Measuring National Life Satisfaction with Music

National life satisfaction is an important way to measure societal well-being and since 2011 has been used judge the effectiveness of government policy across world. However, there a paucity historical data making limiting long-run comparisons with other data. We construct new based on emotional content music. first trained machine learning model using 191 different audio features embedded within music use this Music Valence Index derived from chart-topping songs. This index correlates strongly significantly survey-based outperforms equivalent text-based measure. Our results have implications for role in society, validate as public sentiment.