Polygraph:
This is a story about proving, with data, that No Diggity by Blackstreet is timeless.
Until recently, it was impossible to measure the popularity of older music. Billboard charts and album sales only tell us about a song’s popularity at the time of its release.
But now we have Spotify, a buffet of all of music, new and old. Tracks with fewer plays are fading into obscurity. And those with more plays are remaining in the cultural ether.
As with all lists like this, we’ll never agree completely on its makeup but it’s still interesting to see which songs are being played and their frequency. Jason Kottke has created a Rdio and Spotify playlist of songs from the article.
“And those with more plays are remaining in the cultural ether.”
I am not a huge fan of equating “culture” and “consumption”, especially when looking at “all you can eat” models, which completely separate cost and effort from value.
If I play something for “free”, it is often the result of (other’s) playlists or pre-made channels. If a song appears more often, it is played more often. So, is this a “choice” of the listener now? Or just “eating the dog food” (what most radio always has been)? If it becomes impossible to tell and more and more arbitrary… it may be many things, but not culture.
Record companies have killed great stuff in the past, too. But a single artist or small band could at least exist selling 5k records and doing some gigs. Streaming is killing “culture”, it is no mean to measure it.
I don’t know Spotify. But if it’s like Pandora, then these numbers might just be meaningless. Are the songs chosen by the listeners, or is some algorithm picking them? I have a feeling the numbers reflect the random nature of what’s available * RNG. (Random number generator.)
Given that unlike with radio, it’s easy to skip or change to any playlist you want, yes, it’s different.
(I think the bigger problem with the results is that it’s not “what’s enduring” but “what people who use Spotify a lot like, that’s old”.
“No Diggity” is also in the news now, which makes me wonder what the shape of the listening curve looks like over time.
Like Polygraph says, also, “Spotify’s user base already skews young, and the data more-or-less represents a generation in their mid-20s.”
Of course, if we polled old fogies, we’d find early 80s pop and 70s classic rock “being the most timeless songs of all time”…)
Spotify lets you browse their entire library and make playlists (and listen to other ones people have made public or shared), or listen to curated radio.
It’s not Pandora-like as a primary experience, and as far as I can tell from looking at the app again [I’m not a regular user] it doesn’t even have a “play stuff like this” mode.
Timeless?
350 years and still going strong — https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pachelbel%27s_Canon
Vivaldi and Bach as well. No links. None needed.