T-swift dominates the Billboard Hot 100

Taylor Swift released her latest album “Midnights” at the end of October 2022 and for the week of November 5th, 2022 it held all of the Top 10 spots on the Billboard Hot 100. This seemed quite impressive but we thought it would make sense to go to the data and see just how impressive. Luckily, there is a Python package to pull data from the Billboard charts and using Domo’s Jupyter Notebook integration we can easily pull that data into Domo (I will note that this work was my first time writing python code from scratch on my own and I am quite proud that I completed this work with just a little bit of code review/revision from my team). For this analysis, we pulled the Billboard Hot 100 songs by week back to 1982 so we have 40 years of history. The Jupyter code for getting this data can be found here if you want to try it yourself.

Let’s get to that data. Not surprisingly, this is the first time a single artist had all Top 10 songs for a single week as we can see in the below chart. Drake came close in September 2021 with 9 of the Top 10 songs and 7 for one week in July 2018. Interestingly, if I change the analysis to look at the Top 20, both Taylor Swift and Drake had one week with 14 songs in the Top 20 (shout out to the new Domo variables feature which allows for this quick adjustment in the charts below) .

Maybe one week is too short of a timeframe to examine and I also wondered if this concentration of Top 10 songs is a more modern phenomenon of the streaming era. The chart below shows the number of artists with a certain number of Top 10 songs in a given year (rather than just one week). You can see that it is only in recent years that artists have had more than 6 songs in the Top 10 across a given year (the first time being in 2018). Prior to that it was quite rare to have multiple songs in the Top 10 in one year.

You can continue to explore the 40 years of Billboard data below the data will update weekly) and use the variables to adjust which metric or ranges to examine. One last interesting tidbit that shocked me a bit when looking at the number of unique songs on the Hot 100, the most unique songs by an artist goes to the cast of Glee with 206 different songs appearing on the Hot 100. Granted you could argue these are covers of other artists but I still found that to be quite a surprise. Have fun exploring the data.