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Don't recognise any of these tracks? Never mind, neither do the people in this dataset. They're the Shazamers, the tribe of twenty-first century music lovers furtively raising their phones to the speaker to get the name of the track that's playing - and this infographic shows the songs they checked most frequently during the first three months of 2016.
"We see around 20 million Shazams a day globally. That's 14,000 every minute," says Scott Holechek, senior director of research at Shazam. In 2015 there were nearly 7 billion Shazams for the whole year. Tracking this data lets Holechek see not only currently popular music, but also tunes that will be popular. "We track volume, but we also track momentum," he explains. "We've discovered really popular artists as much as two years in advance." As the London-based audio-recognition firm also records the precise moment a song is requested, Holechek can determine the most appealing moment in a song to the nearest second.
"The two main things we usually see are early spikes and spikes during the chorus, or the catchy parts of the song," he says. There are also differences between genres: pop is consistently appealing, whereas dance spikes and tails off early.
A track needs to be in Shazam’s catalogue for its algorithms to recognise it, so to keep up with new music Shazam has an entire team dedicated to what Holechek calls “music ingestion.” As well as receiving new releases direct from labels, the team combs obscure music blogs and scrapes websites such as Soundcloud and YouTube. "These guys are trawling the internet day in and day out,” says Holechek. Shazam now has close to 40 million unique tracks in its catalogue and can recognise 4 million unique artists.
Shazam makes some of its user data available in the "charts" section of its app, but since 2014 Holechek has been working on a more in-depth viewing tool for commercial users - whether that's radio programmers looking for the next hit or advertisers in search of tunes to promote a product.
So does this data contain the code to the perfect pop song? Holechek laughs. "If we ever get to the place where we're telling artists how to write songs, I'm not sure music will be as good as it is now."
Here are the top-performing tracks on Shazam in the first three months of 2016:
Shazams: 43.7 million
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This track follows the classic pattern: a big early spike on the chorus, followed by a gradual decline in interest. The spike here is earlier than usual, however, a feature typical of hip hop.
'My, Myself & I' is the youngest skewing track on this list, with 61 per cent of Shazams from users under the age of 24s.
Shazams: 4.7 million
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The gentle piano doesn't excite much interest at first, but then the chorus comes in and people start to get interested. The delay between the chorus – shown on the graphic in white – and the spike is what Holecheck calls "the getting your phone out delay."
'7 Years' has had the highest UK sales out of all the songs on the list, with 466,000 sales.
Shazams: 4.9 million
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Despite only coming third, Bieber is the most-played artist on Spotify on this list, with 'Love Yourself' racking up 285 million plays.
Love for Bieber transcends age boundaries: 17 per cent of users who Shazammed the track were over the age of 35.
Shazams: 6 million
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is typical of other dance music tracks in that it usually only has one peak, taking place during the first chorus. The jump in volume towards the end – the bar chart in the graphic - doesn't make much difference.
Despite its high Shazam rate, this song has the lowest UK sales of the tracks in the list, with only 54,000.
Shazams: 6.2 million
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The Twenty One Pilots track , taken from their fourth album, Blurryface, came out in April 2015, but was still racking up the Shazams nine months later.
It comes top of our list, with 6.2 million Shazams in the first three months of 2016. The lesson? Well, having dived deep into the data, we can now say with certainty: people really like a catchy chorus. You're welcome.
This article was originally published by WIRED UK
