What Is Popularity In Spotify Playlists?, Eddie Button, UG '25 (2510273)

From Research Princeton Research Day

views

I was interested in finding a connection between the number of followers that each playlist has and the tracks – and artists – in each playlist. I did not exactly find this connection, but I used it. Ultimately, I chose to focus-on the ‘followership’ concept (taking the number of followers of each playlist into account for the calculations of popularity). I found Spotify’s Million-Playlist Dataset on AIcrowd.com, which provided me with 1,000 files – each containing 1,000 playlists’ worth of data – and I coded a Python program to consolidate a random tenth of these 1,000 files into a spreadsheet. I used Python to count how many times each track and-or artist occurred, independently of the playlist where they occurred. Then, I used Python to count a separate value: the number of followers that each track and-or artist has, determined by the total number of followers for all of the playlists wherein they occur. Do these definitions of popularity overlap? Somewhat. Each of my two ideas of popularity yield different sets of tracks at the top of the list, but they have common (primary) artists. This indicates that more popular playlists might not always have the most popular tracks, but they often have more popular (primary) artists. In fact, there are many more opportunities to explore this dataset. Although I did not find a concrete connection between the popularity of a playlist and the popularity of its contents, what I did find illuminated how rich this dataset is for exploration.

Eddie Button, '25: https://www.linkedin.com/in/ebutton6/

Tags