The takeaway
So if a market ever opened on the happiest fans in music, the board would look a lot like this one. Stray Kids are the heavy favorites, Mitski holds the sadness title, and the anger race stays a scrum of rap and metal heavyweights.
If you're interested in current live music and entertainment markets, you can use these best prediction market promos. New to how these markets work? Here's how to bet on Polymarket.
Current live markets include who will have the #1 spotify song for July, Taylor Swift streams this year, and who will headline Coachella 2027
Stray Kids' fans, typically the happiest music fan, might not be so happy to see the Icons have fallen from favorites to headline to just a 1% chance. Or maybe they are so happy go lucky all they will see is that there is a chance.
Methodology
We analyzed more than 1.5 million comments in the Reddit fan communities (subreddits) of 106 popular music artists and bands, each had at least 2,000 analyzed comments. We selected a broad cross-section of popular artists across genres and eras, focusing on acts with large, active Reddit fan communities big enough to analyze reliably.
This gave a list spanning heritage acts like Metallica and Michael Jackson to current stars, covering everyone from Bad Bunny and Doechii to Mitski and Radiohead.
Comments were collected directly from each artist's subreddit through Reddit's official API, over an approximately one-year window, capturing each comment's text, author, score, identifiers, and source subreddit. That produced 1,752,329 raw comments.
Treating each comment as an isolated "statement," we ran every one through an open-source emotion model (emotion-english-distilroberta-base by J. Hartmann) that scores language across seven categories: "joy," "sadness," "anger," "fear," "surprise," "disgust," and "neutral." Each statement was tagged with the single emotion it scored highest for.
To establish which fans are saddest, for example, we calculate which subreddit has the highest percentage of its statements tagged "sadness" above all else. Neutral statements were kept in the count, so every percentage reflects a fandom's share of all comments, which is why joy and sadness are measured independently and an act can rank highly on both. Comments were counted once and equally, never weighted by upvotes, so a few popular comments can't dominate a fandom's profile.
You can see the full dataset here.
