Music of the Masses

Finding the glitches in Spotify’s Top 200

Michael Döringer

Cardamon Loops | Data Analytics | Spiced Academy

Table of content

• Intro: the data and the significance of Spotify’s charts
• General analysis: popular music around the world
• Non-contemporary incidents: spotting old songs in the charts

Data structure

The 200 most streamed songs for 70 countries for each week since 2013 + the global numbers

• Artist name + song title
• Weekly plays
• Chart date
• Spotify track ID –> Release date

Finding old songs

• looking at the global charts for worldwide trends
• adding more data from Spotify Web API: release dates for each song
• filterting the data for release years before 2010

Some statistics

Global Charts 2013-2022:

• 86.295 entries
• 5.984 unique songs
• songs from before 2010: 188 unique songs
• relation: 3.1 %

• 35 unique song titles contain the word „Christmas“: 2.6 % left

• 99 unique songs charting in December: 1.5 % left

• the truth lies in between: only 2.6-1.5% of Spotify’s Top 200 are older/non-contemporary/non-christmas songs

Let’s find out which songs these are and why they suddenly rise in global popularity!

Old songs with 10+M streams

…

Featured in “Stranger Things”

Viral on TikTok

Singer died

Superbowl Halftime Show Performance

Thank you for listening

• Python
• Pandas
• Plotly
• spotipy
• Tableau
• Pandoc