Yesterday's Numbers

To follow up on a previous post regarding David Bowie and Bob Dylan’s song lengths, here is another look at how song lengths can give insights on how artists have changed through time. In the graph below we look at two metrics related to song length: the variance of song lengths over all albums and the slope of the average song length through time in absolute value (based on a linear regression using the method of least squres). Combining these two metrics will enable us to see whether high variance in song length is actually due to a significant change of musical style over the long-term or whether it is just a sign of a constant desire to change some aspects of one’s music but without changing the style of their music in depth.

In order to avoid extreme values (such as the close to 16 mins average on Lou Reed’s « Metal Machine Music ») skewing the overall trends, the values per album were floored at 2:45 mins and capped at 6:30 mins (these values corresponding to the 2,5 and 97,5 percentiles of the values in the scope of this study).

We easily identify Joni Mitchell and Tom Waits as artists that have had changed their musical style quite evidently, taking in strong jazz influences for Mitchell and turning more and more towards blues as he has advanced for Waits. And on the other hand we can identify Bob Dylan or Neil Young as artists that are often changing in appearance, as illustrated by their ability to switch between accoustic and electric from one album to the next, but that have never really turned away from the music that they wrote at their beginnings. In the case of Dylan the similarities in style between « Highway’ 61 Revisited » and « Modern Times » although separated by 40 yers can be a good example of how steady his music’s deep roots are.

We can also single out some other artists, such as Bruce Springsteen who surprisingly shows some signs of long-term change, which comes from the fact he has never gone back to the epic and grandiloquent songwriting of « The Wild, the Innocent and the E Street Shuffle » (and, to some extent, of « Born to Run ») since then. Or Elton John, whose song length’s evolution suggests that he has not had the desire to change neither some aspects nor the fundamental style of his music over the course of his career.

If you wish to see the evolution through time of the average song length for a specific artist, you can find them all here.

David Bowie and Bob Dylan have produced albums of great quality over multiple decades, and this has been related to their ability to reinvent themselves regularly. Both of them have famously changed the style of their music quite overtly on several occasions, and in the case of David Bowie this was even accompanied by a clear change in his appearance at the same time. To name some of the most known phases: there were the Ziggy Stardust, soul or Berlin periods for Bowie, the protest song, electric or christian periods for Dylan.

These periods appear quite clearly through the average song legth per album. When looking at the graphs below one can notice that within a period the average song length is quite consistent and that a period of increase or decrease in song length is a sign of the singer going through a change in his style and transitioningg form one period to another.

And if one takes the appearance of a clear shift in the albums’ average song length as the sign of a successful change it sems that Bob Dylan has been able to keep on reinventing himself the longest, and that over the past 30 years David Bowie has struggled in this regard.

It comes as no surprise that artists reached their peak more often than not towards the start of their career. However it is quite widespread as for the majority of artists in the study the most successful album was the fourth or later release.

What is interesting to notice is that the two points with the most artists are the first and third albums. Either the artist hits his peak straight away, or it takes him some time to get there. The latter is most noticeable for bands started in the 60s where bands were constantly setting new boundaries for pop music and therefore new peaks for themselves.

In the above the most succesful album was determined as the one with the highest number of releases. The analysis took into account 70 bands or artists that released 7 albums or more, and whose first release was prior to 2000.

Let’s look at this in terms of regularity, that is who has written the most songs that contain the word « love ». And, when doing so, it is George that comes on top! Here are the overall share of songs that contain at least one occurence of the word « love » for George, John and Paul for all songs written up to 1980 :

• George Harrison: 55%
• John Lennon: 40%
• Paul McCartney: 39%

As you can see below George is the one that mentions « love » the most consistently through time as the share of songs containing it never goes below 40% for any period. On the other hand there is a big decrease for both John and Paul during the end of the Beatles’ years as the share for the songs written by them is lower than 30% for both « 67-68 » and « 69-70 » period. This might have been a reaction to what was a heavy use of the word during their first years of writing songs.

However when we look at average number of occurences of the word within the song if it appears at least once then the results are quite different as it is now Paul that has the highest ratio. So Paul isn’t maybe the one that talks the most often about love, but when he does he makes it a bigger part of the song than the others do.

The situation has drastically changed over the past 40 years. In early 70s all countries in the study besides Germany recorded albums in their local language on more than 65% of occasions, however as of 2015 all of these countries were now doing so less than 50% of times. Germany stands out as having already a low share of releases being recorded in german in early 70s.

Another notable trend is the major decrease seen over the last 10 years, and most notably in Turkey. This seems to coincide, as you can see on the second graph, with a major drop in number of records being released overall that started in 2007. And this drop impacted more heavily the number of recordings in local language. One could probably conclude from this that the music industry crisis led artists and/or companies to give a preference to singing in English as this would allow them to have access to a larger audience.

In order to answer this question, we’ve looked into the following three criteria: total number of albums released, average quality of albums released, number of very high quality albums released.

Looking at the chart below it seems that the artists/bands situated in the top right corner (The Beatles, The Rolling Stones and Bruce Springsteen) make a strong case in order to be considered as the ones with the best discographies, since they have been able to produced a large amount of very high quality albums while maintaining a great level of consistency throughout their career. However Bob Dylan could also rightly be considered for that question given he has produced the highest number of very high quality albums.

For the Beach Boys however it is difficult to see how they could come out well from this discussion given that, despite the large number of albums they produced, they rank the lowest in both categories…

If you go here you can see the original version of the map, as well as add some other artists that don’t appear in this vizualisation or remove some that are in it.