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Brandwatch Bulletin #59: The Internet’s Favorite Composer

Some classical fans may find this bulletin distressing.

Welcome to the end of the week. Today we’re introducing a new series to our bulletins as we use our technology to rank the world using the internet’s opinion.

Let’s get to it.

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Beethoven’s not 5th

Welcome to our first “Internet’s Favorite” bulletin, where we take a category and find out the most popular things within it using our Brandwatch Consumer Research sentiment analysis capabilities.

Today we’re analyzing a topic that’s been popular across the centuries, as we find out which classical composer gets the most love online. To get started we took the 30 composers from ClassicFM’s greatest composer list, plugged them into our AI-powered Search tool, and collected data going back to July 2020.

The beauty of using Brandwatch Search is its clever use of entities for queries. This means, for example, that our AI technology will only collect mentions of the composer Bach, and will skip other meanings of the word.

Now to the data.

First, we found out which of these composers were the most talked about. One took a commanding lead.

Ludwig van Beethoven, one of the most famous and accomplished Germans in history, tops the list by a significant margin. Another German, Johann Sebastian Bach, follows, with Austrian/German/Salzburgian (depending on who you ask), Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart following closely behind.

There are no shocks here, except maybe Beethoven’s lead, but this is narrowing. Mentions of Beethoven have dropped significantly in 2021. In April, Beethoven was mentioned 11k times, compared to Bach’s 10.1k, and Mozart’s 10k.

Nevertheless, as we all know too well, being talked about a lot on the internet is not necessarily a good thing. Now it’s time to look at the positive and negative side of the conversation.

Negatives and positives

To work out net sentiment for each composer, we simply removed the neutral mentions, and subtracted the negative mention percentage value from the positive mention one. In other words, a similar approach to working out a politician’s net approval.

Here’s what we found out.

Topping the list is British composer Ralph Vaughan Williams, and he has a respectable lead, too. Vivaldi, one of the oldest names on the list, takes second, with Bernstein, one of the youngest, in third.

But where has Beethoven ended up? He ranked 29th with a net sentiment of 16%. This seems overly harsh for someone considered one of the best composers of all time, but with fame comes hate. To soothe any Beethoven fans reading this, he got the most positive mentions by volume (although, saying that, he got the most negative ones as well).

And while he still got more love than hate, Richard Wagner was at the bottom of the list with a net sentiment of just 6%. Since he was an incredibly controversial figure in his lifetime and now, we’re not really surprised.

Of course this analysis is open to interpretation, as some may put more stock in volume than advocates vs detractors, but either way, we’ll leave you with some music while you debate amongst yourselves.

Here’s Ralph Vaughan Williams’ Symphony No.2 performed by the BBC National Orchestra of Wales.

What should we cover next?

Is there a topic, trend, or industry you’d like us to feature in the Brandwatch Bulletin? We want to hear your ideas to make sure our readers are getting what they want. We may even ask to interview you if you’re involved with the topic.

Send any and all ideas to [email protected] and let’s talk.

Thanks for reading

That’s it for today. We’ll be back on Monday. If you were forwarded this email and want in on the action, get subscribed to the Brandwatch Bulletin now.

Stay safe,

The Brandwatch React team

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