Digitalization has reshaped the music industry, forcing new business models and revenue strategies. By analyzing over 562,000 Spotify tracks from 1922 to 2021, this study uncovers what makes a song popular -energy, danceability, and explicitness – while highlighting the balance between track length, artistic expression, and commercial goals in today’s streaming economy.
Digitalization has transformed the arts and culture economy in many ways, changing how it produces, consumes, and distributes goods and services (KÜBLER, 2021). Technology has demanded the creation and evolution of existing business models, making it necessary for the cultural goods industry to adapt to market and consumer behavior (PEUKERT, 2019). Among the various areas that are being transformed by digitalization, the music sector is one of the most prominent. This is because, with the emergence of streaming platforms and the facilitation of content sharing via the internet, the music industry has had to rethink its business model and find new ways of generating revenue (DATTA et al, 2018). Streaming is an online service that allows users to consume a wide range of audiovisual content on demand. Famous examples of streaming platforms are Spotify, Deezer, and Amazon Music. To understand the characteristics of the most listened-to songs in the world, between 1922 and 2021, we have worked with 562,453 songs released in Spotify. We aim to understand what makes a song highly popular. To this end, we employ the indicators developed by Spotify itself, which are as follows:
- popularity: calculated by the platform’s algorithm based mainly on the number of plays a song has;
- acousticness: acoustic music emphasizes the use of non-electronically processed sounds.
- danceability: this parameter is estimated based on various other musical elements of a track, such as tempo, rhythm, beat intensity, and regularity;
- duration: track’s duration in minutes;
- energy: is a measure that tries to capture how much a track conveys an intense, high-activity feeling;
- explicit: indicator that shows if a music track contains explicit content, such as profanity, references to violence, drugs, or sexual themes;
- instrumentalness: Parameter that assesses how instrumental a track is.
- liveness: Is a marker that detects the presence of an audience at the recording of a track;
- loudness: Indicates how intense the sounds are in a piece of music, measured in decibels (dB).
- mode: Variable that determines whether a track is composed in a major or minor key;
- speechiness: Indicator that assesses the presence of spoken words in a track
- tempo: Measures the pace of a song in beats per minute (BPM).
- valence: Indicates how much a track conveys feelings of positivity
By applying the data on the songs using a statistical model, we conclude that, on average, songs with higher values for explicit parameters, danceability, and energy were more prevalent on Spotify. As a matter of fact, in recent years, there has been a decrease in the average length of the main songs in the market. However, it is worth noting that there is a limit to this reduction. Tracks must be long enough to hold the listener’s attention for at least 30 seconds to generate revenue. Finally, songs that are too short can hinder artists’ ability to express themselves and affect the listener’s judgment, as they may need to provide more space to build passages and choruses that connect with the audience.
Artists are likely searching for an “optimum point” of duration to balance their expression needs with the audience’s experience and commercial financial strategies. This idea needs further investigation, but it aligns with the descriptive analyses conducted in this work.
The opposite was observed for speechiness, acousticness, instrumentalness, liveness, and valence. However, there are still limitations to the research carried out, mainly related to the fact that Spotify restricts access to the platform’s data.
Furthermore, it is currently impossible to carry out work using anonymized listener data made available by the platform. If this rule is changed, it will provide much scope for future research agendas, such as assessing how some sociodemographic factors impact the preferences of the platform’s listeners. It would also be relevant to assess regional differences in music consumption in future work.
References
DATTA, H.; KNOX, G.; BRONNENBERG, B. J. Changing Their Tune: How Consumers’ Adoption of Online Streaming Affects Music Consumption and Discovery. Marketing Science,Catonsville, v. 37, n. 1, p. 5–21, jan. 2018
KÜBLER, R.; SEIFERT, R.; KANDZIORA, M. Content valuation strategies for digital subscription platforms. Journal of Cultural Economics, v. 45, n. 2, p. 295–326, 2021.
PEUKERT, C. The next wave of digital technological change and the cultural industries. Journal of Cultural Economics, v. 43, n. 2, p. 189–210, 2019.
About the article
Machado, Ana & Carvalho, Lucas. (2025). How to make a hit: factors associated with music consumption on Spotify Como fazer um hit: fatores associados ao consumo musical no Spotify. Diálogo com a Economia Criativa. 10. 112. 10.22398/2525-2828.1028112-134.
About the authors
Gabriel Henriques Galvão is Economist with a degree from Universidade Federal de Minas Gerais
Ana Flávia Machado is Full Professor in the Department of Economics at the Universidade Federal de Minas Gerais
Lucas Resende de Carvalho is Associate Professor in the Department of Economics at the Universidade Federal de Minas Gerais
About the image
Image of Gabriel Henriques Galvão generated using AI tools.
