Mining Spotify for the music that never gets old
Polygraph, a publication for thoughtful, data-driven storytelling has set out to find the most timeless songs of all-time. They’ve done this using Spotify to quantify how old music has stood the test of time. “Until recently, it was impossible to measure the popularity of older music,” says Matt Daniels, editor of Polygraph. “But now we have Spotify, a buffet of all of music, new and old. Tracks with fewer plays are fading into obscurity and those with more plays are remaining in the cultural ether.”

The idea came about when the team decided to prove that No Diggity by Blackstreet was timeless. They figured its popularity on Spotify, relative to every other song from the 90s would be a strong signal for whether it will be remembered by our children’s children. Out of the entire catalog of music from the 90s, Polygraph discovered the tracks with the trajectory to survive.

Unsurprisingly, No Diggity is the fifth most-played song from the 90s. Smells Like Teen Spirit, a track that never reached the Billboard Top 5 when it was released in 1992, is now the most-played song from the 90s. There were 41 more popular songs in 1991 than Smells Like Teen Spirit  but since 1992, these songs have slowly faded into obscurity, while Nirvana’s music has not only maintained its popularity, but augmented it.

As dull as it sounds, big data is being used for creative endeavours the world over. Squarepusher recently incorporated local weather data into his live shows while Rapha interpreted data created from the physical effort of a professional cyclist for an interactive window display.