Taylor Swift (Soon-to-be-Kelce)

STA/ISS 313 - Spring 2024 - Project 1

Team Robots 🤖

Introduction

Our Data

  • Taylor Swift R Package

    • Data from Genius and Spotify API

    • All Songs, Album Songs, Albums

  • Each individual song is assigned metrics

    • Energy is a measure from 0.0 to 1.0, represents a perceptual measure of intensity and activity
    • A measure from 0.0 to 1.0 describing the musical positiveness conveyed by a track. Tracks with high valence sound more positive

Q1: How do Taylor Swift’s single releases differ from the songs on the full albums?

Energy on Singles and Albums

This figure is a bar chart titled "Energy Values of Taylor Swift Albums Versus Single Releases" that displays the energy of all of Taylor Swifts songs from each of her albums, compared to the singles off of each of those albums. Each bar represents the average energy score of one album, listed in chronoligcal order. Each album is colored to represent the main color of the album. The plot shows that the single release songs generally tend to have a higher energy score than the overall energy score of the album.

Difference in Tempo in Singles

This figure is a density ridge plot titled "Tempo Distribution of Taylor Swift Songs" that dcompares the tempo of 47 single released songs versus 191 songs released on Swift's albums. The single release density ridge is right-skewed with a peak around a tempo of 90, while the album released ridge is more normally distributed with a peak around 120 tempo. The album released songs also have songs with over a 200 tempo, while the single realeased songs do not.

Q2: How have Taylor Swift’s songs changed over time?

Energy and Valence Over Time

This figure is a point and line plot titled "Taylor Swift album attributes over time" that displays the average energy and valence values of each Taylor swift album along the date at which the album was released. Each album is represented by a point, colored to match the album cover, and labeled witht eh album name. Also, each point is connected by a line to show the change from one album to the next in terms of energy/valence respectively. Under each set of albums is a dotted red line that displays the average change over time among each of these values. The red dotted line along with the rest of the plot show that there is a slight decrease, but seemingly insignificant, decrease in both energy and valence scores of her albums over time.

Taylor’s Version Supremacy

This figure is a bar plot titled "Original versus Taylor's Score Comparison" that displays 8 total bars, each representing a different score value. On the left side of the plot, it dsiplays the user and metacritic score for both the original version of Fearless and the "Taylor's Version" of Fearless. On the right, the same but this time for the two versions of the album Red. On top of each bar is the score for the plots. The plot shows that all of the Taylor's Version score higher than the original version for both metacritic and user scores.

Wrap up

Our Takeaways

  • Taylor Swift has found a Timeless 💜 formula thats allowed her to be incredibly popular over the entire course of her career

  • More energy on single releases, yet slower tempo

  • Despite changing styles of music over time, song attributes only vary slightly

  • Taylor’s Version albums are much more popular than the studio owned versions