Social mood in
Finland shifted from generally positive in the spring of 2006 to generally
negative by the spring of 2009. We identify this change in mood via eight
indicators, including the onset of a financial and macroeconomic crisis, a decline
in measures of sentiment, a rise in radical politics and the demise of an
iconic business unit of one of the country’s most successful firms. From the
point of Prechter’s socionomic theory we hypothesize that this change in social
mood would also be evident in a greater level of pessimism in the songs on the
country’s pop chart in 2009 relative to 2006. To test this this hypothesis, we
introduce and validate a tool to measure optimism and pessimism in popular
music. We then apply this tool to a random sample of songs from the Finnish pop
chart from 2006 and a comparable sample from 2009. Indeed, we find that the sample
from 2009 in the aggregate is substantially and significantly more pessimistic
than the sample from 2006. The study serves to enrich our understanding of what
makes pop songs popular and how popular music is linked psychologically to
broader popular culture and other domains of social expression through a shared
social mood.