Pop Music. Everyone Talking about Pop Music.

As we see below pop has become the dominant genre to the Now album over the decades, typified by Taylor Swift’s move from country to pop in 2014. But calling it just pop is doing pop a disservice, as it’s no longer just the preserve of just 3 minute songs and a catchy tune.

Pop is diverse, complex and has a vast array of sub-genres. Take Now 100 with Ed Sheran’s Sing and Spice Girls Wannabe. Both pop, according to Spotify, but hardly the same.

Rock is stuck with pensioners doing greatest hit tours rather than making contemporary records suitable for Now albums. Specific genres like Britpop come and quickly go, but the musical world always seems to need boy bands….

Don’t Worry, Be Happy?

Valence describes the musical positiveness conveyed by a track. The higher the value, out of 100, the more positive the mood of the song.

Now Albums have always been advertised as being happy and shiny. The data shows the 80's were the high point of Now happiness, but since then it has been a gradual decline. Many recent albums have starting dropping below 50, tipping them into being negative — the Now 100 spike being an obvious outlier because of the inclusion of ‘classic’ tracks.

Music characteristics can be assigned to what is known as the human emotional model of affect. (‘A circumplex model of affect,’ Russell 1980) This model arranges 28 human emotions according to the two dimensions, arousal and pleasure, in circular order. This model allows us to classify music as shown in the quadrant below.

If we add in the Energy of the track we can look at tracks which are negative and energetic — i.e. angry, and those which are positive but gentle — calming. On the whole we see Now albums have become less happy, and in these angry times, have become even slightly angry.

We need to be careful though, averaging by album hides a lot of the diversity of tracks within each album. For example, there are a lot of angry tracks, the angriest being Stamp! by Healy And Amos. There are fewer sad ones, the saddest being, Say Something by A Great Big World & Christina Aguilera, and a lot less Calm tracks like Broken Stones by Paul Weller.

Visit the dynamic version here to hover and explore

Start Me Up

Popularity is measured out of a 100 — with the higher the number, the higher the popularity. Lots of ‘Now’ tracks have zero popularity. Some deservedly so, Garry Glitter’s Dance Me Up, but some are more puzzling, for example The Rolling Stones Undercover (Of The Night).

The reason for this is likely to be the fault of our data gathering. Spotify has multiple instances of each song across many compilation albums and “Best of” albums, etc (Undercover features on the album of the same name as well as Jump Back — The Best of). Each version has its own separate stream and so each gains a different popularity on Spotify. i.e. popularity doesn’t measure the popularity of the track overall, just the popularity of that instance of the track. We can’t guarantee which instance we pick in our matching and so in using popularity we have to assume such data issues average out on aggregation across the data. We won’t analyse individual tracks popularity.

The main (surely only?) task for the producers of the Now Albums is to decide the songs they add and their running order. The blueprint is simple. Put the bangers up front at the start of CD1 and CD2, and leave a few for the end so people will listen all the way through. While we can’t track this across years we can assume the formula remains unchanged.

Cum on Feel the Noize

As most parents have probably noticed music is getting louder, this is something that started from at least Elvis Presley and Buddy Holly in the 1950s. (See — ‘Pop music is louder, less acoustic and more energetic than in the 1950s’ Guardian) Now albums are keeping with that trend by also getting louder, although a little more quieter recently than at its peak.

Time after time

Since Now started the average song length has shortened by a minute from a peak of 4:31 to 3:24, perhaps signifying the move away from longer rock anthems. There are lots of theories as to why and we don’t want to repeat them here, but many focus around the attention spans of modern generations artists “gaming” the Spotify streaming system, either killing the modern intro to get around 30 second demo limits or adding more, shorter, songs to albums to push them higher in the charts.

The Beat Goes On

Previous analysis of hits on the American Billboard charts has shown that 120 BPM is the optimum tempo. So it’s no surprise that a hit based album should hover around that mark. In comparison Dubstep is mostly 80–90, Hip Hop is around 80–115 BPM and Drum and Bass averages a BPM of 160–180.

I Wanna Dance with Somebody

Unsurprisingly, Now albums are full of energy and danceability. Danceabilty has hovered around the same mark for the entire period. There has been more of a change with Energy, and occasionally energy trumps danceabilty in a way that is not completely clear.

Both measures have small fluctuations. One reason is that research, admittedly in Germany, has shown how during warmer months, and assuming there is some in a British summer, the charts are filled with happier, active and energetic songs with a higher danceability. (see ‘Summer hot, Winter not!’ Helmholz et al 2017)