The Secret Sauce in Spotify’s Top Tracks

What makes a top song? Does it make you dance, raise your spirits, or simply make you feel alive? Pooja Gandhi explored audio features of top songs, comparing their characteristics in a series of scatterplots.

Believe it or not, this visualization came to be as a result of a dare—a #DuoDare to be specific—where she and her friend, Adam Crahen, exchanged data sets and did a viz-off. And what better data set for a viz-off than music data? See definitions for each of these audio features.

Explore the visualization

• Click on a mark on the top half of the Danceability chart to see the songs that move you.
• Top songs aren’t always loud. Click on the marks in the bottom half of the Loudness chart to find the tracks that were subtle, but effective.
• Liveness detects the presence of an audience in the recording. Click on the outlier in the Liveness chart to see which track rises above the rest.