Top 100 Billboard Songs of the Year:
1950 - 2017

Data from the top 100 Billboard songs of the year from 1950-2017 grants us insights on music trends. Above, we see the number of songs per genre over time. You can clearly see a rise in Pop music songs hitting the Billboard charts. Similarly, you can see certain genres do not constantly make the charts. Disco, for instance, doesn't have a song on the Billboard Top 100 list until 1965.

Let's investigate trends in lyrics over time.

When we assess the average number of words per song in each genre, we can see that the average increases over time. There was a large increase in word counts in Hip Hop songs in the mid-1990s.

What about trends for specific artists?

Here you can see the artists who have the most words on the Billboard Top 100 Charts. Eminem has the most words on the charts, followed by Rhiana and Michael Jackson. Elvis has 31 songs listed here, but his average words per song is much lower than artists like Eminem with 14 songs and Rhiana with 23 songs.

We have been shown that the number of words in the lyrics is increasing, but what about the complexity of those lyrics?

This graph also shows us that the songs on the Top 100 Billboards list have more repetitive lyrics than they used to. The Flesh-Kincade Grade is a formula that evaluates the readability level of textual content. The higher the grade, the more difficult the readabilty of the content. As you can see by these results, the Flesh-Kincade grade has decreased over time, indicating that the lyrics are less complex.

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