Full write up and interactive graph: https://rpubs.com/tylerotto/billboardtop100

I wanted to dig into the data to see how the songs themselves have changed. A 10 second reel can make a song universally known overnight. This has me wondering if it's directly influencing shorter song lengths, where the "hook" becomes easily shareable, loopable, and instantly recognizable.

To test this, I pulled every Billboard Top 100 chart since 1958 and matched it with Spotify song length data.

Summary:
– Songs were short in the 50s/60s due to limited technology.

  • Song length increase through the LP, 8-track (invented in 1964, look at that bump!), and CD eras as the technology allowed for more storage.

  • But in the streaming + TikTok age, they’re shrinking again.

Posted by Ikigai-san

7 comments

  1. Source: Web scraping Billboard URL and Spotify API
    Code: R (mainly Tidyverse) and plotly

  2. Really cool visual! Would be great to see the original format as a color to really emphasize the hypothesis that format impacts length of songs

  3. Would love to see the name / length of the longest song per year / decade

  4. It was a beautiful song, but it ran too long.
    If you’re gonna have a hit,
    You gotta make it fit.
    So they cut it down to 3:05

    -The Entertainer by
    Billy Joel.

  5. Interesting chart.

    Another thing I saw was that song intros have been getting shorter over the last few years – either the time to the first lyric or the start of the chorus. Would be fun to see how that looks, though I guess your song data only has overall length.

  7. Really cool graph! It doesn’t seem to support your idea that streaming and Tik Tok are influencing song length, though. It shows that length has been decreasing steadily since the early/mid 90s, with no change in slope during the advent of streaming in the 10s or Tik Tok in the 20s. Doesn’t that suggest that something else is driving the change?

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