The #FreeBritney Movement

Britney Spears is a pop singer and songwriter that gained popularity in the late 90s and remains popular today. After Britney Spears’ struggles were broadcast in the media, her father was granted a conservatorship over her estate and career in 2008. Britney has not had control over her career in thirteen years and many fans are advocating for the termination of the conservatorship. The #FreeBritney movement became even more popular after The New York Times’ release of “Framing Britney Spears.”

In this report, I will use the Genius API to conduct a sentiment analysis of Britney Spears’ lyrics before and after her father took control of her estate. The Genius page, which includes Britney’s discography that I extracted my data set from, can be found here. I will analyze the most common words used in all of her albums before and after 2008 and how the sentiment of her lyrics changes before and after 2008.

The Hypothesis

Based on the significant change in Britney’s life and her own expressed dissatisfaction with the court-ordered conservatorship, I predict that the most common words in her albums will change to reflect her darker life after 2008, and the sentiment of all her albums after 2008 will be more negative than the sentiment of her albums before 2008.

The Data

In order to choose albums that would provide clear and concise analyses, I first went through Britney Spears’ discography on the Genius website and excluded remixes or rerecorded versions of the same song. These extra songs would skew the word count when I conduct my analysis, so I removed them from the list of usable albums. From there, I separated the albums by date and grouped them into two categories: pre2008 and post2008, and then I was ready to analyze them.

First, I imported the necessary packages for my analysis.

library(genius)
library(tidyverse)
library(tidytext)
library(textdata)
library(scales)
library(wordcloud2)
library(ggthemes)
library(knitr)

The Word Count

Next, I wanted to count the amount of words in each album. I suspected that the albums written before 2008 would contain more words and that there would be more albums in this group than in the group of albums written after 2008.

Here is the word count of each album written before 2008:

title n
oops!… i did it again 4590
in the zone 6417
greatest hits: my prerogative 8756
britney 5350
blackout 7216

Here is the word count of each album written after 2008:

title n
glory 4832
femme fatale 6452
circus 7599

These tables allow us to see that between the years of 1999 and 2008, Britney Spears released 6 albums, but in the years between 2008 and 2021, she’s only released 3 albums. The word count of each album is generally similar though, so we can’t be sure of any clear differences in her music from this analysis alone.

The Word Cloud

To look further into Britney Spears’ music, I wanted to visualize the most common words she used in her albums before and after 2008.

Using my previous album datasets and the word cloud function, here are the most common words in Britney’s albums before 2008:

word n
heart 78
gimme 84
night 93
dance 103
girl 125
outrageous 127
feel 163
time 177

Here are the most common words in Britney’s albums after 2008:

word n
feel 59
hold 61
lights 62
cry 63
tonight 64
trouble 65
boy 66
bass 76

From these word clouds, we can see that the two most popular words among both groups of albums are “baby” and “love.” These results are not surprising as one of Britney’s most popular songs (written pre 2008), …Baby One More Time, begins with the line “Oh baby, baby.”

However, I noticed that while most of the words pre-2008 are positive (love, baby, hot, dance), some of the words in the post-2008 data set have a more negative sentiment (trouble, cry, womanizer). I wondered if this observation was the result of her new lifestyle or of her lyrics and herself maturing. To study this, I want to look closer at the change in sentiment of her lyrics.

The Sentiment

I want to analyze the sentiment of Britney Spears’ albums before 2008 and after 2008 to see if her lyrics became more negative after her father was granted the conservatorship.

Using the ‘afinn’ sentiment lexicon, here is the sentiment analysis of Britney Spears’ albums before 2008:

Using the same ‘afinn’ lexicon, here is the sentiment analysis of Britney Spears’ albums after 2008:

In the albums written before 2008, half of the most common words have a positive sentiment and half have a negative sentiment. In the ‘afinn’ lexicon, the words are assigned a value ranging from -5, being the most negative, and 5, being the most positive. In the albums written before 2008, the most positive words received a score of 2.5 and the lowest received a score of -2.5, meaning that the words in these albums were not “super positive” or “super negative.” The words with positive sentiment were more commonly used, and “love” was the most common word. In addition, many of the words with negative sentiment were used in reference to love (for example, “crazy in love”, “lonely”).

In the albums written after 2008, only four of the most commmon words have a positive sentiment and sixteen have a negative sentiment. The words in this data set are assigned a value ranging from -4.5 to 2.5. This scale is different from the scale for albums written before 2008, showing us that the words in albums after 2008 are more negative. The most common word is still “love,” however, “trouble” and “cry” are second and third most common. In the albums written after 2008, there are more negative words and they occur more often than most of the positive words. The words in Britney’s albums written after 2008 seem to reflect a sad, scared feeling.

In order to validate the ‘afinn’ lexicon, I wanted to compare it to another sentiment lexicon, ‘bing’. I want to test that the afinn lexicon was not mislabeling words, so I will compare the afinn analysis of pre-2008 albums and post-2008 albums with the bing analysis of pre-2008 albums and post-2008 albums.

The Sentiment Comparison

I want to first visualize the afinn analysis of pre-2008 and post-2008 albums to compare with bing analysis. To do this, I will narrow down the number of albums to one. I will pick the most popular album pre-2008, Oops!…I Did It Again, and the most popular album post-2008, Circus.

Pre-2008 Afinn Sentiment:

Post-2008 Afinn Analysis:

These results show that Britney Spears’ lyrics became more negative in their sentiment after 2008. Next, I want to conduct a bing analysis to see if the change in sentiment is the same as the afinn analysis.

Pre-2008 Bing Analysis:

Post-2008 Bing Analysis:

In the pre-2008 afinn analysis, there are 6 words with positive sentiment and 4 words with negative sentiment in Oops!…I Did it Again. In the bing analysis, there are 3 words with positive sentiment and 7 words with negative sentiment in the same song. Each sentiment lexicon has a couple different words from the other, so that may be the reason for the odd difference in the ratios between positive and negative sentiments.

In the post-2008 afinn analysis, there are 4 words with positive sentiment and 6 words with negative sentiment in Circus. In the bing analysis, there are 3 words with positive sentiment and 7 with negative sentiment. This ratio is similar between afinn and bing analyses, and suggests that the sentiment lexicons are valid and consistent.

The Calculations

However, these visualizations do not provide exact numbers to allow us to examine the change in sentiment. For this, I will calculate the mean of the sentiment value of each album group.

Mean Sentiment Value of Albums pre-2008:

mean(pre2008sentiment$value)
## [1] 0.4936076

Mean Sentiment Value of Albums post-2008:

mean(post2008sentiment$value)
## [1] -0.309434

The means of each album group shows us that the albums written after the conservatorship was enacted have a negative mean sentiment (-0.3094) and the albums written before the conservatorship have a positive sentiment (0.4936).

The Conclusion

Britney Spears’ albums released prior to her conservatorship have a positive mean sentiment of 0.4936 and appear to be overall more positive and more frequent than albums released after 2008. Her pre-2008 albums have more common words that are positive, more positive words, and more words in general. Her music discussed love, dancing, partying and boys. Words with negative sentiment on these albums usually related to love or a longing for love.

Britney’s albums released after her father took control over her estate have a negative mean sentiment of -0.3094 and have more negative and more frequent negative words than albums released prior to 2008. More of her most common words have a negative sentiment, with an emphasis on words like “trouble” or “scared.” Her music seems to reflect her personal struggles, such as the chorus of “Trouble For Me,” which reads “me and you were a disaster, and you’re only a danger to me.”

It is impossible to be certain whether Britney Spears’ Conservatorship is the cause of the change in sentiment of her albums and lyrics, unless we asked her. However, I can conclude that the mean sentiment of her albums changed from positive to negative before and after 2008, the amount of albums that Britney has released has decreased before and after 2008, and her most common words changed from mostly positive to mostly negative before and after 2008.

Based on these conclusions, it would appear that Britney Spears’ lyrics reflect her personal life and struggles. Recently, Britney’s lawyer has formally asked a judge to remove her father as her conservator. The next hearing is scheduled for April, where Britney Spears might move one step farther from the exploitation and one step closer to #FreeBritney.