The Soundtrack - Indie Influence: data science project to find the most influential indie song

Indie Influence ranks the top 500 most influential indie songs today and provides you with an in depth look at what exactly made each song so influential. Over 1 million songs on Spotify were analyzed from the indie folk, indie rock, indie pop, alternative rock, modern rock, indietronica, bedroom pop, and psychedelic rock genres. The initial list of songs was first filtered down by looking at the Spotify popularity rank. This number (between 1-100) represents how popular a song is today on the platform. This gives a good indication of how influential a song is currently. Then from this list, each song was given a social and musical influence rank. Social rank was comprised of the Spotify popularity combined with play count and listeners data from LastFM. Essentially this data was chosen to represent how popular a song was (i.e. how many times it was played and how many people listen to it). Putting this data in an equation outputted a social score which was translated to a number rank. Musical rank was comprised of the Spotify popularity along with the following data from Genius: times the song was sampled, interpolated, covered, remixed, and performed live along with the number of page views it received on Genius. When a song is said to be influential in the music industry, other musicians use it. The five aforementioned categories capture this perfectly. Also, the number of page views shows how much interest the public has in the lyrics of a song. This data was put through another equation outputting a musical score. ‍ These two separate scores were then combined giving a final score and rank. The Soundtrack - Indie Influence is a data exploration project by me, Zach Cmiel. In this project I tried to quantify how influential an indie song is. I'm currently a student at Northwestern University studying computer science. I started out with iOS app development and have always loved exploring different aspects of computer science. Data science and visualization is just the latest stop. This is the first version of The Soundtrack and I'm currently working on developing my skills in d3.js a data visualization framework so I can deliver a more interactive version of Indie Influence. The technology and skills I used to develop this version are Python (pandas), Excel, and Webflow. I hope to learn more in the field of data science and keep applying it to music! Thanks for checking this out!