Wednesday, August 21, 2013

Genre Average Song Lengths

I was working on a different post and had to write a script to get the average song length of a genre from last.fm. I wrote a quick perl script and figured I'd get some other genres to compare. I grabbed the 250 top tags, and then grabbed the 50 top tracks for each tag.

I didn't really expect anything revolutionary.  Prog has longer songs than punk.  Some of the tags don't represent genres (eg Live), but I didn't remove them, both because they are interesting too, and I'm lazy.  Here are the results.

There's a slight positive correlation (0.23) between song length and ranking.  That is, longer genres are generally less popular.  Mean and median length across all genres are quite close at 4:20, and 4:14 respectively.

A graph and table of the top 50 most popular:





RankGenreAverage Length
48progressive metal6:40
26progressive rock6:02
15ambient5:45
24black metal5:38
42trance5:29
36classical5:24
29heavy metal5:14
40thrash metal5:14
49trip-hop5:08
19hard rock4:51
9classic rock4:48
44favorites4:47
11jazz4:38
27death metal4:34
25chillout4:33
17experimental4:32
50hip hop4:31
7metal4:30
45reggae4:29
33industrial4:28
10alternative rock4:25
38rap4:18
18electronica4:16
43japanese4:16
41metalcore4:14
1rock4:13
3alternative4:11
16singer-songwriter4:08
28instrumental4:06
5electronic4:04
14folk4:04
3990s4:02
2180s4:00
8female vocalists3:58
22dance3:55
20hip-hop3:54
30british3:52
46acoustic3:50
4indie3:46
6pop3:45
2seen live3:41
37emo3:41
34soul3:40
13indie rock3:39
47country3:38
35blues3:28
31punk rock3:26
32soundtrack3:16
23hardcore3:09
12punk2:58

5 comments:

  1. punk is literally the shortest on this list and it's totally the biggest surprise ever lol

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  2. Nice research! The dates of the comments themselves make one wonder why they seemed to be dormant for 7-8 years and only started to pop up (like mine) in the last three years or so.
    One of those quirks only Google's arcane workings might be able to explain. Go figure.

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