¶ Good Boring Results · 25 November 2013 listen/tech
Paul Lamere wrote a post on Music Machinery yesterday about deep artists, where by "deep" we mean the opposite of one-hit wonders, artists with large, rich catalogs awaiting your listening and exploration. Paul and I both work at The Echo Nest, trying in one way or another to make sense out of the vast amount of music data the company collects.
Often there is more than one sense to be made of the same data. Sometimes many more than one. I liked Paul's intro about one-hit hits as "non-nutritious" music, with "deep" artists as the converse nutritious music, but after that statement of concept, it seemed painfully ironic to me that his calculations resulted in the #1 score for depth going to the Vitamin String Quartet, which I think of as the artificially-fortified sugar-coated cereal of music. Their catalog, like that of the Glee Cast at #3, is certainly vast and consistent. But I wanted to measure a different kind of depth.
So I ran some different calculations, and made a different list. For this one I took 10k or so reasonably well-known artists, and for each artist calculated an inversely-weighted average popularity of their 100 most popular songs excluding their top 10. If Paul's list is the opposite of one-hit-ness, then mine is the opposite of ten-hit-ness. I'm trying to find the artists whose catalogs are not necessarily the most vast, but where the vastness has been explored most rewardingly, artists where their 100th (or 110th) hit is still empirically world-class.
The good news is that this worked. The bad news is that the resulting list is more than a little boring. We might not have been able to guess this ordering, exactly, but very few of these artists below stand out as fundamentally surprising. Yes, yawn, the Beatles at #1. Eminem at #2 hints at a novelty that the rest of the list doesn't really continue to deliver. I hadn't heard of Argentine singer Andrés Calamaro at #33, but he has won a Latin Grammy and sold millions of records, so that's my ignorance. Conversely, I love Nightwish and Ludovico Einaudi, but didn't fully realize how many other people do, too. Otherwise, yeah, you probably knew about these people already.
But sometimes data reveals new truths, and sometimes, like this, it confirms existing ones. And revealing new truths is cooler, but only if the new truths actually have truth to them, and the best way to confirm our ability to generate true truths is to sometimes generate predictable true truths predictably. Anybody who presumes to do data-driven music discovery ought to have to show that they know what the opposite of "discovery" is. If purported math for "nutritious" doesn't mostly start with vegetables you already know you're supposed to be eating (like Paul's has Bach, Vivaldi and Chopin at #2, 4 and 5), don't trust it.
So the occasional boring is OK, even good, and in that good boring spirit, here's my good boring version of the deepest artists:
Often there is more than one sense to be made of the same data. Sometimes many more than one. I liked Paul's intro about one-hit hits as "non-nutritious" music, with "deep" artists as the converse nutritious music, but after that statement of concept, it seemed painfully ironic to me that his calculations resulted in the #1 score for depth going to the Vitamin String Quartet, which I think of as the artificially-fortified sugar-coated cereal of music. Their catalog, like that of the Glee Cast at #3, is certainly vast and consistent. But I wanted to measure a different kind of depth.
So I ran some different calculations, and made a different list. For this one I took 10k or so reasonably well-known artists, and for each artist calculated an inversely-weighted average popularity of their 100 most popular songs excluding their top 10. If Paul's list is the opposite of one-hit-ness, then mine is the opposite of ten-hit-ness. I'm trying to find the artists whose catalogs are not necessarily the most vast, but where the vastness has been explored most rewardingly, artists where their 100th (or 110th) hit is still empirically world-class.
The good news is that this worked. The bad news is that the resulting list is more than a little boring. We might not have been able to guess this ordering, exactly, but very few of these artists below stand out as fundamentally surprising. Yes, yawn, the Beatles at #1. Eminem at #2 hints at a novelty that the rest of the list doesn't really continue to deliver. I hadn't heard of Argentine singer Andrés Calamaro at #33, but he has won a Latin Grammy and sold millions of records, so that's my ignorance. Conversely, I love Nightwish and Ludovico Einaudi, but didn't fully realize how many other people do, too. Otherwise, yeah, you probably knew about these people already.
But sometimes data reveals new truths, and sometimes, like this, it confirms existing ones. And revealing new truths is cooler, but only if the new truths actually have truth to them, and the best way to confirm our ability to generate true truths is to sometimes generate predictable true truths predictably. Anybody who presumes to do data-driven music discovery ought to have to show that they know what the opposite of "discovery" is. If purported math for "nutritious" doesn't mostly start with vegetables you already know you're supposed to be eating (like Paul's has Bach, Vivaldi and Chopin at #2, 4 and 5), don't trust it.
So the occasional boring is OK, even good, and in that good boring spirit, here's my good boring version of the deepest artists:
- The Beatles
- Eminem
- Pink Floyd
- Iron Maiden
- Red Hot Chili Peppers
- Radiohead
- David Bowie
- Metallica
- Depeche Mode
- Bob Dylan
- Muse
- Coldplay
- Green Day
- Korn
- Tom Waits
- Rihanna
- Kanye West
- Megadeth
- Daft Punk
- The Smashing Pumpkins
- Nine Inch Nails
- The Cure
- Madonna
- Linkin Park
- AC/DC
- Beyoncé
- The Rolling Stones
- Queen
- Britney Spears
- The National
- Jay-Z
- Bruce Springsteen
- Andrés Calamaro
- Johnny Cash
- John Mayer
- U2
- blink-182
- Placebo
- Christina Aguilera
- The Offspring
- The Black Keys
- Foo Fighters
- Taylor Swift
- Michael Jackson
- Lady Gaga
- Moby
- Marilyn Manson
- Nightwish
- Mariah Carey
- Jack Johnson
- Black Sabbath
- Nirvana
- Motörhead
- Nick Cave & The Bad Seeds
- Avril Lavigne
- Arctic Monkeys
- Bob Marley
- Judas Priest
- Oasis
- Blur
- Queens of the Stone Age
- Beastie Boys
- Death Cab for Cutie
- Céline Dion
- Gorillaz
- Slayer
- R.E.M.
- Jimi Hendrix
- Rise Against
- Parov Stelar
- Dream Theater
- The White Stripes
- The Doors
- Bad Religion
- In Flames
- Maroon 5
- Beck
- The Killers
- Michael Bublé
- Modest Mouse
- Hans Zimmer
- 2Pac
- Massive Attack
- Elliott Smith
- Bon Jovi
- Robbie Williams
- The Ramones
- Ludovico Einaudi
- Aerosmith
- The Who
- Sting
- Scorpions
- Sufjan Stevens
- Lou Reed
- Ayreon
- Rush
- NOFX
- Paul McCartney
- Neil Young
- Nas