Mois : août 2019

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.