Drake and Taylor Swift are the undisputed King and Queen of the Billboard Hot 100. With 157 and 109 different songs on the charts respectively, they have shattered the numbers posted by the Rolling Stones (57), Elton John (64) and the Beatles (69). After realizing this, I wanted to discover some of the other ways that the music industry has changed over time, namely by identifying patterns in how much music is released, who is releasing it, and how it performs on the Hot 100. To do this, I will be downloading the Hot 100 charts as structured tables and creating custom metrics to quantify these trends and more.

Exploratory Visuals

The Billboard Hot 100 was first released in August 1958, so for this analysis my data includes every week of every year between 1959 and 2019 (leaving out the two incomplete years, 1958 and 2020) — special thanks to Chris Guo’s API.

The number of different artists that crack the top 100 is decreasing over time, meaning the arena of pop stars vying for Hot 100 entries is about three fewer each year. This market is ripe for superstars to release more songs each with fewer peers to crowd them out.

#data-science #music-industry #data-visualization #pop-music #data-analytics