other non English song to be nominated. The other songs are mainly in English or instrumental.

Word counts

The wordiest song (total words and unique words) to win the Song of the Year is The Battle of New Orleans by Johnny Horton. The wordiest nominee is I'd Do Anything For Love (But I Won't Do That) by Meatloaf but if we count unique words Lose Yourself by Eminem comes out on the top.

Total word count

The total word count rises by almost 4 words every year.

Unique word count

The unique word count rises by almost 1 word every year.

Profanity

Rolling In the Deep by Adele is the only song with a profanity (shit) to win this award. 17 other nominated songs contain profanity.

Songs containing profanity

Instrumentals

Musixmatch automatically analyzes whether a song is instrumental orcan be found here.

Song of the Year music trends

Echonest, a music intelligence platform, provides many interesting musical metrics calculated from the audio signal of a song. We scanned the Grammy Song of the Year nominees and winners in the Echonest database and these are some of the interesting musical trends.

Key

In music theory, the key of a piece is the tonic note and chord that provides a subjective sense of arrival and rest. Other notes and chords in the piece create varying degrees of tension, resolved when the tonic note or chord returns - Wikipedia

Generally, popular music has a well defined key and the songs studied here as well.

Winners

A major is the key most used by the winners followed by D major, C major and F major.

Nominees

C major is