Introduction and Recap

Taylor Swift’s music has been extremely influential in pop culture, everyday life, and other music. In looking at her discography, it is easy to wonder what about her music makes it so popular. My past two blog posts gather data data on Swift’s music and does some simple exploration of this data. For the purpose of this post, I will dive into what this data means. Additionally, I will go into what this data could potentially mean. Because there are many factors both on a wide-scale level and on an individual level that influence how popular a song will be, I will not be arguing that different factors are causes of popularity. Furthermore, I will more simply be going into potential relationships that could be influential if further research is done.

In parts 1 and 2, I collected data, cleaned it, and made some visualizations to portray the data. For more information on the source of the data and different visualizations, feel free to look through the following posts:

Data collection

Data cleaning and visualizations

What Does the Data Say?

In looking at the visuals from the Data cleaning and visualizations portion of this research, there were a couple of standout variables in determining popularity. These variables include speechiness and duration.

Image

Are these variables what make Taylor Swift’s music popular? In short, yes and no. If there were specific factors that always determined whether one of Swift’s songs would be popular, all of her popular songs would song the same. The popularity score on the visuals above would have no real variety showing that Swift’s listeners all have the same preferences. Overall, popularity in Swift’s songs does not come down to a specific song characteristic.

Conclusion

Taylor Swift’s spotify data and the popularity of her songs shows how there is not a fixed group of song aspects that make a song popular. Furthermore, personal preference in a song will also determine how much someone likes a song. Some people may value an acoustic song more than a more speech filled song and others may like to simply just dance to a song. All of these song characteristics are valid things to enjoy, and Taylor Swift has proved to be an artists that can use variability in her music. Overall, there may not be fixed things that make a Taylor Swift song popular, but rather, her ability to utilize many different musical elements has contributed to her success.

Thank you for joining me in exploring Taylor Swift’s song data. If there is one thing that you take from this post, let it be to listen to Taylor Swift and appreciate her ability to have such a variety in the type of music that she makes. If you want more resources to see this variety, take a look at her The Eras Tour outfits and recognize that all of the outfits are within three hours.

The visual was made in Python, and the code can be found on this GitHub Repo.