What Makes a Song Likeable?

They compile a yearly list of Top Songs based on the number of times the songs were streamed by users.Spotify Audio FeaturesFor every track on their platform, Spotify provides data for thirteen Audio Features.The Spotify Web API developer guide defines them as follows:Danceability: Describes how suitable a track is for dancing based on a combination of musical elements including tempo, rhythm stability, beat strength, and overall regularity.Valence: Describes the musical positiveness conveyed by a track..Tracks with high valence sound more positive (e.g. happy, cheerful, euphoric), while tracks with low valence sound more negative (e.g. sad, depressed, angry).Energy: Represents a perceptual measure of intensity and activity..For example, death metal has high energy, while a Bach prelude scores low on the scale.Tempo: The overall estimated tempo of a track in beats per minute (BPM)..In musical terminology, tempo is the speed or pace of a given piece, and derives directly from the average beat duration.Loudness: The overall loudness of a track in decibels (dB)..It lacked a field for the rank of the song, which I added.Initial ExplorationsOut of the above-mentioned parameters, Mode is a binary value of either 1 or 0 denoting the modality of the track (Major or minor), and Key is an absolute integer value denoting the scale of the song (C =0, C# = 1, etc.) Hence, I left these 2 parameters out for and created a scatterplot matrix with the remaining 11 parameters.I created the scatterplot matrix with two main intentions :See if there are any relationships between parameters.Find obvious trends and patterns so as to better identify focus areas.Scatterplot matrix of the Audio Feature parametersA few observations from the scatterplot are as follows:Time-signature — Almost all the songs seem to have a common time-signature of 4..Again, dropping the parameter.Energy and loudness seem highly proportional.Valence seems to be proportional to danceability, energy and loudness.From the definitions of the parameters in the API guide, Tempo and loudness seem to be low-level parameters which are used to calculate other higher level parameters like valence, energy, and danceability..I also dropped the duration parameter since most tracks pretty much seem to be around the 200s or 3:20 minute mark.Initial SketchesNow that I was left with just six parameters, I sketched out a few ways to explore how to make sense of the data such as density plots or just plotting variations in each parameter against rank..all the songs are recorded versions and have very few parts where there is more speech and less music.All songs are pretty mid to high energy (40-80%)Valence is pretty spread out.P.S..But still not more than around 60–70%.Liveness and Speechiness are still unanimously low.Energy still seems to mid to high.Valence is still quite spread out but overall seems more prevalent in the mid to high region.ConclusionWant to make a hit song?.Make sure it’s recorded in a studio and not live, not too ‘speechy’, and wouldn’t hurt to make it high valence i.e.. More details

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