This one’s perhaps not quite what you’re thinking. Yes, almost the entire HMHB catalogue is on Spotify now, for your listening pleasure, but biscuiteer Craig H has been playing with the data…

First up is just to see what data Spotify has about the songs. Craig writes: “The info on key, duration, etc, speaks for itself. The machine-derived metrics are slightly more arcane – ‘valence’ relates to how ‘happy’ a song is, for instance. Popularity is relative to the entire Spotify catalogue and ranges from 1-100, but is subject to change over time – the tracks from the new album are quite high at the moment – relative to the older stuff at least – so these numbers will probably fall as the album fades into memory.”

The full set of Spotify ‘audio features’ are explained here, and include mode, speechiness, acousticness, instrumentalness, liveness, valence, tempo, duration_ms, time_signature and key_mode.

Anyway, see what you think. You can find the spreadsheet here.