Music forms a big part of our identity and as such, people with a shared preference for certain kinds of music may also share similar traits. In this study, we explore differences in the emotional language of fan communities of different music genres.

In focusing on Reddit, we analyze the utterances on online community forums of different music genres using lexicon-based sentiment (emotion) analysis. Upon clustering Subreddit forums, we obtained two clusters: forums discussing genres like Rock, RnB, Country, and Jazz were found to have a higher abundance of positively valenced emotions and a lower amount of negatively valenced emotions. Likewise, Subreddits discussing genres like Metal, Punk, and Rap had a lower amount of positively valenced emotions and a higher abundance of negatively valenced emotion.

We observed a high correlation between counts in lyrics of a genre and counts in a fan community for the emotions of anger, disgust, fear, and joy.

In sum, we found differences in the emotional language of fan utterances by genre, and these could be partially attributed to the emotions contained in the lyrics.

This work has been presented at the Second Workshop on NLP for Music and Audio (NLP4MusA), co-located with ISMIR 2021.