Science sure is a hoot, and it’s giving a little insight into the fanbases of certain bands.
Preply recently published a story identifying which fanbases are the saddest and angriest. How did they determine this? Preply states, “In March 2023, we analyzed more than 200,000 popular posts and comments in the Reddit fan communities (subreddits) of 92 popular music artists and bands … Treating each individual post and comment as an isolated ‘statement,’ we used a dataset called Emotion that measures the sentiment of language. Each statement was scored on characteristics of ‘sadness,’ ‘joy,’ ‘love,’ ‘anger,’ ‘fear,’ and ‘surprise.’”
So which rock bands are more likely to make their fans sad? Panic! at the Disco was ranked number one, followed by Linkin Park. Metallica and Nirvana were tied in third. Lastly, My Chemical Romance was in a three-way tie for tenth with Avicii and John Mayer. Meanwhile, Metallica and Guns N’ Roses were tied in sixth for most likely to make their fans feel angry.
Interestingly, U2, who are often the target of criticism, came in second for artists most likely to make their fans feel happy and fifth for artists least likely to make their fans feel angry. Perhaps, if you need a pick-me-up, pop on some U2.