Seaweeds and music. An analysis of the appearance of songs since the beginning of the 20th century, and their impact on music platforms

Abstract

For most people, seaweed is a common name for “plant-like” organisms living in the sea. This study investigates the appearance of the word and the world of seaweeds in songs. Overall, songs about seaweeds occupied 17th position out of 44 categories of marine organisms. Since the first record found in 1906 from Alf Gordon, this study has collected more than a thousand songs divided into consolidated singer/groups, emerging or amateur ones, and children's songs. Over time, there has been a noticeable increase in the number of songs released each year, particularly by amateur or emerging songwriters compared to more established ones. A recent change in this trend has seen songs by emerging or amateur songwriters outnumber those by more established songwriters in 2022. The total number of reproductions were considerable, reaching more than one billion on Spotify and more than 800 million on YouTube over time, but relatively low compared to leading singers/groups in the music scene (billions of plays per year). As for styles, there is a huge variety from popular music, folk, pop, rock, reggae, rap, etc. following the general evolution in music styles. The lyrics were diverse from topics about nature, beauty or love to contempt for macroalgae. A word cloud analysis of more than 21,000 words collected in the supplementary material revealed that after seaweed and sea, the most common words were hair, wave and ocean. As a product of this study, two open playlists have been created with the most common songs about seaweeds on YouTube and Spotify platforms.