The music industry is incredibly oversaturated, with thousands of songs being released daily. Thus, it is commonplace for songs to get “lost” in the sea of new music, unable to capture the attention of the masses.
However, once in a while a song is able to slip through the cracks, and gain wide-spread recognition. While these hit songs do not always share explicit similarities, we wanted to conduct a more thorough analysis to better understand what made these songs a hit. Do these songs share certain characteristics? Is there a formula for commercial music success?
Billboard and Spotify are two very different music companies, but both have their own ways of rating music on a weekly basis. We wanted to find out if their rating systems worked in similar ways, or if they differed, what made them different?
To conduct our analysis, we used audio data (via Spotify) and charting data (via Billboard.com) of the weekly Hot 100 singles chart from 8/2/1958 and 12/28/2019. We decided to use only the data from 2005 to 2015, to keep our data concise.
In terms of our broader research, we had two goals. Firstly, we decided to analyze the common characteristics amongst songs that reach the top 10 on the Billboard Hot 100. More specifically, we looked into what the common characteristics were between the songs that maintained their top 10 position on the Billboard Hot 100 for over 15* weeks. Secondly, we wanted to analyze the correlation between the number of weeks on the Billboard Hot 100 chart and the highest position on the Hot 100. We also looked into whether there was a correlation between Spotify's popularity attribute and peak_position from the Billboard data.
" *this number was later adjusted based on our exploratory analysis"