The Brit Awards ceremony takes place tonight, with the likes of RAYE, Central Cee, Stormzy and Dua Lipa up for the prestigious song of the year prize.

But would songs like theirs have been nominated if they had been released in a different era?

The Sky News data team has taken a look at the make-up of the tracks nominated this year, and each year since the first awards in 1982, to identify what's popular now and how it's changed in the past 42 years.

We've looked at the genres but also beyond, to how songs make us feel emotionally, how much they make us want to dance, and how music including spoken word has become represented more.

Emotions, dancing and data don't always come hand-in-hand, but fortunately for us Spotify, the world's largest music streaming platform, has a score from 0-1 for every song in its library based on how positive (1) or negative (0) it is, how "danceable" it is and even a "speechiness" rating, where everything above 0.66 is more likely to be an audiobook than a record.

This year's nominees are more danceable than usual, include significantly more speech, and are among the most emotionally negative songs ever nominated on average.

But is that following a modern trend or an exception to the norm? And how does it reflect other changing political, economic and cultural trends in the UK?

Scroll on to see the story of British pop music over the past four decades, and explore how some of your favourite and most memorable Brit Award nominees and winners compare with the rest.

Let's start with emotionality. "Positive" and "negative" sounding songs don't just mean happy and sad, and when it comes to music, "negative" emotion is a description rather than a criticism...

What aspects of a song make it sound more emotionally up or down, and has music really been getting more negative?

Professor Simon Zagorski-Thomas, a former producer and popular music expert from the London College of Music, told Sky News: "Research shows that positive energy tends to flow from rapid changes of energy, a rush of amplitude of volume or a change of texture or pitch, like in dance music you get that rush upwards."

And on the other side, he said: "The thing that gives you a sense of humanity and poignancy in music often comes from breath control and the amplified sound of breaths, as well as the clarity of the lyrics. Once you start hearing [the breaths] in modern music you can't stop hearing it.

"And I think we're hearing this more now because people are listening on computers and earbud-headphones, so you don't get as much body or depth to the sound as you might have done before."

Julia Toppin, a music enterprise and entrepreneurship lecturer at the University of Westminster, and also a member of the MOBO academy, also says modern ways of interacting with music are changing some of how it's produced:

"People expect a verse, a chorus, a bridge, another chorus and out, and people respond well to what they know. There is a recipe, but it's very complicated and like any professional skill you need to master it.

"TikTok is influencing the music industry performance at the moment. It might not forever but it is currently."

Whether this is related to TikTok or social media isn't clear, but song of the year nominees have been getting shorter.

They lasted almost five minutes on average back in 1986, with over four minutes still the norm through most of the '90s. This year's average just 3m11s, among the shortest on record.

Does that give people long enough to get dancing?

What makes a song danceable? Professor Zagorski-Thomas says there are two main elements:

"One is hearing the clarity of the rhythm so you can train your movements to it - Motown musicians used to bang bits of wood with hammers to make the beat come out more strongly.

"Obviously we don't have to do that now but in a lot of dance music production you will hear the kick drum and snare drum as the loudest things - louder than vocals even. It's a standard technique now to drop the volume of other instrumental parts.

"The other is a bit more subtle, the variations and interesting small movements that usually come from hi-hat patterns. It's the human element of skipping and bouncing around that happens between the kick drum beats."

In slightly more reassuring news for dads at weddings/football fans/people of generally limited rhythmic ability, Professor Zagorski-Thomas added that "there is a certain unmeasurable element [to what music is danceable] that won't be picked up in the algorithms...

"Our culture appreciates the pariticipatory element. As in... people like shouting their heads off when they're on the dance floor as much as they like dancing.

"For that, you want the right kind of repetitive phrase which doesn't want to be complicated, but just wants to tell you to make a gesture."

In terms of dancier music being represented at the Brits more, he says "there's a lot of politics behind the nominations, people trying to suggest the direction the industry is going as well as what they like best - which probably doesn't come into it all that much.

"They're trying to make it more open and diverse, increasing the number of nominees in certain categories and publishing diversity stats for their judges as well as the artists."

Julia Toppin says the Brit nominations reflect commercially what's successful in the music industry. "I expect there to be a rise in awards for grime, drill and rap, because over the years we've seen these genres taking more of the market share.

"It represents an overall shift in the cultural diversity of the personnel in the music industry, and the influence that they bring to the table.  If you stop marginalising communities and give everybody the equality of opportunity you will reap positive rewards."

So how is that shift reflected in the data?

The increase in representation of grime, rap and drill artists in recent years does mean there's less space at the table for some other genres.

While pop music has unsurprisingly remained well-represented at a popular music awards ceremony, the heyday of rock and indie at the Brits appears to be behind us.

In the 1980s and '90s more than a third of the nominees were rock or indie bands, with the likes of Queen (These Are The Days Of Our Lives) and Blur (Parklife) winning the award in 1992 and 1995 respectively.

Blur's five nominations between 1995 and 2000 (one more than Britpop-rivals Oasis) is the most successful six-year spell of any artist. Only Robbie Williams (8), Ed Sheeran (8) and Take That (7) have had more nominations overall (Adele is also level on five and eternal Britpop rivals Oasis have five).

Professor Zagorski-Thomas says the decline in rock representation at the Brits doesn't mean the death or decline of the genre though.

"These sort of artists used to sell albums, but not singles. The album has sort of disintegrated and doesn't exist anymore, but rock acts tend to still put out things that look like albums.

"The streaming for each of the tracks on the album probably adds up to the same number of streams as the one 'hit' that an artist from another genre has produced. And rock artists are also selling out larger tours for the most part.

"We're likely to see a continued lack of rock acts [among song of the year nominees] because that kind of buying or streaming of rock singles is diminished, but that doesn't mean rock is less successful than it used to be. It's just hidden behind a more nuanced set of statistics."

Safiya Lambie-Knight, Head of Music UK & Ireland for Spotify, told Sky News: "The music landscape is always evolving, and in the past few years, we've seen the UK music scene really cementing itself as a leader on the global stage. It's great to take a moment and celebrate this at the Brits.

“If you look at all the buzz around The Last Dinner Party, as well as Wet Leg last year, it shows that there are great indie and rock bands breaking through and that there is an opportunity for artists of that kind to find a big audience.

"Electronic music feels really healthy, with the likes of Fred again..., Chase & Status and breakout stars like Pinkpantheress all having huge years.

"It's also been amazing to see the huge rise in UK rap in its various forms over the past decade or so. It wasn't that long ago that hip hop and R&B consumption here was dominated by US artists, but now we have countless artists from here in the UK who are having huge success both locally and internationally.

"Dave & Central Cee's Sprinter is a perfect example given it was the most streamed song on Spotify here in the UK before permeating the culture in the US last year, and you now have huge global stars like Drake featuring on tracks by UK artists like J Hus."

What does the changing nature of popular music and culture tell us about other parts of society?

Not a lot, most likely. "There's as much escapism demanded by cultural and economic down points as there is wallowing in it," explained Professor Zagorski-Thomas.

"I don't think there's a kind of clean reflection of culture in popular music or popular culture in general, but it's always interesting to draw parallels between them."

"It's always interesting" was all the encouragement we needed to take a look, and it turns out the positivity of song of the year nominees doesn't NOT match the trends in UK unemployment through the premierships of Thatcher, Major, Blair, Brown, Cameron, May and Johnson...

Professor Zagorski-Thomas doesn't think that means all too much, and he's probably right...

"It's not clear that the fact there are more sad and angry songs at a given moment means that society is feeling sadder and angrier. You could say it means more people are writing those songs, and you write because you feel it, and the fact they're popular reflects that in some way.

"But you could just as easy say that euphoric songs are popular because people want to be escapist about things."

It's just a bit of fun really, but see what you make of who the winners end up being tonight.

CREDITS

Reporting: Saywah Mahmood and Daniel Dunford, data journalists

Data visualisation development: Giacomo Boscaini-Gilroy

Design: Taylor Stuart, designer