Top Songs of the 1980’s
Photo by Israel Palacio on Unsplash
Top 5 Songs
| Decade Rank | Title | Artist | Genre | Year |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Livin’ On A Prayer | Bon Jovi | glam metal | 1986 |
| 2 | Africa | TOTO | album rock | 1982 |
| 3 | Another One Bites The Dust - Remastered 2011 | Queen | glam rock | 1980 |
| 4 | Break My Stride | Matthew Wilder | new wave pop | 1983 |
| 5 | I Wanna Dance with Somebody (Who Loves Me) | Whitney Houston | dance pop | 1987 |
Most Popular Genres
Here are the genre types that make up the top songs of the decade:
Rock music dominated the charts, with ‘album rock’ and ‘dance rock’ making up over half of the Top 100 songs of the decade. ‘Adult standards’, which is a genre defined by classic or oldschool hits of the past, also contributed to the top songs; followed by other subgenres of pop and rock.
What Makes a Song Popular
Let’s unpack what actually made a song popular in the 1980’s. What elements of the music were important for it to be liked by the masses throughout a whole decade? To explore this, I ran a stepwise regression on all the audio features Spotify provided for the Top 100 songs of the 1980’s, with popularity as the dependent variable.
After running the analysis, we are left with the following co-efficients for a regression formula:
This equation lets us make the inference that in the 1980’s, the audio features of a track that contributed to it being popular were energy, duration, acousticness and speechiness. More specifically, a song being lower in energy, shorter in duration, lower in acousticness and higher in speechiness would make it more popular.
A summary of the stepwise analysis is presented below:
##
## Call:
## lm(formula = popularity ~ energy + duration + acousticness +
## speechiness, data = spotify_data_clean %>% filter(decade ==
## decade_input))
##
## Residuals:
## Min 1Q Median 3Q Max
## -25.6532 -4.0732 0.0869 4.0240 16.5770
##
## Coefficients:
## Estimate Std. Error t value Pr(>|t|)
## (Intercept) 79.29231 4.59974 17.238 <2e-16 ***
## energy -0.09284 0.04226 -2.197 0.0303 *
## duration -0.02088 0.01376 -1.518 0.1322
## acousticness -0.08048 0.03731 -2.157 0.0334 *
## speechiness 0.41234 0.26912 1.532 0.1286
## ---
## Signif. codes: 0 '***' 0.001 '**' 0.01 '*' 0.05 '.' 0.1 ' ' 1
##
## Residual standard error: 7.146 on 100 degrees of freedom
## Multiple R-squared: 0.09032, Adjusted R-squared: 0.05394
## F-statistic: 2.482 on 4 and 100 DF, p-value: 0.04853