There’s no accounting for musical taste — unless it’s tracked by raw data.
A recent story by Polygraph uses Spotify data to track the “timelessness” factor for songs that charted on the Billboard charts from 1950 to 2005, ranking their popularity by number of plays on the streaming service.
There’s an obvious caveat here: The publication’s definition of “timeless” is based solely on the number of Spotify plays, and it’s entirely possible that incredibly timeless songs have been left off the list for reasons of under-playing or -discovering. (For example, Big Star‘s entire catalog.) Also, there are some major artists—including pop superstar Taylor Swift — who have not yet uploaded their catalogs to the service, so they’re altogether missing from the data set.
Pink Floyd, AC/DC, and The Beatles have all just recently put their catalogs on the service, so they have not had a chance to accumulate the numbers. And then there are artists like Neil Young, who have taken their songs off the service, then put them back on again.
Looking at the Top 51 of the list, it’s hard not to wonder how two Linkin Park songs broke into the Top 10 (“Numb,” No. 3; “In the End,” No. 6); or how Eminem’s “Lose Yourself” (No. 1) beats out everything including Nirvana’s “Smells Like Teen Spirit,” Oasis’ “Wonderwall,” and Dire Straits’ “Sultans of Swing.”
To dive into the data, click here.
—RealClearLife
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