If Facebook users had their say, The Weeknd, Mark Ronson and Bruno Mars would have plenty to celebrate Monday (Feb. 17) at the 58th Annual Grammy Awards.
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Ahead of the awards ceremony, the social media network analyzed the conversation around the nominees for positive sentiment, revealing exclusively to Billboard which Grammy nominees boast the most favorable pre-Grammy buzz on the network for three major categories: album of the year, record of the year and best rap album. The analysis, detailed below, covers the two months immediately after the Grammy nominations were announced on Dec. 7, 2015. More than 780 million Facebook users are connected to a music page, according to the social media site.
“Uptown Funk!,” the smash collaboration from Ronson and Mars, leads the five record of the year nominees for the most positive conversation, according to Facebook, followed immediately by Ed Sheeran‘s “Thinking Out Loud.”
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The Weeknd claims top honors in the album of the year race for his Beauty Behind The Madness album, which contained the hit singles “Can’t Feel My Face” and “The Hills.” Alabama Shakes generates enough goodwill to lock up the runner-up slot for their sophomore set, Sound & Color.
Meanwhile, in the best rap album category, 11-time nominee Kendrick Lamar‘s To Pimp A Butterfly secures the most positive feeling among Facebook users, followed by Dr. Dre‘s Compton. The album — released in conjunction with the 2015 N.W.A biopic Straight Outta Compton — marked the rapper, producer and business mogul’s first album since 1999.
Facebook’s data scientists created a system that classifies posts by sentiment by looking at millions of depersonalized posts that included a mention of what the author was doing or feeling, and identifying word patterns likely to be related to each sentiment category (positive, negative or neutral). A team of researchers later reviewed these classifications to ensure accuracy.
