Pandora Part Two

I'm starting with one of the questions I posed in Part One, which is what characteristics of music do most listeners base their musical choices on? Which is clearly a very broad question, so I'd love to get everyone's input on what you, yes you, on what makes you like or dislike music.

More specifically, one of the characteristics that, for me, determines whether or not music has any staying power with me is the lyrics. I pay a lot of attention to the lyrical subtlety and prosody of a song, and even of an entire album, but I'm pretty sure I'm in the minority in this. Anecdotally speaking it seems most people's taste in music can be pegged by the characteristic described by the Music Genome Project -- the approximate 400 attributes each song in Pandora is rated on individually. So what happens to the lyrics in the Genome?

I asked Pandora's Tim about how lyrics were handled, and he acknowledged that they are a weak spot in Pandora, and in the Genome Project in general. Tim had an interesting perspective on which lyrics elements might determine a person's taste in music, based on his explanation of lyrics in the Genome. Commenting on how subjective they are (agreed), Tim said "one person's happy can be another person's sad." And in fact, lyrical "genes" were once included in the Project, but as the Pandora team came to decide on which genes were useful and which ones weren't, lyrics were kicked off the list because they were too difficult to measure objectively.

While I agree that the emotional content or interpretation of lyrics is far too subjective for something as taxonomical as the Genome project to measure, it did seem to imply that emotional content was all there was to lyrics. Another Pandora listener commented alter that evening that it would serve Pandora well to measure lyrics by more literary attributes, for instance, verse/chorus structure, use of a bridge, etc. The Genome does use basic literary traits such as these, but doesn't measure (as of yet) more advanced critical concepts that may actually indicate a lot about a listener's preferences. These concepts could be things like paradoxical language (typical of Modest Mouse), third person narration (typical of Ben Folds), or adherence to a strict rhyme scheme (any showtune you can name).

So here are my questions to you (the royal you): do these more advanced lyrical traits play a part in your musical preferences? Does much of your music collection have lyrical commonalities on this level? If you looked at the lyric sheets alone, would there be more similarities than if you looked at the genres represented by your iPod?