2026-07-12
Broken Record or Poet? What Your Lyrics Say About You
Some Music League submissions are three minutes of the same eight words repeated over a beat. Others read like a short story set to music. The Repetitiveness Index puts a number on that gap and tells you exactly where you land, whether you asked or not.
How it works
For every song you've submitted, we take the cached lyrics and divide the number of distinct words by the total word count. A song that loops one hook for three minutes scores low. A song where every line introduces something new scores high. Your overall number is the average of that ratio across all your submissions, not a single pooled count, so one three-minute chorus loop doesn't tank your score and one unusually wordy outlier doesn't inflate it either.
Filler gets stripped before any of this runs. "Yeah," "oh," "na na na," pronouns, contractions like "gonna" and "gotta" — none of it counts for or against you. What's left is the vocabulary actually doing work in the song.
The Broken Record
Lowest score in the league gets crowned The Broken Record. That's not a knock on taste. Plenty of great songs lean hard on repetition because that's what makes a hook a hook. It just means your picks tend to say less with more repeats.
You need at least three submissions with usable lyrics data to qualify, so one instrumental house track doesn't brand you for the rest of the season.
The Shakespeare, or the Rap God
Highest score gets a title depending on what they actually submit. If their most common genre tag is rap, hip hop, grime, or drill, they get crowned The Rap God — dense, fast, packed-verse tracks earn that one honestly. Everyone else at the top is The Shakespeare.
The genre check looks at the tag itself, not vibes, so "trap" doesn't get swept in with "rap" just because the letters overlap. Different sound, different crown.
Where the lyrics come from
Same pipeline as the Lyrics Word Cloud: LRCLIB first, Lyrics.ovh as a fallback, and Claude AI filling in what neither database has. Only the word counts get stored, never the lyrics themselves, so there's nothing reconstructible sitting in a database anywhere.
It runs across your combined leagues too
If you've uploaded more than one league, the combined view pools every submission from every season before ranking. Someone who's a Broken Record in one league can look completely different once their whole submission history is on the table.
Broken Record or Poet is a premium feature, sitting in the Fun Stats menu next to Superfan & Nemesis, Genres, and the Lyrics Word Cloud. Upload your Music League export to find out which one you are.