Don’t Worry, Be Happy – But Only Seasonally

Mateusz Kijewski, Szymon Lis (), Michał Woźniak () and Maciej Wysocki
Additional contact information
Mateusz Kijewski: Faculty of Economic Sciences, University of Warsaw
Szymon Lis: Faculty of Economic Sciences, University of Warsaw
Maciej Wysocki: Faculty of Economic Sciences, University of Warsaw

No 2021-12, Working Papers from Faculty of Economic Sciences, University of Warsaw

Abstract: Current scientific knowledge allows us to assess the impact of socioeconomic variables on musical preferences. The research methods in these studies were psychological experiments and surveys conducted on small groups or analyzing the influence of only one or two variables at the level of the whole society. Instead inspired by the article of The Economist about February being the gloomiest month in terms of music listened to, we have created a dataset with many different variables that will allow us to create more reliable models than the previous datasets. We used the Spotify API to create a monthly dataset with average valence for 26 countries for the period from January 1, 2018, to December 1, 2019. Our study almost fully confirmed the effects of summer, December, and number of Saturdays in a month and contradicted the February effect. In the context of the index of freedom and diversity, the models do not show much consistency. The influence of GDP per capita on the valence was confirmed, while the impact of the happiness index was disproved. All models partially confirmed the influence of the music genre on the valence. Among the weather variables, two models confirmed the significance of the temperature variable. All in all, effects analyzed by us can broaden artists' knowledge of when to release new songs or support recommendation engines for streaming services.

Keywords: valence; spotify; happiness; statistical panel analysis; explainable machine learning (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: C01 C23 I31 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 33 pages
Date: 2021
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-big and nep-hap
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.wne.uw.edu.pl/index.php/download_file/6529/ First version, 2021 (application/pdf)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:war:wpaper:2021-12

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Working Papers from Faculty of Economic Sciences, University of Warsaw Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Marcin Bąba ().