Analyzing data to find patterns can be tricky. This past week, the Internet has been obsessing on a project by Polygraph, in which Matt Daniels analyzed the top played tracks on Spotify versus the Billboard Hot 100 to find "the most timeless songs in music history." Daniels singles out several individual artists and tracks to find surprising and sometimes interesting patterns, but most surprising of all is probably the list of every Billboard hit from 1950 to 2005 ranked by their popularity in Spotify.
The top 10 of that list is dominated by rock, with two hip-hop and two pop tracks making the cut. Daniels admits his methodology is flawed, saying if it were perfect it would analyze only data from Spotify users born after 1995, because they and their children and their children’s children will be the ones influencing what is popular in 2050. But the aim of this exercise is to determine what songs from the past will endure and be remembered by future generations, versus what was popular at the time it was released.
With a cursory glance at the list of Billboard hit songs with the highest Spotify plays, one influence jumps off the page: placements in film and television. Analyzing its impact is one of many X-factor things the author admits is beyond the scope of his vision in the timeless songs piece, but it’s such a significant factor in several songs on the top of the chart that it jumps off the page at you.
Here is a sampling of tracks from that list with significant placements. The list is incomplete, not showing every single placement or even every song that has a placement, because that would be all of them if you take into account the number of cover songs that reality singing and dancing TV churn through. (It is noted when a song has been repeatedly featured on multiple singing or dancing shows, however.) The list is condensed to highlight TV shows and films that have mass audiences (new or nostalgic), are very popular to stream, or have been in syndication/repeated on cable long enough to saturate the culture.
1. Eminem: "Lose Yourself" - 8 Mile
4. Journey: "Don’t Stop Believin’" - The Wedding Singer, "The Sopranos", "Glee", "Laguna Beach", "Family Guy", "Scrubs", numerous singing competition shows
9. The White Stripes: "Seven Nation Army", arena sports
10. Coldplay: "Fix You" - "Glee", "The Newsroom", "Scrubs", "Extras", numerous reality singing and dancing shows
12. Mariah Carey: "All I Want for Christmas Is You" - Love Actually
14. Goo Goo Dolls: "Iris" - written for City of Angels
15. Oasis: "Wonderwall" - "Girls", "Lost", "Nip/Tuck", "The O.C."
16. Survivor: "Eye of the Tiger" - Rocky III& Rocky IV, "The Big Bang Theory", "Breaking Bad", "The Simpsons", "Gilmore Girls"
19. Queen: "Bohemian Rhapsody" - Wayne’s World, "Glee", "Dr. Who", "Two and a Half Men", numerous reality singing shows
20. Beyoncé: "Crazy in Love" - Fifty Shades of Grey, The Great Gatsby, "The Office", Bridget Jones: The Edge of Reason, White Chicks, numerous reality singing and dancing shows
21. Kanye West: "Gold Digger" - Trainwreck, "Glee"
24. Blackstreet: "No Diggity" - Pitch Perfect
28. U2: "With or Without You" - "Friends"
29. Guns N' Roses: "Sweet Child o' Mine" - The Wrestler, "The Office", Step Brothers, Big Daddy (cover), numerous reality singing shows
31. Metallica: "Enter Sandman" - sports
33. Radiohead: "Creep" - "Community", "Glee", "The Simpsons"
38. Whitney Houston: "I Will Always Love You" - The Bodyguard, This Is the End, "Two and a Half Men", "The Simpsons"
The idea that people use TV and movies to discover music is nothing new. The Pew Research Center released a study on purchasing music on the Internet in 2008 that found, "Most music buyers (83%) say that they find out about music from hearing a song on the radio, on TV, or in a movie." That was greater than any other discovery method, including recommendations from friends and family, going to a record store or going to a concert. In 2008, TV and film were considered an "offline" resource. Binge-watching as we know it didn’t exist, rather it meant binging on a day-long reality TV marathon on cable. "Friends" wasn’t on Netflix; in fact, most people still had Netflix deliver DVDs of movies to their home. iTunes only began offering movie rentals that year, and films certainly didn’t premiere digitally while they were in theaters.
As an example, let’s examine Journey’s "Don’t Stop Believin’". It’s hard to imagine it now, but in 2007 everyone was confounded by the song’s jump to the top of the iTunes sales chart. It hit a pop culture high when it was featured in the season premiere of the MTV show "Laguna Beach" and an episode of "Family Guy" in the same week, while simultaneously soundtracking a video that had gone viral on YouTube. That could have been the end of the story for this random '80s non-hit, but it was resurrected again in 2007 when "The Sopranos" used it as the final song of the final scene of its much-discussed series finale. This time the track saw radio airplay spike, as well as iTunes sales. The cast of "Glee" performed the song in the show’s pilot episode, which aired in 2009. That show in particular became highly influential on music sales. They resurrected "Don’t Stop Believin’", bringing the original cast back to sing it again in the 2015 final season. That blitz of placements, not it’s endurance on classic rock radio station playlists, is why the song is so popular now. Will it be timeless forever because of the new context these shows have put around it, rewriting its history from a cheesy pop song released in the '80s into a classic pop nugget? We need two more generations to decide. If we’d never heard from the song again after 2005’s TV-borne renewal, it might have disappeared. "The Sopranos", and the intense discussion around the controversial finale of that show, gave the song a salience it didn’t previously possess—and, evidently, legs.
One could make the same argument for "Eye of the Tiger" or "I Will Always Love You", whose subsequent placements in various pop culture moments have everything to do with its genesis as a fight song in the context of the Rocky movies and The Bodyguard. The White Stripes and Metallica are constantly used as bed music in sports broadcasts of all types. U2’s "With or Without You" is a great song on its own, but how many people under 30 know it best as the song that soundtracked Ross and Rachel getting back together on "Friends"?
The landscape has changed quickly and we now live in a world where film and TV streaming influences music streaming. It’s always been a symbiotic system, with varying degrees of success, but a shift in preferences to streaming video as well as music has given the advantage to studios, networks, and record labels that allow their content to have a presence on streaming services. Bands who don’t license their music, like Pearl Jam and R.E.M., have zero songs on this list of timeless music. What was a choice driven by integrity at the time couldn’t possibly have anticipated how much we now allow our media consumption to drive our music preferences. Some of the most important bands in music history will be lost in favor of Journey’s "Don’t Stop Believin’", which is the most timeless song of the 1980s at this point, because a high school kid on an MTV reality show wanted Journey to be playing when he met his girlfriend.