Edit: Updated with data from TBHC!

In honor of the Arctic Monkeys’ new album Tranquility Base Hotel and Casino,

I decided to look at Arctic Monkeys data using the terrific SpotifyR package from Charlie Thompson. The package lets you easily pull data from Spotify’s API. You can very quickly extract all the songs by a given artist and see the attributes Spotify keeps for each song.

For example, the Monkeys’ most popular song on Spotify is Fluorescent Adolescent. This song has a “danceability” score of .654, an “energy” score of .828, a tempo of 112, and a “valence” score of .7900. You can even find the key a song was written in (C#) and whether it’s acoustic or not (nope).

I made some visualizations in Tableau that are fun to explore if you’re a fan of the band. Check them out, and let me know if you’d like the data or if there’s anything else you think would be interesting to see.

Popularity of Arctic Monkeys songs by album

AM has the most big songs, followed by Favorite Worst Nightmare. Tranquility Base Hotel and Casino is much less hook-heavy but gets better each time you listen to it.

Cheerfulness and Danceability

Not surprisingly, it looks like Monkeys songs that are more cheerful / danceable are more popular. I love their upbeat stuff, but slower songs like Cornerstone, Mad Sounds, and Only Ones Who Know are some of my favorites.

If you’ve never seen the live version of Only Ones Who Know that Alex plays with Richard Hawley, I can’t recommend it enough:



Song Length and Loudness

It’s interesting to look at song length. I also charted average song length per album, expecting their songs to get longer as they’ve gone from garage band indie punk teenagers to artsy lounge lizards. Turns out Humbug had especially lengthy songs but the general trend is that songs are getting longer:

Thanks for reading! I wrote an R script to pull the data which you can find on github, and if you’d like the raw data feel free to reach out and I’ll send it to you (email joe at this website).

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