Visualizing Popular Music Trends. Understanding how music is evaluated by…
By: Donald Lang
Tags: Learning, Spotify, Trends, Data Analysis, Music

1: Streams

The first metric is the most straightforward and is used in the following six, so it is a good place for us to start. Here, we are evaluating the total number of streams in a given week for all 200 songs. There are no ‘cool’ conclusions, but what stands out is how much streaming volume can vary from week to week. Spikes are generally from the releases of popular albums, with the exception of the 1/24/2020 spike, which is noted below:

total streams for top 200 songs, in thousands

There are seven spikes which are attributable to these albums and songs. The total streams listed are for all 200 songs for the listed week, however the identified album or song was instrumental in reaching this number.

2: Danceability

Next, we find one will find it difficult to dance their way to the nice list. Our second metric, danceability is ‘how suitable a track is for dancing.’ What stands out are the seasonal drops in this metric. This is caused by the seasonal streaming of Christmas music. In 2018 and 2019 this drop was contrasted with a peak sometime in the following month. Will we see the same in 2021?

Though there are songs with a higher danceability indexes (Chanel — Rae Sremmurd, Dancing in My Room — 347aidan both come in at 0.98), here are the songs that scored high in danceability and carried high streaming volume (placed top 10 in at least one week) — do you agree?

3: Energy

The first interesting point in our time-series comes from the energy metric. Energy is the ‘perceptual measure of intensity and activity’ in a song. Again, we see seasonal drops, however; the lowest energy period came on 4/5/2019 just after Billie Eillish released her ‘When We All Fall Asleep, Where Do We Go?’ album. The average value (adjusted for streaming volume) dropped to 0.53, being heavily influenced by her songs.

Spikes seen on 4/20/2018 and 10/5/2018 are attributable to Drake and Lil Wayne. Both Drake’s single Nice For What (~0.913) and Lil Wayne’s ‘Tha Carter V’ scored high in this metric. Lil’ Wayne’s album had multiple songs scoring high, specifically Let It Fly (~0.819) and Uproar (~0.870).

4: Loudness

Loudness is as straightforward as Streams — that it is an objective measurement. Spotify measures the loudness of a track in decibels and provides an average. There is nothing really interesting to point out here, other then again, Christmas music, creates seasonal lows.

It does seem that popular albums score low on this metric, with the exception of Post Malone’s ‘Hollywood Is Bleeding.’ We see non-seasonal lows with the release of albums ‘More Life’ (Drake), ‘Scorpion’ (Drake), ‘When We All Fall Asleep, Where Do We Go?’ (Billie Eilish), and ‘folklore’ (Taylor Swift). It is unclear what is causing this.

5: Speechiness

Speechiness, which is almost certainly not included in the latest copy of the Merriam-Webster, is another interesting metric. This was created to evaluate the presence of spoken words in a track. A track with no words would score near 0, whereas an Allan Watts lecture would score near 1. Intuitively, we expect the playlist average (again, adjusted for streaming) to carry higher values when rap albums and songs are popular. We can see this in our time-series.

Again, we see the seasonal lows previously discussed, however we also can confirm our statement from above. Note Billie Eilish making this list, as she also makes an appearance in the next metric.

6: Instrumentalness

In contrast to the previous metric, instrumentalness predicts whether a track contains no vocals. Artists ‘humming’ (“ooh” or “aah” sounds) are treated as sounds and add to this metric. Two spikes that stand out are 12/14/2018, which is heavily influenced by XXXTentacion’s song ‘whoa (mind in awe)’, and 4/12/2019 which is influenced by Khalid’s album ‘Free Spirit’ in addition to the popularity of the song ‘Bad Guy’ by the aforementioned Billie Eilish.

There are three spikes following the first two, which are a 9/6/2019 spike from album ‘Pneuma’ by Tool, a 11/22/2019 spike from the song ‘everything i wanted’ scoring 0.657 by our popular suspect Billie Eilish, and finally, a spike on 10/9/2020 from 21 Savage’s album ‘Savage Mode II’, which included ‘Many Men’ scoring 0.747.

7: Valence

The last metric we will cover is Valance. Here, Spotify is evaluating the perceived happiness of a song. We can see the positive side of seasonal Christmas trends. There are non-seasonal highs and lows, the largest of which seems to be from viral song ‘Despacito’ by Justin Beiber in May of 2017.

Because this is one of the more interesting metrics, I have included a list of the 15 ‘most positive’ songs within the dataset (again, with the requirement of holding a top 10 spot for at least one week).

Understanding these metrics combined with their trends will help in discovering new, ‘enjoyable’ music. In addition, these metrics help non-musically-gifted listeners evaluate what they do and do not like about what they hear. In doing this, Spotify helps provide a platform for lesser-known artists to have their music compared to the largest creators.

If you enjoyed this discussion, feel free to reach out and suggest other or new topics. If something is unclear, please ask a question and I will do my best to respond.

Oh, as I promised, here is a link to all the documentation you will need to recreate or continue analysis such as this:

Spotify’s API reference: https://developer.spotify.com/

This is the playlist I analyzed: https://spotifycharts.com/

Reference document for metrics being discussed: https://developer.spotify.com/documentation/web-api/reference/tracks/get-audio-features/.

Datawrapper: https://www.datawrapper.de/