Melody Mining

A data-driven journey to discover new old tracks from the Rolling Stones Top 500

I had been struggling to discover new music off late. Although I have the YouTube and Spotify’s personalized and adaptive algorithms at my disposal, I find them to be more ‘safe’ than exciting. Let me explain: these apps only suggest music based on what I already like, it does not really go where I haven’t explored.

Friends too have been dismal in this endeavour. Everybody is into the same thing at the same time! I call it tunnel hearing.

So, in a quest to unearth new sounds, I decided to explore rock music. In doing so, I also discovered RollingStone. Yes, both the Band and the Magazine. Their Top 500 of all time list never disappoints. Even if the music is not for me, their short blurbs about the song are a nice respite from tweets.

The best moment was when I discovered the entire data listed on Kaggle. Every song on the Top 500 is neatly itemized into cells with its release date, description, artist, position on the chart, and it’s weekly streak on the chart (how long did it maintain it’s position on the top charts).

With newly discovered music in my years and in front of my eyes, I began analysing this grand repository.

There clearly was an era where music had peaked. Upon doing some research, I found out that the 60s and early 70s music era ss highly regarded in the music industry. The creativity lied in the fusion of many genres like rock, folk, psychedelic which resulted in remarkable music that even resonated today! It is also said that the music of 60s reflected and potentially influenced the politics of that time.

Off the Bands and Artists of those times, some remain at the top with quite a bit of margin. In the Rolling Stone top 500 songs of all time, The Beatles’ titles are featured 23 times! They’re followed by Bob Dylan and Elvis Presley with quite a wide margin.

Although there are many songs in the list that had acquired position 1 in the charts of those times, but they remained popular for varying time periods. This is explained by streaks. Streaks measure the number of weeks in a row that a song remained in the top charts. To find which best ranked song (position 1) was running the longest on charts, I made a table.

It is quite shocking to see that the first title ‘The Twist’ by Chubby Checker lasted in the top 1 position for a whopping 38 weeks! Here’s the song in case you were too impatient to read the rest.

Although this exercise has populated my spotify playlists with a lot of ‘fresh’ music, it was also a great way to learn about the cultural and historical context of (relatively) old music. It’s also fun to see how some of the music styles have evolved over time. If you are from the generation that produced this music, it can also create a sense of nostalgia.

Hope you enjoyed my data-driven journey to diversify my music taste! Drop a like if you did!