What do people listen to when they play ball nowadays? What are good songs to pump myself or my team up before heading over the hard court?
Since i only know a few baller songs (He Got Game lang actually tsaka Pag Nanalo ang Ginebra), i need to rely on the wisdom of the crowd for some recommendations.
I used Spotify API to download all the playlists in their database that contain the keyword "basketball" in the title. I think it's safe to assume that playlist creators use these playlists as background music for their basketball-related activities.
My search yielded 590 matching playlists containing a total of 59,798 tracks.
Here's a sample of the playlist table:
Out of the 59,798 tracks that populate the basketball playlists, the API narrowed the list down to the top 100 titles that appear most frequently.
I used Lyrify to download the lyrics and then Tableau to create a wordcloud to see how the artists corrupt the minds of the young ballers of the world with their bad words.
His 15 songs translate to a total Score of 1,056. This makes him far and away the MVP.
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| basketballsocietyonline.com |
Since i only know a few baller songs (He Got Game lang actually tsaka Pag Nanalo ang Ginebra), i need to rely on the wisdom of the crowd for some recommendations.
I used Spotify API to download all the playlists in their database that contain the keyword "basketball" in the title. I think it's safe to assume that playlist creators use these playlists as background music for their basketball-related activities.
My search yielded 590 matching playlists containing a total of 59,798 tracks.
Here's a sample of the playlist table:
Out of the 59,798 tracks that populate the basketball playlists, the API narrowed the list down to the top 100 titles that appear most frequently.
I used Lyrify to download the lyrics and then Tableau to create a wordcloud to see how the artists corrupt the minds of the young ballers of the world with their bad words.
Before anything else, some key terms:
- SCORE = the number of times a song appears on playlists. The higher the score, the higher the song ranks. In other words the more playlist inclusions, the more popular the song is
- NUMBER OF RECORDS = the number of unique songs a particular artist has (ex. J.Cole's No Role Modelz, GOMD, Wet Dreamz, and A Tale of 2 Citiez are among our top tracks. Thus he has 4 number of Records)
Top Song Based on Score
Jumpman - a nod to the iconic Michael Jordan logo perhaps?
Jumpman by Drake is included in 206 playlists. If you view the breakdown of songs (like the table above), you'll notice that Jumpman only has a Score of 157 and yet the final chart below indicates a higher total. This is because the song is included in some playlists more than once. I attribute this to the idea that the curator wanted to increase the chances of hearing the song in shuffle mode. I do the same thing when making playlists too.
Furthermore, Spotify assigns a unique ID per song. This is particularly useful for tracking if, say, a song was first released as a single or EP and then later on as part of a full length album. In this case, it was first put out for streaming on 20/09/15 and then again on 25/09/2015.
And even if some Spotify subscriber would create a "basketball" playlist consisting of 1,000 Jumpman (ganun siya ka-adik) tracks, it still wouldn't pad the total numbers because all of those tracks would share the same limited number of unique IDs.
As such, it means the song truly is popular and it wouldn't show if i retain only one entry in the table.
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| (click to enlarge) |
Top Artist
Drake - the Canadian hip-hop superstar has 15 Records representing him on Spotify's basketball-related playlists: Jumpman, Forever, 0 to 100/The Catch Up, Summer Sixteen, Back to Back, Big Rings, All Me, Pop Style, Controlla, Energy, Legend, Still Here, Hype, and Too Good. |
| http://www.thecountrycaller.com/ |
His 15 songs translate to a total Score of 1,056. This makes him far and away the MVP.
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| (click to enlarge) |
Explicit Lyrics
89% of the songs contain dirty, dirty words.
Here are the most frequent words:
Year of Release
Majority of songs are recent releases. A few go as far back as 2002.
Conclusion
Songs by Drake will kill it on the court and Jumpman should be the first round pick. Spotify users who use the app to play songs for basketball like, or at least don't mind, profanity. Lastly, it's ok to add an oldie or two but stay current in the song selection.Here's an interactive chart for more exploration:
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