mfdaniels

5 ms·

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by mfdaniels 11y ago
Yea, there's lots of other charts, sources, notes that I could have included in the piece. The challenge is that this is not an academic study – it's Internet catnip. All the things that make studies too dense and boring to read (
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by mfdaniels 11y ago
I should!
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by mfdaniels 11y ago
Sorry that there's so comments section. The data is pretty clear in terms of source...Spotify in 2014...Billboard data via Whitburn. The data was directly from one of Spotify's data partners. Yea Spotify isn't a perfect indic
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by mfdaniels 11y ago
Ah. Didn't realize that. Billboard data, generally, is terribly inaccurate in terms of a measure of cultural popularity...back in the day, they used to call radio stations to ask what their top 10 were. But it's the best we'v
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by mfdaniels 11y ago
Yup. I emailed Dorothy at the beginning of the project to get the Whitburn database.
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by mfdaniels 11y ago
Yea, Beatles, T Swift, Ac/dc are all not on Spotify. I preface that in the article.
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by mfdaniels 11y ago
It's all of Spotify. So while it's international data, it certainly skews toward western music.
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by mfdaniels 11y ago
I actually think that "longevity" is a better term. But I only realized that after I wrote the article. Here's another version of the article that never really was released, which focused on longevity over timeless: http:&#x
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by mfdaniels 11y ago
Honestly, I expect recency to be a large factor in Spotify plays. That is, we expect that the average hit from the 70s to have fewer plays than a hit from the 80s, and so on. Regardless of the age of the listener, I expect newly released so
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by mfdaniels 11y ago
I made everything. Thanks! I used D3 to create the charts, as well as some additional frameworks (Jquery, Waypoints).
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by mfdaniels 11y ago
Yea, the plan was to cut the data by age buckets that Spotify has (<18, 19-25, etc.). This, unfortunately, would have quintupled the size of the data pull, which was already close to a million requests. The last point, Billboard vs. Spot
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by mfdaniels 11y ago
Agree! In fact, I'd argue that a v2 of this project, where I look at the features of songs with high longevity (e.g., No Diggity) were driven by samples/covers/Glee/etc.
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by mfdaniels 11y ago
Yea, the plan was to remove counts via radio and playlists, but it would have doubled the amount of work from a data call/cleaning perspective. I'd bet that the results are still directionally accurate :)
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by mfdaniels 11y ago
author here, if there's any questions