Top 100 Spotify Track Features
What does it take to be on the Top 100 Spotify Tracks?
I am curious as to what are the common features of the tracks that fall under the year’s Top 100 Spotify Tracks. These tracks were based on most listened songs for the year in Spotify, so it also gives us insights on what type of songs does listeners like the most.
The data I utilized was from the 2018 Top 100 Spotify Tracks. There is a lot of opportunity for future datasets like this to improve in the future. I am thinking it could include the number of times a track was played, to further specify rankings, also, the genre could’ve been included as it gives a clearer picture of what type of music listeners would want to hear.
Top 10 Artist
Let’s start with looking at the top 10 artists — which was based on the number of tracks included in the Top 100 per artist:
Artists that were included in the Top 10 had 2 or more tracks included in the overall list.
The features included in the dataset were danceability, energy, key, loudness, mode, speechiness, acousticness, instrumentalness, liveness, valence, tempo, duration in ms, and the time signature. I picked to look at the tempo first which is the speed of the song, as this can be classified and can provide a more obvious type of song that listeners prefer.
Popular Tempo
The tempo is measured in beats per minute (bpm), and has 7 classifications namely: prestissimo (fastest at >200 bpm), presto, allegro, moderato, andante, adagio, larghetto, and largo (slowest at <60 bpm).
Andante and allegro appear to be the most popular tempos. It means that most songs or about 87% have a tempo of 76–168 bpm, not too fast and not too slow. We also captured a mean of 119.9 bpm which falls under the moderato category, which is between andante and allegro. The genres that we can consider on these tempos are hip hop, rap, and pop.
Correlation
We were provided with several features, among these features, only 2 stood out that have a positive correlation — energy & loudness.
It tells us that the louder the music, the higher energy it gives. Another positive correlation that can be observed is with valence or the positivity of the song, it shows that the more positive the song, the more danceable, energetic, and loud it is.
Song Duration
What’s the average time of playing each track? Based on the graph below, it shows that listeners prefer around less than 3.5-minute durations, and not too long.
To summarize, we found out that listeners like songs that are moderate in speed (between andante and allegro, possible genres are hip hop, pop, and rap). Listeners prefer to listen to songs with less than 3.5-minute durations. There is not much correlation on the features available — but most notable is the loudness and energy. Note that 87% of the songs in the top 100 are energetic. Also, 96% of the songs are danceable. We can say that Spotify listeners love to play party songs.
