Show HN: Kendrick Lamar appears 4x in top most syllable-dense Billboard hits
syllablecounter.io
We believe that the average number of syllables in an artist’s lyrics are a big indicator of musical proficiency, for the same reasons that syllable counts are used as a primary input in Flesch-Kincaid readability testing. Through our research we aim to more objectively and quantitatively determine how complex a musician is.
A few interesting takeaways:
-Kendrick Lamar appears 4 times in the top 10 songs by syllable count, speaking to his lyrical complexity and dense rhyme schemes
-Not Like Us by Kendrick Lamar has the most syllables, words, and characters of any song in the Top 100 Defying Gravity by Cynthia Erivo and Ariana Grande is the longest song in the Top 100 at 7 minutes and 40 seconds.
-The average length across all Top 100 songs is 3 minutes and 29 seconds.
-Bad Bunny appears in 6 of the top 10 songs when considering average syllables per word, meaning he packs more syllables into fewer words compared to other artists. This could indicate a broader trend in reggaeton and Latin trap toward more complex lyricism.
Would love your feedback on how to improve our data study (and the site overall) before we circulate it more widely. Thanks!