An Analysis of Indonesian ‘Galau’ Songs

We’ve heard the term ‘Galau’ all-over Indonesian internet. ‘Galau’ is an Indonesian term to describe the condition of having sad, complicated thoughts. It is heavily associated with one’s romantic feelings. ‘Galau’ comes in many shapes and sizes, In this research, we’re going to see the level of ‘galau’ in Indonesian music scene by looking at songs that we have determined as melancholic.

Questions

Our research is based on these questions:

• Are popular Indonesian songs are more melancholic than non-Indonesian songs?
• Are Indonesians more likely to listen to melancholic songs?

The Data and Setting Up Criteria

We’ve decided to take a look at the Top 200 Indonesian songs from early 2017 until mid-2019. In this research, we used data from Spotify Charts to obtain information on Indonesia’s weekly popular songs and Spotify’s API to obtain the song’s valence and danceability. Valence is a metric developed by Spotify to rate whether a song evokes positive or negative emotion. Meanwhile, danceability measures whether the song is danceable or not. You can check our main page for further information regarding the pre-processing step of this research.

The first step that we did was establishing some criteria for what we call “melancholic songs”. We define melancholic songs as songs that are:

• Low in valence,
• Low in danceability, and
• Categorized as non-explicit

Low valence indicates that the song contains negative emotions, such as sadness and anger. To filter out melancholic songs from ‘angry’ songs, we’re going to use the explicit label. We assumed that melancholic songs do not have explicit lyrics since explicit lyrics tend to be used to convey the anger of the songwriters, at least in the context of Indonesian songs. We also defined melancholic songs as songs that you can’t dance to as they are songs that you listen to when you’re in despair. This means that melancholic songs, by our definition, should have a danceability score that is lower than 0.5.

Next, we mapped out the valence of these Indonesian songs to get a bigger picture of how negative Indonesian popular songs are.

From the figure above, we can see that Indonesian songs mostly have negative emotions, be it sad or angry. To gain deeper insights, we also mapped out the songs based on their valence and danceability, and then divided them into four quadrants:

1. First Quadrant (Greyish-green Area, Top-Right):
   Songs that possess high valence and danceability scores.
2. Second Quadrant (Purple Area, Bottom-Right):
   Songs that possess a high danceability score, but low in valence.
3. Third Quadrant (White Area, Bottom-Left):
   Songs that possess low valence and danceability scores.
4. Fourth Quadrant(Green Area, Top-Left):
   Songs that possess high valence score, but low in danceability.

In this research, we’re going to focus on the third quadrant since melancholic songs fell into this area and we called the area a ‘melancholic area’.

Many Shades of Indonesian Songs

First, we began analyzing Indonesian songs in the Top 200 Chart. We mapped out the songs by their valence and danceability score. In the diagram, green dots represent songs without an explicit label, while the red dots represent songs with an explicit label.

It is shown that most of these songs are on the bottom-right side of the diagram, implying that Indonesian popular songs tend to have a low valence and high danceability score such as Rossa’s “Tegar” and The Overtune’s “Takkan Kemana”.

We also find that songs that exist on the uttermost right side of the diagram are more likely to be Dangdut (an Indonesian traditional genre that is has by Indian,Malay and Arabian influences), or songs from 88Rising’s artist.

We count the songs on each quadrant, and found out that the number of songs in the third quadrant were less than the number of songs in first and second quadrants.

First Quadrant	Second Quadrant	Third Quadrant	Fourth Quadrant
103 songs	140 songs	90 songs ( with 88 songs classified as melancholic songs since they do not have explicit lyrics )	14 songs

Since the number of songs doesn’t represent how Indonesian listeners feel about the songs, we decided to take a look at their number of streams to see Indonesian listeners’ enthusiasm towards the songs. In the diagram, we define songs with high popularity with dark-colored dots, meaning that these songs have high number of streams by August 2019.

It is shown that the melancholic area are dominated by light-colored dots, implying that most of the songs that fell under the area were not streamed frequently. The darkest-colored dot in the area belongs to Payung Teduh’s “Untuk Perempuan yang Sedang di Pelukan” and there are some red-colored dots, such as Fourtwnty’s “Aku Tenang” and Virzha’s “Tentang Rindu”.

The other dark-colored dots tend to cluster on the right side of the diagram, with songs such as Andmesh’s “Cinta Luar Biasa,” Arsy Widianto’s “Dengan Caraku,” and Sheila on 7’s “Dan…”.

How about Non-Indonesian songs?

We’ve also visualized non-Indonesian songs that had entered the Top 200 as a comparison.

As seen in the figure above, non-Indonesian songs tend to have higher valence and danceability scores than Indonesian songs. Similar to Indonesian songs, non-Indonesian songs also leaned to the bottom-right side of the diagram, implying that Indonesian listeners are more attracted to songs with joyful yet darker vibe.

First Quadrant	Second Quadrant	Third Quadrant	Fourth Quadrant
491 songs	528 songs	173 songs (with 162 songs classified as melancholic songs since they do not have explicit lyrics )	31 songs

We also found that non-Indonesian songs also have the same pattern for the number of songs for each quadrant. The second quadrant ranks first for the number of songs, followed by the first, third, and fourth quadrant. It is implied that Indonesian music scene is not dominated by melancholic songs, but rather by joyful songs with emotionally negative meaning.

We also analyzed the number of streams for these non-Indonesian songs to see whether there are some patterns from the data.

From figure above, there are some notable songs with a high number of streams on the melancholic area, such as H.E.R’s “Best Part”, Alan Walker’s “Lily”, James Arthur’s “Say You Won’t Let Go” and Calum Scott’s “You Are The Reason”. Like Indonesian songs, most of the songs with high popularity are more likely to be on the right side of the diagram.

Conclusion

Overall, popular songs in Indonesia are more likely to be high in danceability score but low in valence, suggesting that Indonesian listeners prefer songs with joyful beats while having an emotionally negative vibes behind them. Indonesian popular songs also tend to have lower valence and danceability score than non-Indonesian ones, implying that non-Indonesian songs tend to be more high-spirited than Indonesian ones. Songs with high popularity doesn’t seem to show distinct pattern, however they seem to group on the right side of the diagram.

In conclusion, melancholic songs do not dominate the chart in Indonesia, but instead their more-energetic counterparts, whose negative emotions are concealed by their danceable beats, do. Check out our playlist below to listen to these songs!

Disclaimer: Some songs are not featured in these playlists (i.e Sabyan Gambus) since they were no longer available at the time the playlists were compiled.