2026-06-21
What Does Your Music League Group Actually Sing About?
Genre stats tell you what kind of music your group submits. Lyrics tell you what it's actually about.
The Lyrics Word Cloud fetches the text of every song in your league and maps the most-used words. What comes back is usually more revealing than you'd expect, and often stranger.
What it shows
The cloud is built from the combined lyrics of all submitted songs, with common filler stripped out. English stopwords go. Onomatopoeia goes: no "yeah", "oh", "na na na". Section markers like [Chorus] and [Verse 1] go. What's left is the vocabulary your group's music actually reaches for, recurring across dozens of songs from dozens of rounds.
Bigger words appear more. The cloud doesn't care about genre or who submitted what, only what the songs say.
Below the cloud is a word frequency table with the top words and their counts, if you want the numbers behind the image.
Filter by player or round
The whole-league view is interesting, but the per-player view is usually more so. Select any player and the cloud rebuilds from only their submissions. You see what their music tends to talk about compared to everyone else's.
Some players have a clear lyrical obsession: heartbreak, cities, freedom. Others are all over the place. The one with the most scattered cloud is either genuinely eclectic or hasn't thought much about lyrical consistency. The one with a tight cluster has been sending the same message for months and nobody noticed.
Round filtering works too. If the theme was emotionally loaded, the word cloud usually shows it. When it doesn't, that tells you something about how seriously your group took the brief.
Where the lyrics come from
When you upload a league, lyrics are fetched in the background from LRCLIB, an open lyrics database. Anything LRCLIB doesn't have falls back to Lyrics.ovh. For songs neither source covers, Claude AI fills in what it recalls from training: characteristic words and rough weights, not reproduced text. A coverage indicator on the page shows how complete it is. Most leagues are well-covered within a minute of upload.
Only word counts are stored, not the lyrics themselves. The raw text is tokenised immediately and discarded, so there's no reconstructible copy sitting in the database.
The surprising part
Groups that think they're submitting varied, eclectic music are usually wrong. The word cloud has a way of showing that three or four people have been fixated on the same themes for months without realising it. The most common word across an entire league is often something nobody would have guessed.
It also exposes a gap between what players think they're submitting and what the lyrics are doing. Someone who prides themselves on interesting, unconventional picks often ends up with a cloud that looks exactly like the person they consider the group's most mainstream member. The lyrics don't care about the artist or the production. They're just the words.
The Lyrics Word Cloud is a premium feature. Upload your Music League export to see what your group has been saying without realising it.