While originality and inventiveness is frequently sought by songwriters, they often end up using repetitive themes, ideas, or even words. Here we look at a new study revealing the frequency of job titles as used in song lyrics.
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Guest post by Bobby Owsinski of Music 3.0
Most songwriters try to be as inventive as possible but more often than not they fall into repeating patterns that were previously successful. This is demonstrated in a new study from Zippia that analyzed the counts from the musiXmatch Dataset, an official collection of lyrics from the Million Song Dataset. The company, which helps recent college grads find jobs or careers, crossed referenced the data against it own database of about 39,000 standardized job titles taken from over 6 million resumes and matched all of the single word job titles to the lyrics data. The results might surprise you.
| Rank | Job Title | Count |
|---|---|---|
| 1 | soldier | 3,861 |
| 2 | cop | 3,751 |
| 3 | doctor | 3,179 |
| 4 | clown | 2,521 |
| 5 | cowboy | 1,863 |
| 6 | teacher | 1,604 |
| 7 | captain | 1,471 |
| 8 | cook | 1,461 |
| 9 | preacher | 1,354 |
| 10 | critic | 1,205 |
| 11 | dancer | 1,192 |
| 12 | driver | 1,137 |
| 13 | artist | 1,062 |
| 14 | singer | 959 |
| 15 | sailor | 875 |
| 16 | poet | 797 |
| 17 | author | 783 |
| 18 | lawyer | 620 |
| 19 | maid | 575 |
| 20 | butcher | 547 |
The order of this jobs listing is more surprising than the content. For instance, I would have thought that singer, poet and artist would have been much higher, and cop and cook much lower. Maid and butcher are a total surprise that they were included at all.
That said, this is an analysis of the lyrics of all songs from the beginning of popular music, not just current ones, so the list is probably skewed a bit. Still interesting though.
[Graphic: Thirdjobpoint]