When it comes to lyrical inspiration, the urban bustle and busy streets of cities have a rich musical history. From the thundering charge and iconic howls of London Calling, to the bouncing bubbly beats of London Boy, the UK capital sparked over a hundred songs from its streets.

But how much do these songs reflect the soul of the city they’re named after? While it’s easy to follow song lyrics to trace the story of a city,  the soul of a city is about more than that. And so are songs.

Here at Vibrant we’ve been pondering this question for a while so we decided to get our research hats on. We’ve taken a deep-dive to see what some of the most iconic city-inspired songs really reveal about the places they reflect on. More specifically, on the mood of the city. Are the sunshine streets of Canberra echoed in bright sunny pop tunes? Are the tense, politically-charged streets of Washington DC captured in serious musical polemics?

How we drew our musical maps

As a result of our research we were able to pull together 25 playlists where 20 ‘definitive’ songs were available that captured these cities. We searched for songs that spoke of the city’s soul, rather than just restricting ourselves to songs that featured the city name in the title. 

We mainly restricted ourselves to capital cities, but curiosity called us to make a slightly deeper dive on America and Australia, where Washington and Canberra offered a scant few songs compared to more celebrated cities such as LA, New York and Sydney. 

We then used Spotify’s own data to analyse our 25 carefully curated city-themed playlists to reveal the hidden happiness rating that Spotify had assigned each song, along with a host of other information such as popularity, genre and BPM.

All our findings are listed below including some interesting – and some intriguing – insights we uncovered.

Happiest

Our headline was happiness, and when it came to joyful capital cities, the Spotify happiness scores ranked 5 clear winners:

This list in itself sparked some interesting reflections – mainly as we didn’t imagine any of their countries to be beacons of light in a dark world.

The ‘gold standard’ for rating worldwide happiness is the Word Happiness Index, which uses a variety of factors such as wealth and living standards to identify the ‘happiness’ of 150 countries around the world. Suffice to say, there is next to no overlap between the Spotify happiness scores and the WHI. 

Only 2 of our top 5 (London/United Kingdom and Washington DC/United States) even scrape into the top 20 and none make it into the top 10. Havana’s home Cuba doesn’t even feature in the list at all, because its government doesn’t allow the WHI researchers to speak to its citizens..

According to the music inspired by Kingston, Jamaica should soar high on the Happiness Index. An astounding 80% of our Kingston playlist was classed as ‘Happy” by Spotify, with 20% scoring over 90/100. 

Yet the 2023 WHI report ranks Jamaica around 68, which may have something to do with the fact it also ranks in the top 10 for having one of highest crime rates in the world. 

Another surprise sits in second place. Cuba is known to have low living standards and is generally considered a country in crisis.  So we’re admittedly perplexed that the music coming out of the stricken city of Havana scored so highly on our count of capital cities.

Perhaps seeing Tokyo at 3 is less of a surprise, as Japan sits in the middle of the World Happiness Index and is known for having an ultra-civilised society.

However, the country also historically suffered from a well-publicised mental health crisis leading to a high suicide rate. While people across the country are currently working to reduce this, a few years ago it ranked among the highest in the world.

As our playlists span the decades, it’s surprising that a country so beset by poor mental health has inspired such upbeat, joy-filled songs.

For specific songs, the happiness was much more widespread. The top of the list was a draw at 97, between 3 songs in 3 separate cities:

Only 1 song appears on one of our happiest playlists, that being Tokyo. But Toots & The Maytals ‘Funky Kingston’ was only a single point away from the top 3, bringing a little more cohesion between the averages and the top songs.

‘Funky Kingston’ was also the most popular song with a happy score, as Spotify rates its popularity at 57. Considering the average popularity for the happiest songs was only 25, this falls in line with the general joy of Kingston’s music. 

Across all the happiest songs, we also found that the average BPM was 114. This tempo is classified as ‘Allegro’ which is characterised as fast and bright – a perfect match for the brighter mood.

When it comes to happiness, our research revealed some interesting, if conflicting, results when it comes to happiness. We think it made one thing pretty clear – that a city life plagued by poverty, crime or poor mental health does not equal sad music. In fact, sometimes the opposite.

Saddest

Of course, there can be no happiness without the contrasting sadness, and our playlists revealed as many surprises around the darker moods of the world as they did the lighter ones.

The saddest capital city playlists are:

Perhaps not all of these are surprises. Afghanistan also sits at the bottom of the World Happiness Index, so it actually follows that its capital sits towards the bottom of our list too.

China’s capital Beijing also registers little shock at having the saddest songs associated with it. With the political situation as it is in China, this seems understandable.

Understandable, but not the whole story perhaps. According to Spotify the saddest song on the Beijing playlist is ‘Beijing’ by Wang Feng, a haunting ballad about life in the bustling city that focuses more on personal introspection than any societal suffering.

So some of our saddest lists made sense. Others really did not.

We were surprised to see Canberra sitting so low, if only because we associate the Australian sunshine with pure joy and this clearly isn’t reflected in the music. 

Similarly, Prague has a high-standard of living and is a popular tourist hotspot with beautiful buildings and rich cultural heritage. Czechia also sits in the top twenty on the WHI.

Neither of these cities seemed a good fit for the bottom of our list, and Oslo coming in at number 2 shocked us even more.

Norway is a Nordic country, one in a collection of countries renowned for being full of joy. Seriously happy. The kind of happy we all aspire to on long grey days when everything goes wrong from the moment we trip out the wrong side of bed.

Norway itself sits at an impressive 7 in the WHI, with another 4 of the top 10 being Nordic countries too. They seem to have a perfect balance of equality, wealth and trust in their society that instil a sense of happiness in their people. Or so we’re lead to believe.

This clearly isn’t reflected in their music, with Oslo ranking almost at the very bottom of our scale. The most popular song on their playlist holds a mediocre 55 on Spotify’s happiness scale, while the saddest song is a mood-destroying 3. 

In fact, one of their songs – “Hawaii, Oslo” by Hania Rani –  had the joint lowest score across all our playlists. The other two being “Prague” by Sascha Dikiciyan and “Canberra” by Ulnar – all hampered by a haunting 3, that probably goes some of the way to explaining why these cities scored such low spots overall.

Though they were inspired by very disparate cities, one thing that draws these songs together is that they’re instrumentals. We’d allege bias from Spotify, but we agree that all 3 are heart-wrenching even without words.

Something else that surprised us was the popularity of the sad songs. The average Spotify popularity rating was 24/100 which was only slightly lower than the happiest songs.

When it comes to cities whose musical heart skews towards sadness, our takeaways were pretty clear. Though this may feel like a reflection of the cities themselves, cities like Oslo have other things at play.

The Beat of the City

We didn’t restrict ourselves to the happiness rating either. We also looked into the literal heartbeats of the playlist and compared the average beats per minute (BPMs) – perhaps expecting to see a correlation between happiness and speed.

Yet the city with the happiest playlist actually had the lowest average bpm. Kingston’s average bpm was a slow 102 – 4 beats per minute below even Oslo, the city with the saddest playlist. A sign that joy isn’t necessarily expressed in tempo.

The city with the fastest tempo is Reykjavik, whose average speed sat at a brisk 135 bpm. The songs of Reykjavik were pretty neutral, sitting at 49 on the happiness score although this still placed it 8th on our whole list. 

Headscratchers and Surprises

For some cities, we failed to find enough songs to create an eclectic playlist. Despite being home to many small and silver screen icons, Wellington in New Zealand just doesn’t seem to inspire inhabitants to pick up an instrument – we just couldn’t find enough songs to make it work. 

Same goes for Luxemburg City and Bern. All three of these cities sit in the top 10 for the World Happiness Index, so we suspect their souls to be full of joy…just not song, it would appear.

Similarly, Canberra and Washington DC, despite being capitals of vast populations and places, hadn’t inspired many recognisable tracks. We found enough songs to work with but followed our intrigue to look into a couple of cities that are more popular with American and Australian musicians.

When you factor in a further four American cities (LA, Memphis, New York and Chicago) the whole face of our research looks different. The top 5 shifts completely:

Drawn together, America suddenly seems a much cheerier place.

Sydney also surges up the rankings, placing 7th happiest compared to Canberra’s prime spot as the 3rd saddest city overall. 

We were somewhat surprised by our rich range of choices for Brussels though. Seems this political and historical hotspot really fires up creativity.

Truths We Learned from Our Musical Map of Happiness

– Happy songs do not equal popular songs, but the most popular happy song we found was Toots &  The Maytals “Funky Kingston”

– While Nordic folk are known for their happiness, they don’t carry this through to their music

– Many cities have a strong sense of national identity woven into their music, from the Irish Pop Rock that dominates Dublin songs, to the Icelandic Post-Punk and Pop that is scattered throughout Reykjavik’s music

– Something about Canberra really dampens a person’s musicality

We thoroughly enjoyed digging around in the songs of cities to find what secrets they hid. But did we discover anything unexpected or are the hearts of cities quite clearly on their sleeves?

The fact is, that the mood of a city is rarely reflected in the music it inspires. The correlation between the World Happiness Index and the Spotify Happiness Scores is slim to non-existent. 

The music of a city is influenced by so many factors that no one aspect in isolation can dictate it. From societal concerns like crime, poverty or political tension, to climate considerations such as bright sunny streets or drab, dreary days, there are no hard-and-fast rules regarding the mood of their music.

In the end, the connection between cities and their music remains a captivating puzzle. A lasting reminder that the heart of every urban landscape beats to its own unique drum.