XPN 90s A to Z Countdown¶
It's countdown time at XPN. While I took a year off from doing stats last year, as the station did a bang up job and I had other things going on, I'm up for another crack at it.
This year it's the 90s A-Z countdown, which stated at 8am on December 1st. There's a Real Time Countdown and the usual Twitter banter.
Status¶
It's Thursday, Dec 8, things have been running for over a week. And We're just finished Z at 8:30.
- Resurrected most of the Data Loading with updates for the new playlist format
- Started with the the absolute basics
- Added in the trivial manipulations that don't need much data augmentation
- Took a pass at doing breakdown by years. It needs work. But running with it for the moment
- Added scan for sequential tracks by the same artist.
- Added pivots for artist by year and by letter.
Loading Data¶
Most people don't care about how I get the data.
If you do, checkout my Dataloading notebook.
If you just want to play with the data,
the playlist with some data augmentation, is here as 90sA2Z.csv.
If you do something interesting, let me know,
and post with the #XPN90sAtoZ hashtag so people can find it.
Popular Albums¶
I'd always wanted to group on albums. But using an external source like MusicBrainz to find / guess album names based on artist and title was kind of problematic. Now that album is in the new playlist format, this is easy.
Songs By Letter¶
If we are doing A to Z, it's probably good to know how far we are, and have some notion of where we're going.
Tracks by Year¶
Well, years are what a 90s countdown is about. I've had mixed results in earlier years trying to get release dates by looking for matches on MusicBrainz. So, right now I'm using the datas from the 90s A-Z playlist page. They may not be a lot better. We're only batting a bit over 90% But here's what we got.
Tracks by Frist word¶
Back in the origional A-Z the first thing I did was break things down by popular first words.
Covererage¶
Has an artist had a track played for each letter yet? Unlikely, but who comes the closest? This really relates to number of tracks played and, to some degree, diversity of naming. Similary, has any artist had a track played for each year? That's an easier goal, but relies a lot on consistant output.
Longest Songs¶
At some level the duration we calculate is somewhat suspect. There are station id breaks, and such. So just counting start to start is iffy. But it's still interesting.
Sequential Runs by an Artist¶
How often do we get runs of two or more consecutive tracks by the same artist? It happens. The alphabet is a strange thing.
Note, I'm not sure that the same artist playing the same song really counts. But the two plays of All Apologies by Nirvana really happened. They were from In Utero and MTV Unplugged in New York. So a self cover?
Duplicate Titles¶
Duplicate titles could be covers. or they could just be "same name, different song".
Availability¶
The code for this project is in my github repo and this file is specifically 90sA2Z.ipynb.
License¶
This project is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License. You are free to use for commercial or non-commercial purposes, so long as you attribute the source and also allow sharing.