Popular Music is Getting Sadder (Blame Drake)

How has popular music changed since 2000?

To investigate this question, we downloaded a dataset of all the Billboard Hot 100 songs from 2000 to 2018. The Billboard Hot 100 is the industry standard record chart for the US, measuring the pulse of popular music. This dataset includes a host of Spotify metrics for each song, ranging from “liveness” to “valence” to “danceability.” We began by plotting the development of each metric's average value over time, as you can see in the graph on the right. We noticed a surprising trend: the valence of popular music has steadily decreased in the past two decades. Its average has dropped from .58 in 2000 to .44 in 2018—a 14% decrease! Valence is Spotify’s estimate for the happiness of the track, which means that popular music is getting sadder. With data and d3.js in hand, we set out on a mission to find out why.

Can we blame a particular genre?

We began our analysis by charting the Hot 100’s distribution of genres over time. Most of the songs across the 20 years fit into one of 6 main genres, shown in the key to the right. Songs that don't share one of these labels were classified as “unknown”—you might notice that most of the songs from 2018 have not yet been labeled. For each year, the chart to the right shows each genre's percentage share of the Hot 100 (click on the chart to isolate one genre, or compare specific genres by toggling the checkboxes). We noticed that the relative popularity of hip hop has been increasing, and the genre has exploded into the forefront since 2014. Perhaps hip hop is to blame for the sadness of popular music…

A Striking Trend

Next, we isolated hip hop to test our hypothesis. Charting the average valence of hip hop over time revealed a striking trend—it has decreased from .64 to .41, a 23% drop! Considering the recent dominance of hip hop, it seems likely that this drop has strongly influenced the overall decline in valence. For the sake of curiosity, we’ve also included the top hip hop songs from each year as dots in the graph. Notice the outlier "Low" by Flo Rida in 2008, which is a decidedly happy song. It seems that the valence metric has misinterpreted shawty’s dance moves…

Can we blame a particular artist?

We found the top five most popular hip hop artists, based on their number of songs and features that have made the Hot 100. Going from fifth to first, it’s Eminem with 46 songs, Lil Wayne with 48, Jay-Z with 51, Kanye West with 54, and Drake with… 114. Yes, Drake has more than twice as many top songs as the next (including all 22 tracks from his 2017 album More Life). We compared valence profiles of these top artists with the chart on the right—each dot corresponds with an artist’s song in the Top 100, placed into the its valence range. The majority of Drake’s songs have a valence below 0.4—we are concerned for his wellbeing. Considering Drake’s dominance of the most popular genre, it seems that Drake is to blame for the sadness of popular music.

Explore!

Feel free to compare the valence profiles of any top artist by removing and adding with the search bar. For reference, the top 5 artists across all genres are Kenny Chesney with 51 songs, Justin Bieber with 56, Taylor Swift with 80, Drake with 114, and… Glee Cast with 207 (now that is sad).