So, the music streaming services are breaking out the year-end recaps, and as regular CU:BS readers know, I do love me some year-end music lists.
In addition to the year-end lists, my Spotify recap gave me a small taste of some of my listening habits over the past decade. Per Spotify, I've been a member of the service since 2011, receiving premium benefits (read: I'm paying $10 a month for unlimited streams and no ads) since 2014.
Spotify did not quite provide me as much end-of-decade content as I soon decided I want, which in essence means they curated no top 100 songs of the decade playlist for me to peruse. They also didn't go deep enough in analyzing my listening habits through the decade as they do for just the past year. Thankfully, I have recap playlists from the past five years, although I have no idea if or how I can access the full recaps (top songs by season, top artists, top genres, etc.) from 2015-2018.
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I was planning on having a grand finale for the CU:BS Top 100 series which began on this blog in 2014. Said finale would include a year-end list for 2019 (similarly formatted to last year's list, which came in four installments as opposed to the 10 in years before), as well as a massive 1,000-song list of the top songs of the 2010's decade.
After publishing both lists, I would retire from music chart-watching forever. I saw it as somewhat of a satisfying close to a phase of my life that began as I was mentally checking out of college one semester early. In other words, as the start of my educational downfall coincided with my newfound obsession with analyzing pop music charts, so too might I be able to begin a new life journey by leaving the Billboard world behind.
Sadly, as most of my ambitions go, this extensive project fell flat on its face. In a tragic and completely preventable turn of events, I knocked my laptop over a month or two ago. It landed right on the plugged-in USB drive that had been storing all of my chart data (and numerous other projects) since late 2016, making said flash drive unreadable.
I've been attempting to recover the data from the drive, but I've resigned myself to the fact that I won't have my Mega Chart Extravaganza ready to publish by year's end. Once I do recover the files, I may complete the project for my own edification (I was getting tantalizingly close to the end), but I doubt I'll publish unless I get overwhelming requests from you, my reading public to do so.
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That was quite a bit of exposition, I know, but now for the fun part.
Because of my dissatisfaction with the lack of coverage my decade of music streaming received, and in lieu of the Decade End Musical Smorgasbord (I have a lot of words, and I've not been putting many of them out into the world recently, so bear with me), I'm doing a bit of a merger between the two things.
As mentioned above, I have playlists of my year-end streaming recaps for each of the past five years. As hinted at above, I'm presently looking at that time frame (2015-2019) as kind of a chapter in the Book of Clayton.
This chapter really began in 2014 and I'll probably finally close the book on it sometime in 2020, but January 2015-December 2019 seems like a nice round unit of time to me. We'll call it my half decade of mental hibernation.
What I did, then, is curate a playlist of my top 100 songs from the past five years. I got a little fancy in figuring out the exact order. For all it lacked, I did get one awesome tool from Spotify's "decade" recap, a chart that showed how many minutes I streamed per year. Using this chart, I developed my formula for scoring each song.
Each song was given a base score which, as in my Billboard compilations, was inverse of its position of each year's chart. In other words, the number one song from each year was given 100 points, the number five song got 96, and on down to song number 100 receiving just one point.
I then multiplied each song's score by the percentage of my overall streaming minutes I spent during each year:
From 2015-2019, I spent 614,275 total minutes streaming music through Spotify. In 2015, I listened to 87,106 minutes of music (good for 14.18% of the total time in the overall span). In 2016 I listened for 123,190 minutes (20.05%), in 2017 162,618 (26.47%), in 2018 110,363 (17.97%), and in 2019 I streamed 130,998 minutes of music (21.33%).
After multiplying each song's base score by the time percentage for its appropriate year, I added the scores of songs that appeared on multiple years' charts to come up with my overall score and rankings.
Just for a quick example, let's say a particular song was ranked 39th on my 2015 list, second in 2016, off the chart in 2017 and 2018, then rebounded to 68 in 2019. Its score would be formulated as such:
x=(62*.1418)+(98*.2005)+(33*.2133)
for an approximate total of 35.48.
I then ranked the overall scores from highest to lowest, and the top 100 scores made my Ultimate Recap Playlist (for what it's worth, the hypothetical song I just randomly came with would have finished 22nd for the last five years).
I decided on the percentage multiplication method over a straight-up 100-1 scoring system because based on those percentage numbers, there's a good chance I listened to my number one song in 2017 nearly twice as much as I listened to my number one song in 2015. As Spotify, to my knowledge, doesn't let me see how many cumulative streams I have of any given song, I figured this was the best way to guesstimate.
Plus I don't like making things easy.
This method made the overall scores decidedly lower (if I had the same number one song all five years, its score would be exactly 100, compared to 500 on a straight-up scoring scale) and the intervals between songs decidedly smaller (some separated by a score of .03 or less).
The end result is represented in this playlist:
Of note, my number one songs from each year are Reflections by MisterWives (2015, number seven overall), Tori Kelly's Something Beautiful (2016, number 68), Shape of You by Ed Sheeran (2017, ranked third), and two Taylor Swift bops: End Game (2018, number 24) and You Need To Calm Down (2019, 62). Interestingly enough, although Something Beautiful appeared on two years' recap lists, its combined score was still not higher than Calm Down, which only debuted this year.
In terms of scoring, the high mark on the list was for Closer by the Chainsmokers and Halsey (number 2 in 2016, 4 in 2017, 25 in 2018, 46 in 2019), which registered a total score of 70.9165. Burn by Ellie Goulding pulled in 64.5025; ranking among my 100 most-streamed songs in all five years, it peaked at 7 in 2015 and found its low rank of 91 in 2019.
Shape of You, my highest scoring song that had a number one peak, scored at 61.4431 with identical year-end finishes of 12 in both 2018 and 2019. Don't Let Me Down by the Chainsmokers and Daya was my number 12 song of 2016, 23rd in 2017, and number 10 in 2018 to earn a 55.1118 score. Rounding out the top five was Sheeran's Eraser, a favorite over the past three years (7 in 2017, 23 in 2018, 39 in 2019) with a final tally of 52.3852.
Let's Get It Started by the Black Eyed Peas (sixth at 52.1210) and Start Me up by the Rolling Stones (14th with 40.4569) earn their high positions because until recently, I alternated only those two tunes as my jump-off song at my trivia shows. As I've added more shows, I've diluted my rotation so that there are now five songs I choose from to begin each night; therefore 2019 is the first year that neither the Peas nor the Stones made an appearance on my top list.
Swift's Look What You Made Me Do is the highest song on this list that only appeared in one year-end recap; its second place finish in 2017 (the year I listened to Spotify most) was good enough to earn it the 40 slot over the past five with a 26.2085 score.
Taylor, as those of you who know me could probably guess, is all over this list. She occupies 16 slots, starting with 2018's chart topper End Game, which has 35.0269 points thanks to an additional appearance at 21 in 2019.
Wildest Dreams is ranked lowest of all songs with multiple year-end appearances. Positioned 47 in 2017 and 81 in 2018, its five-year score dropped the song into 98th place at 17.8888 points.
Panic! At The Disco's High Hopes, my number 18 song of 2019, rounds out the five-year Top 100 with a mark of 17.7002.
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After compiling my five-year list, I added one last component to my Music of an Era study. My top ten artists from 2015-2019 are as follows:
- Taylor Swift - 39 songs ended at least one year in the top 100, 16 made the five-year list
- Ed Sheeran - 19 for at least one year, 9 on the five-year
- Ellie Goulding - 21 for at least one year, 6 on the five-year
- Walk Off The Earth - 13 for at least one year, 5 on the five-year
- The Chainsmokers - 7 for at least one year, 5 on the five-year
- Halsey - 6 for at least one year, 5 on the five-year
- Ariana Grande - 8 for at least one year, 3 on the five-year
- Khalid - 6 for at least one year, 3 on the five-year
- Bruno Mars - 5 for at least one year, 2 on the five-year
- The Gardiner Sisters - 8 for at least one year, 1 on the five-year
Other artists with multiple songs on my five-year chart include Alessia Cara, Demi Lovato, Dua Lipa, Kiiara, Adele, and Zedd.
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I hope you all enjoyed this way too in-depth look into my listening habits over the past half decade. I might do this again in 2024, 2029, or both, or I may never post to this blog again. Who knows, the future is wide open. Have a safe and happy holiday season and beyond.
