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Spotify Is Killing Song Titles

Discussion in 'Article Discussion' started by Melody Bot, Mar 28, 2018.

  1. Melody Bot Mar 28, 2018
    Melody Bot

    Your friendly little forum bot. Staff Member

    This article has been imported from chorus.fm for discussion. All of the forum rules still apply.

    Michael Tauberg, writing on Medium:


    With the death of record stores, radio, and to a lesser extent, iTunes, the unit of music delivered to customers has shrunk. From the album, to the song, to now, the stream, music has been disentangled from it’s larger context. As such, we would expect that the names of albums and songs are uncorrelated to their musical success. One way to measure this is the number of unique words in a song title. Although there does appear to be an art to naming a hit song (or say book), the longer tail of music means more random song titles chosen by artists instead of record executives.
    ​

    An interesting dive into music data.

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  2. TheTagalongs Mar 28, 2018
    TheTagalongs

    Newbie

    Can someone help break this down for me? I understand the data suggesting that song titles are getting shorter, and if that means they're getting less meaningful, fine. But I'm confused about this part: "Although there does appear to be an art to naming a hit song (or say book), the longer tail of music means more random song titles chosen by artists instead of record executives. Number of unique words in song titles from 2000–2008 = 2113. Number of unique words in song titles from 2009–2017 = 2512. There were 19% more unique words in song titles in the post Spotify era." How does that suggest the titles are less meaningful? I would think that more unique words = more meaningful.
     
  3. Analog Drummer Mar 28, 2018
    Analog Drummer

    Regular

    Explains why panic and fall out boy don’t have those really witty fun titles anymore

    Although lyrics are really as much either
     
  4. sawhney[rusted]2 Mar 29, 2018
    sawhney[rusted]2

    I'll write you into all of my songs Supporter

    I’m a bit co fused as well, unless they’re implying the words chosen are only so the song becomes more easily identifiably when “searching” for it as a purely monetarily driven action?
     
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