The saddest number one song ever made, according to science
“Sex sells” is an old industry adage that seems to have been flipped on its head in recent times.
Sadness, it seems, has a far more universal appeal. Music now has its only exclusive “sad girl” genre, where even pop is ruled by the emotive likes of Lana Del Rey and Taylor Swift. It is a tradition centuries in the making because we all like to indulge in a bit of sadness now and then. There’s a sense of relief in listening to a more melancholy track, but what exactly qualifies as a sad song is such a unique listener experience that it has largely mystified science itself.
The challenge lies in the fact that sadness in music is rarely determined by a single factor. Tempo, melody, lyrical content, personal memories and cultural associations all play a role, meaning a song that devastates one listener might leave another completely unmoved.
Much to the delight of Radiohead fans, Spotify built an algorithm that aimed to quantify the levels of objective sadness in any given song. Right out of the gate, their metrics are a bit off – judged on the valence score of every track in their 35 million song library, which is scored from 0 to 1. Apparently, a high valence sound suggests cheerfulness, while a low valence tends to spin more negatively. Similar scores are applied to these songs’ pace and “danceability”.
While the methodology offered an intriguing way of analysing millions of tracks at scale, it also highlighted the limitations of relying solely on musical characteristics. Emotional responses are often shaped by context rather than sound alone, making them notoriously difficult to measure with data.
Naturally, this algorithm stirred up a lot of intrigue because everyone has their idea of the perfect sad song. Notable contenders, you’d think, might include Johnny Cash’s ‘Hurt’ or Eric Clapton’s tragic ‘Tears in Heaven’. Alternatively, most of The Smiths discography. The list goes on. The gloomy scale gets blurred, however, by the added metric of Billboard number one hits.
While ‘Asleep’ might be a certified sad banger, it’s not exactly a Billboard hit. In 2018, data journalist Miriam Quick decided to test the Spotify sadness algorithm, and her addition of chart-toppers into the mix yielded some strange results. She notes one prominent blind spot is that the algorithm can’t compare lyrics, so it’s guided purely by the valence scale. Considering these were all commercial gold complicates it further.
Quick found that among the top saddest tracks, the algorithm seemed to have confused lovelorn yearning with low energy, which makes some sense of why the Commodores ‘Three Times a Lady’ is in the final five. The heartfelt ballad might be laced with emotion, but definitely not sadness. The same can be said for Larry Verne’s ‘Mr. Custer’, a novelty ’60s comedy song about a fearful soldier.
Quick found that the saddest song of every possible track to top the chart from 1958 was objectively not a sad song. Roberta Flack’s ‘The First Time Ever I Saw Your Face’ is undoubtedly a love song. It was soulful and venerable, and Flack herself said she wished more songs “moved me the way that one did”, but not a tearjerker in quite the correct sense.
That said, the algorithm’s confusion of love and sadness, if anything, is quite a poetic ode to the heartbreak anthems that would be more fitting for the list. Putting a scale to sadness remains an impossible task because it’s so distinctly personal that a computer is unable to sense what exactly distinguishes it.
Perhaps the most revealing outcome of Quick’s experiment was not identifying the saddest song ever recorded, but exposing how impossible such a task may be. Music resonates differently with every listener, shaped by individual experiences that no algorithm can fully quantify. In that sense, the search for an objectively sad song says less about the music itself and more about humanity’s enduring desire to measure feelings that were never meant to be measured.
The saddest songs from 1958 to 2018:
- ‘The First Time Ever I Saw Your Face’ – Roberta Flack
- ‘Three Times a Lady’ – Commodores
- ‘Are You Lonesome Tonight?’ – Elvis Presley
- ‘Mr. Custer’ – Larry Verne
- ‘Still’ – Commodores
