Skip to main content

Generate highly personalized music data using Exportify

Spotify generates gobs of data about music. 

Most people have seen the end-of-the-year data Spotify generates for each user about their listening patterns. Most people don't know that Spotify also generates a lot of data about individual songs. Some of it is straightforward: tempo, genre, length. However, Spotify also has its own niche way of quantifying songs: Danceability. Accousticness. Here is a whole list of their variables and descriptions from researchers at CMU: https://www.stat.cmu.edu/capstoneresearch/315files_s23/team23.html

What does this mean for a stats teacher? You have access to highly personalizable data sets, rooted in music, with gobs and gobs of variables for each song...or artist...or album...or year of release...or genre (like, so many ways to divide up your data). 

For instance, I created a data set with Spotify data for 1989 and 1989 (Taylor's Version) to teach paired t-tests. How do Taylor's re-recordings compare to the originals? 

This data is freely available for download. If you are fancy, you can negotiate their API all by yourself. If you aren't fancy (I'm not fancy), you can use Exportify to get at this data.


https://exportify.net/#playlists

Exportify, in a nutshell:

Create playlists on Spotify (I have a free account, and it still works). Connect Exportify with your Spotify account. Download CSVs that have ALL of the data about each song on your playlist. Analyze. I teach intro stats and have already used this to teach t-tests and I am working on a way to use it to teach ANOVA. I bet you could also use this data to teach far more complicated data (multiple IVs, multiple DVs, repeated measures over time) analysis.

How can you use this in class?

Pick your own artist. Have your students pick the artist! 

Which artist's sounds have changed the most if you compare their first album to their most recent album? 

Which K-pop groups differ from one another, and how? 

Which artists have the most variability on a single album? 

What about soundtracks for horror movies versus romances? What about the top ten songs from 2003 versus 2023?

Not only are there endless questions, but I imagine you could come up with data for any kind of test you would ever want your stats babies to learn. 

PS: Hey! If you like this idea and would love a whole stats textbook from the brain of the person who came up with this idea, sign up for more information about my forthcoming book here: https://seagull.wwnorton.com/l/710463/2023-10-26/2tp3nt

Labels:

Comments

  1. Pavel KomarovOctober 2, 2024 at 5:52 PM

    I made exportify.net! Glad to see it getting used this way.

    ReplyDelete
  2. Pavel KomarovOctober 2, 2024 at 5:53 PM

    I made exportify.net! Glad to see it's getting used this way!

    ReplyDelete

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Ways to use funny meme scales in your stats classes

Have you ever heard of the theory that there are multiple people worldwide thinking about the same novel thing at the same time? It is the multiple discovery hypothesis of invention . Like, multiple great minds around the world were working on calculus at the same time. Well, I think a bunch of super-duper psychology professors were all thinking about scale memes and pedagogy at the same time. Clearly, this is just as impressive as calculus. Who were some of these great minds? 1) Dr.  Molly Metz maintains a curated list of hilarious "How you doing?" scales.  2) Dr. Esther Lindenström posted about using these scales as student check-ins. 3) I was working on a blog post about using such scales to teach the basics of variables.  So, I decided to create a post about three ways to use these scales in your stats classes:  1) Teaching the basics of variables. 2) Nominal vs. ordinal scales.  3) Daily check-in with your students.  1. Teach your students the basics...
Post a Comment
Read more

Rouse, Russel, & Campbell (2025) is a curated list of Psi Chi journals that are perfect for Intro Stats.

This summer, the Psi Chi Journal of Psychology Research published  Rouse, Russel, and Campbell's Beyond the textbook: Psi Chi Journal articles in introductory psychology courses. It is a curated list of paywall-free Psi Chi articles, mostly with student co-authors, that are peer-reviewed and of an appropriate writing level and length to use in an Introduction to Psychology course. The authors provide the following information for each of the articles: In addition to being appropriate for Into Psych, these articles are also perfect for Intro Stats. In my classes, I emphasize the ability to read and write simple result sections. One way I would review this skill is by showing my students Results sections from published research and asking them to identify the test statistics, effect size, and other relevant information. This selection of articles features clear and concise results sections for t -tests, ANOVA, factorial ANOVA, regression, and correlation. I created a spreadsheet...
Post a Comment
Read more

Using pulse rates to determine the scariest of scary movies

  The Science of Scare project, conducted by MoneySuperMarket.com, recorded heart rates in participants watching fifty horror movies to determine the scariest of scary movies. Below is a screenshot of the original variables and data for 12 of the 50 movies provided by MoneySuperMarket.com: https://www.moneysupermarket.com/broadband/features/science-of-scare/ https://www.moneysupermarket.com/broadband/features/science-of-scare/ Here is my version of the data in Excel format . It includes the original data plus four additional columns (so you can run more analyses on the data): -Year of Release -Rotten Tomato rating -Does this movie have a sequel (yes or no)? -Is this movie a sequel (yes or no)? Here are some ways you could use this in class: 1. Correlation : Rotten Tomato rating does not correlate with the overall scare score ( r = 0.13, p = 0.36).   2. Within-subject research design : Baseline, average, and maximum heart rates are reported for each film.   3. ...
Post a Comment
Read more