Full write up and interactive graph: https://rpubs.com/tylerotto/billboardtop100
I wanted to dig into the data to see how the songs themselves have changed. A 10 second reel can make a song universally known overnight. This has me wondering if it's directly influencing shorter song lengths, where the "hook" becomes easily shareable, loopable, and instantly recognizable.
To test this, I pulled every Billboard Top 100 chart since 1958 and matched it with Spotify song length data.
Summary:
– Songs were short in the 50s/60s due to limited technology.
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Song length increase through the LP, 8-track (invented in 1964, look at that bump!), and CD eras as the technology allowed for more storage.
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But in the streaming + TikTok age, they’re shrinking again.
Posted by Ikigai-san
6 Comments
Source: Web scraping Billboard URL and Spotify API
Code: R (mainly Tidyverse) and plotly
Really cool visual! Would be great to see the original format as a color to really emphasize the hypothesis that format impacts length of songs
Would love to see the name / length of the longest song per year / decade
It was a beautiful song, but it ran too long.
If you’re gonna have a hit,
You gotta make it fit.
So they cut it down to 3:05
-The Entertainer by
Billy Joel.
Interesting chart.
Another thing I saw was that song intros have been getting shorter over the last few years – either the time to the first lyric or the start of the chorus. Would be fun to see how that looks, though I guess your song data only has overall length.
Beautiful data and analysis 👍