mayur, you have given me another idea: if you look at the cross-country correlation between per capita GDP and the length of time that a pop song spends on the top 20 charts of that country, i predict that you will find a strong negative correlation. this is due chiefly to the fact that information transmission is slow in a poor economy, so that it takes about two months or so till everyone in the country has heard the new celine dion song, whereas in the US, it would take a few days.
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