Preply analyzed over 40 commonly misheard songs and the over 50 artists who confuse listeners the most and scored each on five measurable qualities. The result is a rare, quantified ranking that gives insight into why we sing the wrong words.
Preply used five metrics to create their rankings: Flesch readability score, percentage of unique words, percentage of rare words, AI transcription accuracy via the Clipto tool, and words per minute. Artists were ranked using submission counts from a mondegreen database. The top song “Blinded by the Light” wins not on speed but on readability. It only scored 85 on Flesch, the least readable song in the study. AI managed to translate only 63% of the song “Empire State of Mind” accurately, showing confusion occurring for a different reason. The song is fast at 158 wpm and has 43% unique words. The song “Saint-Tropez” by Post Malone is highly readable, but its 131 wpm tempo even baffles AI 31% of the time.
We see two distinct rankings emerge from the team’s graphic. Among recent artists, listeners struggled the most to understand Lady Gaga, who had 306 submissions of mishearing, often due to her unusual and theatrical pronunciation style. Taylor Swift is frequently misunderstood, too, with 300 submissions and two songs in the top 20 most misunderstood song list. Kelly Clarkson ranks closely behind her. The most misunderstood artists of all time, not just recent releases, were Elton John, with “Tiny Dancer” alone receiving 214 submissions; Queen, particularly the song “Bohemian Rhapsody”; and Michael Jackson, with “Billie Jean.” This all-time leaderboard skews toward artists with big catalogs, but the per-song counts of mondegreens are striking.
The data doesn’t capture the cultural memory of these mondegreens, like the “Starbucks lovers” memes about Taylor Swift. These mondegreens might outlive the song itself. While data can explain the mechanics of mishearing, the Internet might just be the determiner of which mondegreens become canon.
