Top Songs of the 2000’s
Photo by Victor Rodvang on Unsplash
Top 5 Songs
| Decade Rank | Title | Artist | Genre | Year |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | In the End | Linkin Park | alternative metal | 2000 |
| 2 | The Scientist | Coldplay | permanent wave | 2002 |
| 3 | Numb | Linkin Park | alternative metal | 2003 |
| 4 | Fix You | Coldplay | permanent wave | 2005 |
| 5 | Umbrella | Rihanna | barbadian pop | 2008 |
Most Popular Genres
Here are the genre types that make up the top songs of the decade:
Dance pop is the genre that defined the popular music of the 2000’s. ‘Barbadian pop’ is the next most common genre; this ranking being led by Rihanna’s emergence within and domination of the pop music scene.
What Makes a Song Popular
Let’s unpack what actually made a song popular in the 2000’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 2000’s, with popularity as the dependent variable.
After running the analysis, we are left with the following co-efficients for a regression formula:
\[
popularity = 75.98 + (-.09)(energy)
\]
This equation lets us make the inference that in the 2000’s, the audio features of a track that contributed to it being popular were energy only. More specifically, a song being lower in energy would make it more popular, although this is not a strong predictor.
A summary of the stepwise analysis is presented below:
##
## Call:
## lm(formula = popularity ~ energy, data = spotify_data_clean %>%
## filter(decade == decade_input))
##
## Residuals:
## Min 1Q Median 3Q Max
## -39.069 -4.039 2.172 5.513 14.431
##
## Coefficients:
## Estimate Std. Error t value Pr(>|t|)
## (Intercept) 75.98463 4.30314 17.66 <2e-16 ***
## energy -0.08623 0.05947 -1.45 0.15
## ---
## Signif. codes: 0 '***' 0.001 '**' 0.01 '*' 0.05 '.' 0.1 ' ' 1
##
## Residual standard error: 8.58 on 98 degrees of freedom
## Multiple R-squared: 0.02101, Adjusted R-squared: 0.01102
## F-statistic: 2.103 on 1 and 98 DF, p-value: 0.1502