Project Review

Project Review: The Most Timeless Songs of All Time

The Most Timeless Songs of All Time is a visual journalism project by Matt Daniels that examines the “timelessness” of songs. Created in 2015 for The Pudding, a web “publication that explains ideas debated in culture with visual essays,” Daniels’ project is made interactive and easily readable for younger generations.

Project Description

This visual essay is focusing on music and how it can be universal and stay around throughout time. Using Spotify as a means to find out song popularity and longevity among older songs. The project uses that Spotify data that it has collected to form its points and find out how older songs are doing in popularity when it comes to the newer generations of music listeners. So he analyzed all of these songs that had charted from 1990-1999 and ranked them in the order of having the most play counts on the music streaming app Spotify. The project also seems to be split into eras to analyze, the 90’s and the 2000’s and early 2010’s. Also, has a separate section looking at the genre Rap and what are the biggest Rap hits on Spotify specifically So, that means that there are two different findings that were found for each era’s analysis.

Inside the graphs themselves, there are actual ways in which you can play the songs that are being ranked and it has very interactive data and ways to actually know the songs while looking at where they are in the data. Here underneath is just the top 10 of the extensive #1-#100 Present Day Popularity of Five Decades of Music. This chart gives you a search bar to lookup certain songs or even different decades if you want to see something more specific instead of having to look through every single song title.

This project was not created recently, and the songs have probably changed by now because what people have been listening to has changed since then, so the data is not the most recent or most reliable to find a concrete answer since it was done five years ago.

Graphs

The graph itself is interactive which makes it easier to read for users. Users can scroll over pictures of artists and bands to see where they fell on the amount of Spotify play counts. 

As the graph shows, Nirvana’s Smells Like Teen Spirit is the most played song from the 90’s with just over 50 million plays. If the graph doesn’t show a specific artist that a user was looking for they can use the search box in the top right hand corner of the graph. 

This graph once again is interactive allowing users to move their cursors over the red circles to see where the most popular song ranked. This time, each circle is a song and multiple songs from the same artist can appear. If a user want to look at a specific artist of song they can enter the name at the top left of the graph. 

If users want to find a specific artist or track that is listed they can use the top left search bar. Users can also choose if they want to look at a specific decade by using the top right row. 

As shown above, the larger a dot is the more popular the song was when it originally was released, likewise the smaller the dot is the less popular it was. This is then put on a spectrum of how many play counts on Spotify it has. Users can choose a specific year by clicking the dial at the top left of the graph. They can also highlight specific categories like if the song won an award or reached #1 on the billboard chart. 

Users can once again look for a specific track using the search bar to the left of the graph. The use of the line graph makes it clear to readers when certain song dipped and when they recovered

Project Significance

This project is interesting and educational in a couple of ways. This project is on a subject matter that a lot of young people would be interested in and I think that that would lead more people to look into this project and see for themselves what is popular. This also is a way to look at the generational divides within music and music listening. Like, your parents listened to something that is still popular among your generation. It can show the staying power of a song and that can help you build an idea of popularity and longevity like mentioned before.