Radar Charts
We started by creating radar charts to show how the average popular song evolved throughout the decades in the last 50 years.
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The code we used to create these radar charts can be found here.
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The radar chart featured at the left displays the mean audio features of the top '20 hit songs per year' per decade. We can observe that top hit songs did evolve throughout the years and that their audio features changed through time.
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This phenomenon is even more accentuated when comparing only the hit songs of the 70s and of the 10s.
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We can see that in 50 years there has been a sharp decrease in the accousticness of popular songs meaning that more songs now have electronically produced sounds.
However, the Energy and Danceability of songs have increased meaning that today’s tracks are more suitable for dancing and can be described as ‘more intense’ than songs in the 1970s. However, other features such as speechiness and instrumentalness seem to have remained quite stable throughout the years.
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We created interactive polar charts with Flourish to compare in more detail how audio features of popular music have evolved in different decades.
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