Music to My Ears: An Analysis of Taylor Swift and Beyoncé Music and Youtube Search Trends
Taylor Swift and Beyoncé are two of the most successful artists since the 2000’s. Hit Albums like Fearless, Dangerously in Love and 1989 all have sales of over 10 Million units as defined by the RIAA. With how popular these two artists are it is interesting to look at a comparison of their music, popularity over time and the states they are most popular in.
First off most of this data was compiled by Rosie Baillie and Dr. Sara Stoudt for the R for Data Science Tidy Tuesday project so a huge thank you to everyone that worked to come up with this idea and gather relevant data.
You can read more about this data or get a link to Rosie’s analysis on Taylor Swift songs on the Tidy Tuesday GitHub:
Youtube Search Trends
Looking at user search trends on Youtube for Taylor and Beyoncé it is clear that from between 2008 and 2015 both Artists were at their peak popularity on the platform. Every Album release corresponds to a strong spike up in searches with Taylor’s album releases being more popular on average. The most popular month in the dataset for Taylor was September 2009 which corresponded with her October 27th re-release of Fearless. For Beyoncé her peak popularity was in November and December of 2008 corresponding with her November 14th release of the album I Am… Sasha Fierce.
Taylor’s October 2014 album 1989 marks the last album for Taylor that gained any meaningful traction in Youtube searches. In fact in November of 2014 an article was written on Mashable describing the effect of Taylor removing her music from Spotify. Since these dates line up with her 1989 album release they probably inflate that album’s effect on her search history if anything.
Around 2015 both artist’s relative popularity in Youtube searches began declining and to this point has never recovered. In fact since 2015 each of Taylor’s album’s have produced a less meaningful search bump compared to the album before it. This most likely corresponds with the rise of music streaming on Spotify, Apple Music and other sources.
Music Analysis
Listening to the music of both artists there are some obvious differences. That being said this analysis will focus mostly on song lyrics since that is the data that was provided.
First looking at Taylor’s song titles she picks the title from an exact song lyric 89% of the time but as the title word count grows the likelihood of an exact match plummets. Taylor’s top songs by number of times a title is mentioned in the song lyrics are This Love (54), Red (41), Daylight (40), Out of the Woods (38) and Shake it Off (36).
Beyoncé is more creative with her titles with the fact that she is less likely to pick an exact song lyric as a title. As the title word count grows though the same trend holds as before. Beyoncé’s top songs by number of times a title is mentioned in the song lyrics are Waiting (75), Halo (67), Hello (59) and Run the World (59).
Color Analysis
Both Artists love to use colors in their songs. This is a visualization of the different colors that each artist uses in their music.
Taylor Swift uses the color Red much more than any other color in her songs and actually has both a song and album titled Red. Unsurprisingly Taylor’s track Red has the most mentions of a single color, red at 41 times it also was the track with the most total mentions of colors at 47. More interesting may be the fact that the track with the most unique colors mentioned is invisible string from the folklore album which mentions 4 unique colors (gold, green, pink and purple) most of which are rare mentions in Taylor songs.
Beyoncé in the 390 songs analyzed sings about green a lot more than I would expect. I think this may have something to do with the fact that her song Green Light mentions green 23 times and the dataset includes five different versions or remixes of that song. The song with the most mentions of a single color is Hey Goldmember (Ft. Devin The Dude & Solange) which mentions gold 48 times. The song with the most unique colors mentioned is Lemonade Film (Script) which mentions 9 colors (black, white, red, gold, maroon, yellow, pink, green and orange) a total of 70 times in the track.
Youtube Popularity Comparison Map
When looking at a comparison of Artist popularity by state there are some obvious patterns. Taylor seems to be more popular in the Midwest where her early career country style music probably is more popular. Beyoncé on the other hand is most popular in the South but also appears to be slightly more popular in states with large cities (New York, California, Illinois and Texas).
Code to reproduce this analysis is available on GitHub:
https://github.com/thedataviz/Tidy-Tuesday/tree/master/9-29-2020
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