Strategic New Media has released the first song in its Dozen From The Decade list of the twelve songs that radio listeners have rated over the past 10 years as their most emotionally engaging tracks. The list will count up from number 12 to 1 each day, with song number 12 being revealed today as 100 Years – Five For Fighting.
Strategic New Media General Manager David Rogerson explains to radioinfo how the top twelve songs came together:
“We’ve taken all of the written comments listeners have made about each individual song we’ve been testing on line between the year 2000 until now. Using an emotion score from those written comments, and combining them with each listener’s enjoyment rating for the song, we’ve arrived at the 12 Highest Emotionally Engaging Songs from 2000 to 2010.
“There’s been quite a cross over between music genres. We were not sure what to expect, but the influence of country cross over artists like Taylor Swift and Carrie Underwood have certainly increased listener engagement and emotional attachment to songs in more recent years.
“What has been interesting is the significant increase in comments about seeing songs on You Tube. The visual aspect of a song adds to its engagement and enjoyment factor. There’s a clear parallel between the advent and growth of You Tube and similar sites with the increase in emotional engagement. Combine this with the social media sites where friends are sharing favourite movies, artists and songs and you start to see a trend in how music has added an extra powerful and emotional connection among radio listeners and their friends.”
In a social media innovation, each song will be released on the company’s Facebook page (Strategic Media on Facebook) over the course of the next two weeks.
Australia’s Music Pulse has been the base source of the song data analysis, combined with qualitative comments from Strategic New Media’s own music and audience trending research.
The final Dozen From The Decade was drawn from analysis of more than 17,000 tracks in more than 10 years of research.
