The Cavemen: “Love and Highlife” Trend Report

The Cavemen, a Nigerian band that set out to revolutionize highlife music consists of two brothers, Kingsley Okorie and Benjamin James.

Their sophomore album titled Love And Highlife which contained 18 tracks was released on Friday 29th of October 2021 and we set out to explore the following:

• The possible volume of Tweets and Retweets
• Number of fans tweeting about the album
• Top fans and Top Tweets
• Popular tracks in the album
• Top locations
• Google Web search and interest by country

Data Collection

Data was collected using 3 keywords. Why?

• #LoveAndHighlife being the main hashtag of the album had a low volume of tweets.

• Twitter users and fans resorted to using the name of the band Cavemen and their Twitter handle @StayCavy

• Tweets were collected from the 27th of October to 9th of November 2021. Two days before the album launch and 12 days after which sums up to 14 days.

• Data was collected using the Twitter search API. The dataset doesn’t provide an exhaustive collection but a very reliable sample to draw useful inferences.

Data Cleaning & Tweet Types

“Cavemen” being a generic word was featured in conversations not related to music or the highlife band and thus constituted the greatest challenge on this project.

A total of 33,000+ tweets were collected but with further cleaning, 17,162 tweets remained.

These tweets consisted of

• 10931 Retweets ( 64% of total)
• 3757 Original Tweets (22% of total)
• 2474 Replies (14% of total)
  This classification is visualized below:

ANALYSIS

Tweet By Day

Here is how the conversation and mentions of the album and artiste evolved in 2 weeks

In the column chart above, the conversation peaked on the day of the album launch and proceeded to drop traction after then. For more context, the tweets were classified into types:

• Original tweets connote the original tweet made by a user,

• Replies are responses under a user’s tweets, and Retweets are shares of an original tweet.

Sometimes, amplification doesn’t give a true picture of a Twitter conversation. A clear example of this is the spike that happened on November 6.

On November 6, the line graph shows a massive spike in retweets. Investigating the opinion/highlight that caused that surge and here is one of the possible answers:

From the graph, it is clear enough that the album didn’t get talked about enough after the release date.

Top Tracks

The result below shows the most popular tracks mentioned within the timeframe

Top Fans

The graph below shows the Twitter users that mentioned the cavemen most. We had to make a distinction to eliminate retweets and blogs announcing the release of the album. We can also infer that these users with the highest original tweets or replies mentioning the cavemen are amongst their biggest fans.

Top Tweets

These are the tweets with the highest engagements

Word Cloud

This shows the top words mostly used in the conversation around the album and artiste.

Some of the popular themes in these conversations are Language, Features, and Admiration. An example is the Igbo language. Although the band disclosed they aren’t very fluent with the Igbo Language and are trying to improve, we still have fans expressing concerns.

Still on Language, we explore Inclusivity as a sub-theme. Several Twitter users mentioned that they were able to enjoy the music and appreciate the igbo language despite not understanding it. The Cavemen music helped them bridge that gap.

Location

These were the top public locations users were tweeting from. To achieve the graph below, we removed countries seeing as it didn’t affect the outcome and focused on cities.

This particular data is useful for growing fan bases and organizing concerts. This finding was validated seeing as The Cavemen recently toured Nigeria and visited all the cities listed there. They also performed in the U.K and Accra in 2021

Google Trend Data

This data relates to search interest on google over time with 100 being very high and 0 being very low. Notice the spike which occurred on November 3. It could be attributed to the Cavemen’s performance which was happening in the United Kingdom at that time and also a Twitter Space conversation with a respected music journalist – Joey Akan. The three countries with the top searches for the cavemen on Google web search were Nigeria, the United Kingdom, and the United States.

DASHBOARD

Conclusion

Artists and Labels might use data to grow their following on social media, discover and engage fans abroad, a feedback source to improve their plans and organize concerts, and much more. Albums are too important a project to fade off within a few days. Artists and labels need to invest in driving attention to their projects while measuring the data and taking the necessary feedback.

Analysis by Paul Nnakwe
Contact: Paulnnakwe@gmail.com

@Paulodaguvnor on social media platforms.

Viz by Akintunde Ebenezer