I collected data of other K-Pop groups like BigBang and Twice, based on this top 20 artist chart. In total, I had a total of 2,673 K-Pop soundtracks. With few lines of code, I extracted some interesting mathematic properties about BTS’ music.

These numbers represent the average of every musical feature for every K-pop song in our dataset. We see here that on average, BTS’ songs have the highest level of speechiness , almost tripling that of other artists. Speechiness is the detection of spoken words in a track, which is converse to instrumentalness : a measurement of whether a track contains vocals. No wonder that BTS’ songs are relatively low in the latter metric. In fact, take a look at the chart below:

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We see here that since 2013 (when the group first debuted), measurements in liveness danceability , speechiness , and acousticness all fell gradually until the year 2016, when the numbers started to go back up. Converse, energy in their tracks increased until the same year of 2016 when the numbers began declining.

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Focusing on speechiness alone, Never Mind by BTS had one of the highest levels of with a rate of 0.90! If you check out the music video below, you will see that the song is a mixture of pop, hip-hop and rap, resulting high rate of vocals in the track.

Visual comparisons among artists also can be prove useful for our problem of addressing group identity and uniqueness.

The distribution plot above illustrates a interesting piece of information. While BigBang and iKon’s music generally center around a specific tempo (125 and ~90 respectively), BTS’s music is far more distributed in the beats. This indicates that BTS’ music is diverse in rhythm and speed, comprising of songs that are both extremely fast and slow in pace .

I wanted to hear from myself how different the pace was. The BTS track with the slowest tempo was Butterfly, which is a Ballad-EDM mix. The track containing one of the fastest tempos was MAMA, which lean toward straight up hip-hop.

Not the original for ‘MAMA’. Couldn’t find it on Soundcloud.

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iKon is especially relevant for BTS comparison, since they are also a pop/hip-hop hybrid group (BigBang too). But their songs are much slower on average, like Welcome Back which hovers around the 90 tempo line. My data showed that their fastest music were either remixes or live concert versions of originals.