Show HN: The Nostalgia Machine – Get your childhood jam on

thenostalgiamachine.com

10 points·JusticeJuice··5 comments

The algorithm needs some tweaking: If a song is popular in x decade, it will continue to be popular for some time, and may experience a resurgance, as parents expose their children to it.

A song may also be re-discovered decades after it came out, and rise to popularity through some cultural phenomena. I dub this "the Rick Astley effect."

We based the data off the Billboard Year End top 100 singles Chart. So it mainly takes in record sales within America, mostly when the song was first released. Occasionally songs will chart in both years, or chart in a year different to it's release.

We'd love to improve the way we rank songs, but the problem is getting good data sources of popularity, particularly with different sources - EG how can you compare record sales to youtube views? And how can you compare data from multiple countries?

I'm not sure. It's a hard problem.

There are, I hear, some very good sites for get youtube statistics, which could help find out what years songs have been popular on YT. I'm not sure how to do records, though.

And ultimately, I'm partly basing this off of my childhood, which was out of the ordinary, music-wise, so you need a larger sample size.

Was a bit dissapointed that it was just music... i guess that doesn't make me much nostalgic.

It's not like those hits aren't still being played to death.

This is awesome! Thank you! :)

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