Music Through the Decades

Music is a reflection of the times we live in. As our culture and society changes, so do the trends in music. In this data story, you will explore how music has changed over time, and what defined different eras of music.

Throughout this data story, we will look at music as defined by the features assigned by Spotify's EchoNest.


Acousticness: A confidence measure from 0.0 to 1.0 of whether the track is acoustic. 1.0 represents high confidence the track is acoustic.
Danceability: Describes how suitable a track is for dancing based on a combination of musical elements including tempo, rhythm stability, beat strength, and overall regularity. A value of 0.0 is least danceable and 1.0 is most danceable.
Energy: A measure from 0.0 to 1.0 and represents a perceptual measure of intensity and activity. Typically, energetic tracks feel fast, loud, and noisy. For example, death metal has high energy, while a Bach prelude scores low on the scale. Perceptual features contributing to this attribute include dynamic range, perceived loudness, timbre, onset rate, and general entropy.
Instrumentalness: Predicts whether a track contains no vocals . "Ooh" and "aah" sounds are treated as instrumental in this context. Rap or spoken word tracks are clearly "vocal". The closer the instrumentalness value is to 1.0, the greater likelihood the track contains no vocal content. Values above 0.5 are intended to represent instrumental tracks, but confidence is higher as the value approaches 1.0.
Liveness: Detects the presence of an audience in the recording. Higher liveness values represent an increased probability that the track was performed live.
Speechiness: Detects the presence of spoken words in a track. The more exclusively speech-like the recording (e.g. talk show, audio book, poetry), the closer to 1.0 the attribute value.
Valence: A measure from 0.0 to 1.0 describing the musical positiveness conveyed by a track. Tracks with high valence sound more positive (e.g. happy, cheerful, euphoric), while tracks with low valence sound more negative (e.g. sad, depressed, angry).

***Definitions taken from Spotify's API.***

How has music changed over time?

The line chart below shows the average value of each feature across albums that charted over time.
The histogram to the right shows the distribution of that feature value of albums in the selected decade.
Click any of the lines below to see the respective histogram.

Some of the attributes featured above, such as acousticness and energy, had distinct changes over time.

We'll next look at the top five artists and albums per each decade. Do you find the attribute trends of these artists matched the overall trends of the decade?

The below artists personified the trends of their time, with specific genres of music taking over a decade. Explore each decade using the buttons (left) to display the top five artists.

Top 5 Artists of the Decade

no artist yet no artist yet no artist yet no artist yet no artist yet

Note: The top 5 artists were selected based on "count" which represents the total number of times an artist's album charted per decade.

After exploring the top albums, we can see that the 60's were dominated by jazz, the 70's & 80's by pop & rock, the 90's country, and the 2000's & 2010's by rock .

Will the top albums follow the same trends as the top artists?

Top Albums of the Decades


As we all know, music has changed drastically over the past couple of decades. Between societal trends and technological advancements, new styles of music emerged.

Even music players evolved from record players to jukeboxes, cassette tapes and CDs, to iPods and now streaming services on any device.

The attributes of music followed suit. Let's now take a close look at the overall changes across the decades.

Features of Each Decade

1960's and 1970's were the most instrumental, lively, and acoustic decades

2000's and 2010's were the most energetic, loud, and speechy decades

These results are the reverse for the lowest of these categories

Additionally, the 1960's and 1970's are notably the least danceable, and the 2000's and 2010's had the lowest valence scores.

While each decade has a distinctly unique style of music, like many other aspects of pop culture, musical trends can be cyclical. Albums sometimes see a resurgence in popularity a decade or more after its release, due to nostalgia or recurring trends.

Select an album to compare its features to the averages of the decade it released in and the averages of the decade it charted in.

Over the last 60 years, we've seen all different genres and styles of music reach the charts. With decades of music at our fingertips thanks to streaming services like Spotify, it's easier than ever to find music that you enjoy, even if you don't like what's popular now.

Using what you've learned about music through the decades, in our final visualization you'll be able to try different attribute values to find music that best suits you.

Acousticness

Danceability

Energy

Instrumentalness

Liveness

Speechiness

Valence

Use the sliders to input values for different features of music

The year with the lowest prediction error is given as output.

*Predictions calculated using RMSE

The year that best matches your choices is

Average values for this year:

Team EARS


Elizabeth Christman
M.S Computer Science


Rebecca DeSipio
M.S Computer Engineering


Adwait Pradhan
M.Eng Computer Science


Surendrabikram Thapa
M.S Computer Science

All data, code, and image citations can be found at our GitHub.