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ArtesianDiff t1_iuq8ibb wrote

I knew it wasn't my imagination that modern popular songs are more gloomy! I would love to see percentage of songs that are in a minor key over time too. I have a feeling that has increased too.

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MonkeyCube t1_iuqx2aa wrote

It takes more than simply using a minor key to make a song evoke sad emotions. The minor keys have traditional been more effective at doing so, but they're surprisingly versatile. A majority of electronic dancehall music in the 90s was written in aeolian, for example. Seven Nation Army became a sports anthem with a solidly minor riff. But to more clearly illustrate the point:

Major key songs that sound sad:

  • Radiohead - No Surprises

  • Adele - Someone Like You

  • Soundgarden - Black Hole Sun

  • Taps (funeral song)

And conversely, happy songs in minor keys:

  • Usher - Yeah

  • Justin Timberlake - Sexy Back

  • Lady Gaga - Just Dance

  • LMFAO - Party Rock

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samillos t1_iuqz3kc wrote

My most recent discovery, Levitating by Dua Lipa not only is in a minor key, it only uses minor chords during the whole song

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Sheyvan t1_iur7qmj wrote

>Seven Nation Army became a sports anthem with a solidly minor riff.

Ok, sure - the Melody is in Minor, but Jack White plays every Chord as a major one in an open tuning. Lots of Chromatic Mediants. ;)

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MonkeyCube t1_iur9bb0 wrote

Ha. Fair. Though if we're going down that rabbit hole, couldn't it be argued that a large chunk of the blues is the sound of minor key melodies over major chords?

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Mine-Shaft-Gap t1_iur2b6g wrote

Ahhh, No Surprises. Sounds like a lullaby, but with lyrics like "I'll take a quiet life, a hand shake of carbon monoxide".

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CheckOutUserNamesLad t1_iurymfl wrote

Any measure of happiness or sadness is going to have inherent bias and error. It doesn't make the measurement bad or unuseful.

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EldraziKlap t1_iuq7elg wrote

How is "acousticness " defined?

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robert_ritz OP t1_iuq7k2s wrote

Spotify defines it as the likelihood that a track is acoustic on a scale from 0-1. You could interpret this as how acoustic sounding a track is.

This is a machine-made metric, though, and you can take it with a grain of salt if you wish. Docs on these are here.

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EldraziKlap t1_iuq8eqr wrote

Thanks for the response. I moreso wonder what in that case Spotify defines as acoustic, and what it considers non-acoustic music.

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robert_ritz OP t1_iuq8kjd wrote

My guess is that there is no "definition" and that a machine learning model was trained using songs labeled as "acoustic". This is probably the result of either some database Spotify pulls from or the artists themselves.

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isaacals t1_iurr6iq wrote

I would assume it's just a degree of how much sound amplification/modulation and/or manipulation is made to the acoustic instrument or the recordings of it. Mind you, you don't even need to "record" if the original sound is made digitally/electronically which I guess can be considered non-acoustic or at least a very low degree of acoustic-sounding.

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Canucker22 t1_iuqieus wrote

Not really getting less acoustic anymore: according to this graph top 10 singles from the last year or two were more than at any time since 1981 or so.

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GMN123 t1_iuqx14j wrote

I wonder how much of that was Taylor Swift's acoustic albums.

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nedmund13 t1_iur6ifz wrote

Considering that Midnights (though less folk-acoustic than folklore or evermore) currently holds all top 10 spots, as well as 13-15, I'd be willing to bet she's a big part of that impact

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hurshy t1_iurqca5 wrote

But that’s 2022 and the graph ends at 2020

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Knyfe-Wrench t1_iururrt wrote

The last label on the graph is 2020 but it clearly goes beyond that.

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hurshy t1_iut8nn2 wrote

Well not necessarily clear but I wasn’t wearing glasses so…

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nedmund13 t1_iustrhc wrote

Yes (though it looks like the data might actually spill over to 2021) - my point was more, her latest album is TOTALLY dominating the charts so it seems very likely that her previous albums (which were also extremely popular, and were very folk-acoustic) would have contributed to the 2020/2021 spike

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cda91 t1_iuqrmcr wrote

Yeah, the last four years have seen highs not seen since the early 80s - definitely shouldn't say that in the title.

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swaggyquack t1_iuuk5zo wrote

A lot of rap songs since 2020 started using more samples of acoustic guitars and shit which prob jumped it... then stuff like Olivia rodrigo and Taylor swift etc.

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RealRiotingPacifist t1_iuq6orp wrote

What units are on the Y axis?

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Ignitus1 t1_iuqidp8 wrote

It says right there mate, "Acousticness" and "Valence".

How those are determined is anybody's guess, but they're normalized to a 0.0-1.0 scale.

Edit: From OP's other reply, they are Spotify's proprietary metrics:

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.

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).

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beingsubmitted t1_iuqxtrd wrote

Hmm... I tried to find out more about the "valence" attribute from spotify. I assume both of these values are coming from machine learning algos. Spotify describes valence as how "positive" something feels, but the word valence comes from chemistry - the linking between atoms. It's also used in linguistics to describe the linking of terms (in "charlie gave the big, jolly, man apples", 'gave' is linked to 'charlie' and 'apples' and 'man', 'the', 'big' and 'jolly' are also linked to 'man', but not to 'gave' as they refer to 'man' not the act of giving, so 'gave' is connected to 3 words, valence of 3, man is connected to 4 words, valence of 4).

Since the linguistic definition of valence doesn't at all seem to fit 'positivity', I assume valence here is tonal or rhythmic, but it's not a common descriptor in music generally. It could be rhythmic synchronization, or an inverse of syncopation, but that wouldn't generally make something feel positive, so my best guess is tonal, and it's a machine learning algorithm trying to fit the pitches to the tonic / major scale. Any song in a major key can be rewritten exactly the same in a minor key. A minor and C major use all of the exact same notes, but if the song tends toward C as "home" it's Major and happy sounding, if it tends toward A as "home" it's minor and more sad or whatever. You can't just have an algo look at what notes are used to determine if it's major or minor, you would more likely look at the distribution of how the notes are used, which is something I could see describing as valence. Plus, Major and Minor are binary, but there's really a continuum. Mary had a little Lamb is very very major. Moonlight sonata is very very minor. So I think here we're seeing songs growing increasingly less major. Specifically less major, though - there are other modalities of music outside of Major and Minor, and a single metric wouldn't really capture all of that - less major doesn't necessarily mean more minor, although we could generally assume it mostly goes that way.

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f1g4 t1_iurgtae wrote

Here I found A LOT more about the valence score: https://github.com/raffg/spotify_analysis so far it looks like a deep learning trained model and fine tuned. It seems to work pretty well.

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beingsubmitted t1_iurqo28 wrote

Interesting - seems it's mostly just trying to fit one experts idea of what valence means, so we'd have to ask that dude what features contribute to valence.

But... aside from the fact that it's relatively old and predates a lot of the better language models we have today, I think we can also conclude it's likely not looking at lyrical content by the inclusion of both Hey ya and Pumped Up Kicks at the top of the valence scores.

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robert_ritz OP t1_iuq3vpq wrote

I scraped data from Wikipedia (link) for the Billboard top-ten singles each year from 1958 to 2022. I then used the Spotify API (link) to get features about each song.

Valence is a measure of positivity (lower is more negative, scale from 0-1). Acousticness is how confident their algorithm is that the track is acoustic (0-1).

Tools used: Python, Spotipy, Pandas, Matplotlib

You can find a blog post about this analysis here. If you want to view the code and data used to generate this plot, you can find it here.

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ILoveToVoidAWarranty t1_iur34q7 wrote

I don't know what "valence" means in this context, and I don't know what "acousticness" means at all.

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GoodAndBluts t1_iurceoh wrote

The acousticness thing is not a surprise - people are creating new sounds (and even instruments) all the time.

Music is geared around novelty, and its hard to make an acoustic guitar or piano sound novel after 60 years of pop music

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Steepyslope t1_iuqisrs wrote

I was so confused I thought it was about singles as in people who are singles. Idk why

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Alexalder t1_iuqz52x wrote

Ignoring the fact that the graph shows a constant positive trend in acousticness in the last 20 years, but even then what is this even supposed to mean i don't like positive acoustic music what is this 1920

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AstroBuck t1_ius2ruk wrote

What does valence mean here? I only know that word from chemistry and I don't think they're talking about valence shells.

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Jausti0418 t1_iuqs1nd wrote

Makes sense, the world’s going to shit

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rodolphoteardrop t1_iuqwqw3 wrote

If you're getting your music from the Billboard top 10 then you're lazy and the problem is you. Part of the reason the world is shit is that people just accept what's given to them....like the Billboard top 10. Search out music you like rather than passively listening to the radio.

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drillgorg t1_iur2ix3 wrote

Popular music bad!

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rodolphoteardrop t1_iurndzw wrote

I was once stuck in at a job in an office that had the radio on. In the space of 2 hours I heard the same song 4 times. Twice an hour. Do you know how "popular music" becomes popular? (Hint: it's got very little to do with whether is a decent song or not.)

I'm not going to apologize for actually listening to music than putting it on in the background and ignoring it. The music industry isn't about music. It's about profits.

There was an article awhile back about Sufjan Stevens. They did a focus group and found that the vast majority of random people liked his songs. Even with that, he couldn't get industry backing.

Look. I get it. You want your choices made for you. You'll like what you're told to like. Good for you. The fact is that there is a ton of amazing music that people will never know about because the monopolies that run radio won't play it.

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drillgorg t1_iurnu7h wrote

I mean I mostly listen to video game dubstep remixes on YouTube.

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Howboutit85 t1_iurznjc wrote

Sorry you’re getting down voted but yeah. This.

If you like top 10 stuff then great, but there’s a whole world of music out there not on the radio that is great, you just need to dig beneath the very top layer of culture.

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Jausti0418 t1_iurel21 wrote

How did you possible get that from my comment lmao. What a fucking stretch

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rodolphoteardrop t1_iurkg8n wrote

>Makes sense, the world’s going to shit

That sounds a lot like "old man yells at cloud." So I made the assumption that if you the music is part of "the world going to shit" you must be listening to it...or just making your own assumption about music.

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Jausti0418 t1_iutrb04 wrote

Again how the fuck is that what you got? The world is going to shit ergo popular music is also going to be depressing because it’s relatable and that’s what makes it popular you dunce

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[deleted] t1_iurdy17 wrote

Off topic: I think it's crazy how few artists that we have today aren't overly produced. Very few true rock bands or people that can actually play an instrument while they perform.

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Howboutit85 t1_iurzezh wrote

Depends on what genre you’re into. I’m a metal and hard rock guy and the bands, the hundreds and hundreds of bands, that I like are playing their own instruments and writing their own songs. They exist in droves, just not in the billboard top 100.

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Knyfe-Wrench t1_iurvdft wrote

I don't think it's crazy at all. Rock is dying in the mainstream, and with it most of the full bands. Pop and hip-hop have a lot more solo acts and vocal groups.

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TopofTheTits t1_ius2kvu wrote

This is someone else's opinion.

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sirnoggin t1_iuscula wrote

You mean there's a correlation between acoustic guitar music and making me feel crap because it sounds bad? YEP

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Brewe t1_iusdj36 wrote

Hmm, I would have assumed the pandemic would have resulted in less acoustivicity (yes, it's totally a word).

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harrisonj247 t1_iusimae wrote

I've got a negative feeling. Ooh ooh. That tonight will not be a good night.

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xhyzBOSS t1_iusled3 wrote

Music is not like it used to be, Its more like Entertainmet nowadays.

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screenstupid t1_iuuiqch wrote

Party rock anthem, I see you!

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robert_ritz OP t1_iuuqltc wrote

This is why I love sharing these things on the internet. People see things I would never notice. Thanks!

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HJVN t1_iuv6osn wrote

Acouticness in modern music has mostly been replaced by electronic noise. Prove me wrong.

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SCWthrowaway1095 t1_iuqv6nn wrote

Go damn, and I thought I was the only one who thought music nowadays sounds sad as shit.

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madam_anal t1_iur2g6g wrote

Wow! I can't believe that data! That's a solid trend!! Now I need an explanation. Are there scientific papers about this?

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aufstand t1_iure9lh wrote

Who actually gives a 💩 if Taylost (verily!) Swift and others like her are dominating it anyway, regularly? Mostly by cheating/abusing the system with their fanbases, massively. All while artists - who don't have a massive industry or fanbase behind them - have to give away their fruits of labour for pennies because the payment schemes behind pop culture markets are deeply fscked up to favour the few "big ones"...

That whole pop-"culture"-thing has completely degraded to unculture decades ago. I think it was actually flawed from the beginning on: Plasticized, industrialized, capital-motivated "music" - the idea is just outright stupid, imho. Not saying it's all crap, but most of it definitely is. Even if you judge it by quality and not taste. A constant stream of uniform, moneymaking sludge designed to extract as much buck as possible. </rant>

I'm just very, very, very happy that humanity - in spite of all of this - still has an interest in keeping a vast and indie artist community alive and thriving.

Shout out to every independent musician! Keep doing what you do! 💕

^(Queue the huuuuge Swift-Fandom bashing this post in 3..2..1.. yet, as you can see above, I don't give a shite about mass-consumer-opinions.)

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