The Trucks of Country Music
Where the rubber meets the road
People often ask me where to find data for their content. What they’re typically looking for is a long list of datasets. These do exist. Here’s one, for example. But I don’t find they’re as useful as people might think.
More often, I discover datasets from other content I see. For example, I’d never thought of using song lyrics as a dataset until I saw ‘The rappers with the largest vocabulary‘.
Later on, we were working with an American tire company who wanted to create content for pickup truck drivers. There’s a whole culture around these trucks, and through our audience research, we discovered that people who were passionate about trucking were also fans of camping, fishing, and country music.
We also discovered that it wasn’t just that truck drivers that loved country music, but many country musicians loved their trucks too, so much so they would sing about the vehicles in their songs.
So we wondered… could we analyse the lyrics of country songs to find out which brand of truck gets mentioned the most? Which musicians favour which brand of trucks? And which musicians are most obsessed with their trucks?
It was a pretty simple idea, and it landed right in the sweet spot between the client’s product and the audience’s interests. It was fun to make too!