BILLBOARD HOT

100 AND LYRICS

ANALYSIS

Overview
Billboard
Coding

Overview and Limitations

Billboard
Lyrics

Hot 100 Background

Analysis & Discussion

Analysis & Discussion

Conclusion

Background: Billboard Hot 100

What
How

is the Billboard Hot 100?

is it chosen?

Hot 100 weekly formula = ~40% sales + ~35% airplay + ~25%

streaming, but varies by song
Songs gain points for their position on the weekly charts (1 point for
#100, 2 for #99, etc.) and then ranked by number of points on the year

Billboard

Hot 100 started in August, 1958

First #1 song: Ricky Nelsons Poor Little Fool

Today: Panda by Desiigner

Obviously,

the types of songs on the charts

have changed, but what else has?

Background: Lyrics Analysis

According

to a 2014 headline in
,
Repetitive pop songs [are] more likely to be hits
Inspiration
Repetitiveness of top
songs: how big are the
vocabularies?

Existing

analyses of
Biggest vocabularies in
different genres by artist

Our analysis is more

eclectic

Dataset: Billboard Top 100

For

each artist and

track, the original
dataset includes
Number of Weeks on
the Chart
Peak Chart position
and number of weeks
there

A-Z

URL column:
pruned dataset to
only include artists
available on
azlyrics.com

(Edited) Dataset
snapshot

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Coding and Limitations

Importing
Lyrics

Billboard data into Python to analyze

analysis: needed path link to azlyrics website

Not all songs/artists were available

195 195
Mismatch of song/artist keys between Billboard
data
0
1
Yr.
and AZlyrics site.

Song
Data

lyrics to bag-of-words
to graphs

Lyrics

sample set

195
201 201
2
0
1 2012

Num
N/a

299 290 282

Num
Total

332 313 312

Ratio

Count
good

34

34

483 497 214

0.9
0.10 0.07 0.10 0.93
3 0.97

33

23

30

449 463 208

Billboard Analysis: One Hit

Wonders
One

Hit Wonder
An artist who has
only one hit ever hit
the Billboard Hot 100

Over

time, it seems
that there are less
one hit wonders,
showing a longer
staying power for
artists

Artist

with the most

entries on the chart:
Glee cast with 207
entries

Billboard Analysis: Average # of

weeks on the Chart
Peak

in the early 2000s

~17 weeks on the
chart/song

Record

holder: Jason
Mraz, Im Yours with 76
weeks on the chart
(2008).

Recent
2.86:

relative decline

average number of
weeks (over the history
of the chart) for a song to
spend at #1

Lyrics Analysis
Select

dataset for lyrics

analysis

Nothing
Top

surprising here

words: the, to, and

Love,

baby, heart:
words that make songs
relatable/emotional

Top

words that arent words:

gonna (#80), aint (#97),
wanna (#103)

Rank

Word
1 the'
2 to'
3 and'
4 you'
5 i'
19 love'
43 baby'
69 heart'
73 chorus'
74 back'
79 night'
81 need'
83 life'
85 girl'

Count
489
485
480
475
470
309
200
142
136
134
130
128
127
120

Ideas for Further Analysis

Comparing the lyrics on different websites for accuracy
Looking into the length of songs, length of stanzas, etc. over
time

Conclusion
All of our analysis has shown that there are trends over time
within the Billboard Hot 100 in almost every category
Yet over time lyrics have still remained largely the same