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Comment by mfdaniels | Hacker News Reader

author here, if there's any questions

Thanks for this: http://poly-graph.co/vocabulary.html I've gotten hours of conversation out of it.

Also so happy to see that "You Got Me" by The Roots got 6 million streams in 2014. That is the definition of a future timeless track.

Has there been any kind of analysis about potential biases? From the top of my head I can think of the fact that Spotify was not available in every country from the start. Also, not every person on the world streams their music. Does this data include record sales for examlpe? Does it normalise the data somehow taking into account the percentage of the population that streams music versus other means of consuming music?

Or is it just plain and simple data gathered from Spotify?

I'm not saying that there is anything wrong/bad about the results. But without knowing the details on how the data is collected, it's hard to read anything from the results.

This is awesome. You kinda touch on this, but the main thing that jumps out at me is that there seems to be a very strong bias towards songs from the late 90s and early 00s. Do you think this is because Spotify’s main cohort is people in their late 20s to early 30s, who came of age, musically, during that time?

Honestly, I expect recency to be a large factor in Spotify plays. That is, we expect that the average hit from the 70s to have fewer plays than a hit from the 80s, and so on.

Regardless of the age of the listener, I expect newly released songs to have higher playcounts (in fact, I plotted this curve, but it was too high-brow for the Internet and the audience for which I was writing).

That said, if I managed to cut the data by age-bucket, I do think that the results would shift toward the music with which you grew up.

I'm surprised that nirvana's smell like teen spirit wasn't a bigger hit. However, Nirvana was insanely big at the time, so they don't really fit the hypothesis of underground sleeper hits.

I'm sure Nirvana has many #1 hits, but why did Smell like teen spirit become the poster song for Nirvana?

The same can be said about Oasis, who at the time was insanely big and held several spots on top 10 lists for months. But maybe they were bigger in Europe than the U.S. And maybe European fans are driving the spotify listens?

It's too bad that pearl jam isn't represented. I listened to some the other day and was taken with how good it was.

But, very interesting data nonetheless! I'm loving it!

Is it possible to filter the data by listener age? I wonder, because a lot of these songs are in play lists of mine from the 80s / 90s (I grew up in the 80s / 90s). Maybe spotify's user base is older than suspected?

Also, it would be interesting to plot billboard rankings vs spotify rankings. Possible?

Pearl Jam is old music? Man, I feel old.

Yea, the plan was to cut the data by age buckets that Spotify has (<18, 19-25, etc.). This, unfortunately, would have quintupled the size of the data pull, which was already close to a million requests.

The last point, Billboard vs. Spotify, is in the second to last chart. Check it out :)

Why "timeless"? When I use that word to talk about music, it means that the music has evaded its contemporary trappings. Its opposite is "dated".

Why lasting popularity as a measure of timelessness?

How do you account for longer trends? Some of Bach's children were more popular than he was for quite a while.

I actually think that "longevity" is a better term. But I only realized that after I wrote the article. Here's another version of the article that never really was released, which focused on longevity over timeless: http://poly-graph.co/timeless/nodiggity.html

We only have two data points in this work: today and release date. So longer trends like the one you pointed out might be lost in time.

I am more interested in what you use to make these graphs and charts. The data presentation in all the articles on poly-graph is always excellent. The interactive charts and graphs is perfect for letting the reader understand the data. Did you make all the graphs and charts?

I made everything. Thanks!

I used D3 to create the charts, as well as some additional frameworks (Jquery, Waypoints).

I loved the way some of the charts reflected how far I had read in the content; very subtle and effective.

Great job.

Few slight bugs on the Present-day Popularity of Five Decades of Music, Dream On appears twice in the 70s with the same listen count(73 & 76). Also Blink-182, 1999 is showing in the 00s. All I Want For Christmas Is You — Mariah Carey, 2000 is showing in the 90s.

No question; But this is one of the coolest things I've seen on the internet yet.

When are you coming back to do another tech talk at Pivotal Labs?

This is impressive!

Did you manually retrieve the play count for each track or is there an automated way of doing it?

Also interested in how the data was gained.

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