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Joe Sipher's avatar

Interesting write up! I was waiting for the movie tie in though. How much of the longevity of these songs is due to the fact they were highlighted in a movie? Maybe a future statistical analysis?

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Brian Thurogood's avatar

Two pieces of information are necessary to give this analysis any credibility.

First is the geographic catchment. If the majority of Spotify users in the data set are from the USA, that gives an enormous bias. For example, Spotify (and for that matter Apple Music) will regularly 'force' rap and hip hop into any playlist – even if I have repeatedly notified them to "play less". In other words, the algorithm is constantly trying to load music it thinks is 'popular' into playlists that I have no interest in, for example, rap and hip hop. Is the geographic catchment known?

Second is the actual listening time of any piece of music. If 30 seconds is defined as being "listened to" then every rap and hip hop song that has been forced into my playlists could be in the data, especially when it can take me 30 seconds to reach the music-playing device and hit the "please, no more of this stuff" button, especially if, as usual, the iPad is the turntable and the iMac is the drawing board.

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