Since anyone can record an absolutely terrible song that will never see the light of day, I think an important metric with respect to the awfulness of songs, or their performers, is the amount of airplay they get: the Total Awfulness of a Song (TAS) should be:I think you might have to come up with a metric for (awfulness of one listen of the song). Among the factors I'd include would be 1) use of unrelated references or cliches when you clearly can't be bothered to write decent lyrics and 2) rap interludes by people who are manifestly untalented in the medium. But I think it's very, very clear that reach should be a magnifying factor in the final calculations.
(awfulness of one listen of the song) x (amount of airplay it got on station N) x (Arbitron ratings of station N)
Summed up over all N, of course.
(Yes, I’m a geek. Deal.)
The total awfulness of a particular performer or group (TAP) would be obtained by summing up TAS over the collected works of that performer or group.
Measuring (Pop) Rock-Bottom
After Jonah Weiner published an inexplicable defense of Creed (there are guilty pleasures, and pleasures for which folks find you guilty, dude), I teased Matt by asking him who was worse, Creed or LFO? This plunged us back into the Great Worst Summer Song Debate of September 2009, and ended with both of us listening to a whole lot more LFO than I think either of us ever intended (And with feeling kind of sorry for the guys than I expected. They tried for solo careers and serious projects, and ended up back together, making music that is considerably worse than the music they made before, I suppose on the grounds that it's better to have a sad music career than no music career.). The whole thing made me wonder how we can best measure the comparative awfulness of various pop songs. Matt's commenter low-tech cyclist has a proposal (despite my disagreement with him on Celine Dion) that I quite like: