Spotify Data Reveals The Ultimate Commuting Playlist

Research has recently revealed that listening to music whilst driving can have a positive effect on mood, which in turn can influence driving behaviour.

With this in mind, Uswitch.com/car-insurance set out to uncover the ultimate commuting playlist. By analysing 45,000 songs from 200 different commuting playlists on Spotify, they evaluated the popularity of each tune based on the streaming platform’s own popularity score, plus the number of appearances each song had in the playlists, to then determine an overall ranking.

This research is part of a wider study into the most popular albums, artists, and songs on commuting playlists.

THE RESULTS

Ed Sheeran’s ‘Bad Habits’ is currently the world’s most popular commuting song, with a perfect popularity score of 100 out of 100. Streamed over 457,512,174 number of times on Spotify, the track also appears in over 10% of the playlists analysed (22/200), the third-highest of all songs analysed.

Dua Lipa’s ‘Don’t Start Now’ comes in second with a score of 99.997. ‘Don’t Start Now’ beats Dua Lipa’s second song in the playlist, ‘Levitating’ by 0.023, due to making nine more appearances in the 200 playlists analysed.

With a popularity score of 99.995 out of 100, Olivia Rodrigo takes third place with ‘good 4 u’. Despite just turning 18, the American pop singer beat more established artists such as Coldplay and Justin Bieber, due to having the joint third-highest number of appearances in the playlists analysed (22/200).

‘Kiss Me More’ by Doja Cat (feat. SZA) is the world’s fourth most popular commuting song, beating other female rappers such as Cardi B (feat. Megan Thee Stallion) and ‘WAP’ due to the almost perfect Spotify popularity ranking of 92/100, the fifth-highest of all songs analysed.

The most popular commuting albums 

This is followed by Billie Eilish’s ‘WHEN WE ALL FALL ASLEEP, WHERE DO WE GO?’ with a 99.996 popularity score, and besides not being in any of the top 25 songs, 2 of the top 5 most popular commuting albums go to Taylor Swift.

Methodology:

1. Uswitch.com/car-insurance sought to discover the most popular songs to listen to whilst commuting.
2. An initial seed list of over 45,000 songs was gathered from a collection of 200 commuting playlists found on Spotify. Only playlists with titles containing words synonymous with commuting were selected for this study.
3. The collection of songs, along with their respective artists and albums was facilitated by the Spotify Python Library which was used to interface with the official Spotify API. This was also used to determine Spotify’s popularity of each song – which they state: ‘is calculated by an algorithm and is based, in the most part, on the total number of plays the track has had and how recent those plays are. Generally speaking, songs that are being played a lot now will have a higher popularity ranking than songs that were played a lot in the past.’
4. Following the collection of data, the information regarding artists was pre-processed and joined into a new variable – relative popularity. This is a weighted average based upon Spotify’s general ‘track popularity’ and the number of appearances each track has through all 200 playlists.
5. Once the top songs were obtained, the same methodology was used for the albums and the artists present in the playlists, by adding their popularity and calculating the weighted average.
6. Subsequently, a relative popularity score out of 100 for each song, artist, and album was then calculated using the PERCENTRANK formula. All data were then ranked in descending order by their total score.
7. Data was collected on 15/9/21 and is subject to change.

Source: Uswitch.com

This article was sourced from a media release sent by Bethany Surridge of Journalistic.org