Drake has been one of the most dominant artists since his debut in 2009. He has a unique style that combines R & B and hip-hop and makes songs that commercially pop. He makes songs with a variety of lengths, sometimes even having beat switches in the same song. So the natural question is; do people like long songs with beat switches, or do people prefer shorter Drake songs?

Data

I decided to look at the top 411 most played Drake songs on Last.fm and see what song lengths people enjoyed the most.

To start here are the song lengths compared to play counts:

Drake song length compared to the average play count for songs of that length

There is a weak correlation (0.15) between play count and song length. But play count doesn’t equate to likeability. Some songs get pushed on the radio more than others and get their play counts inflated.

To combat this, I looked at the replayability factor, which I defined as the play count / unique listeners. This determines how much fans came back to the same song:

Drake songs lengths vs. replayability score.

Not much of a correlation there.

But short songs can’t really be judged the same as long songs in terms of replayability. Most plays are counted as 50% of the song time, so this means a play requires less listening for a short song vs. a long song.

For the next comparison, I multiplied the song length by the replayability score, to get the replayability time:

Drake’s song length compared to how much time people spend replaying it

Clearly this data has a strong correlation, 0.73 to be exact.

Conclusion

The data shows the people like to listen to longer Drake songs by a small amount over shorter drake songs, in total. But when you account for the length of the song, it appears that people overwhelmingly prefer listening to longer Drake songs.

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