Overall visualizations

Which decade has the fastest songs? And the longest? The radar chart below tries to answer questions of this kind. All attributes are normalized. This way, the decade with the longest songs will reach the edge of the circle for the length attribute, and the other decades will be positioned proportionally.

The plotted attributes are:

• Length: total duration of the reference record of the song.
• Tempo: Beats Per Minute (BPM) of a song. The higher this value, the faster a song feels.
• Artist Familiarity: algorithmic estimation of how many people in the world have heard about the artist in some way or another. See "understanding the Experiment" for details.
• Time Signature: in short, the amount of beats that fit into a bar of the song. This value is hard to summarize, but consider that higher values mean longer bars.
• Loudness: self-explanatory.

What are the most common musical keys? And the most common time signatures? That's what the charts below aim to elucidate:

Artist popularity in Billboard History: an artist's popularity is the sum of the popularity of his/her/their songs. A song's popularity is the sum of it's weekly score for all the weeks it remained on the chart. The weekly score of a song goes from 99 (#1) to 0 (#100). Songs that were never featured on Billboard's Hot 100 don't have a score.

A visual representation of the words most likely to show up on song titles, powered by Wordle:

Here is a list of the #10 most popular songs in our database, according to the sum of its yearly Billboard popularities, along with some information for each of them.

Warning: our popularity data from Billboard is grouped by year. Since most songs stay on the charts for no more than a few weeks, there is a bias on our list: songs that were released closer to the end of their years are more likely to appear in two years and therefore have a higher rating. We realize that and are working to update the data to use a weekly granularity.