An interactive story by Chris Barber, Xavier Evans, and Andrew Nickerson
Pick a genre to discover more about that genre's success on the Billboard top 100 music board. The genre you pick will be the type of song you write! Hover over each line to learn which song it is!
Nice choice! Close to 90% of the songs with the most weeks on the board in the last 20 years are pop songs. This seems to make sense, given that "pop" is short for popular!
Nice choice! Surprisingly, out of the top 50 songs with the most weeks on the board in the last 20 years, only 6 of them have been rock songs. Crazy!
Nice choice! Rap seems to rarely be on the billboard top 100 for a long amount of time, but it's on the rise in recent years.
Tell us which decade you'd like your hit song to be from! We'll use this to help you create a hit chorus.
You chose 1980! We've picked a few top songs from the '80s in your selected genre. Press "Play Song" to hear one of our selections play while we animate lyrical sentiment.
You chose 1990! We've picked a few top songs from the '90s in your selected genre. Press "Play Song" to hear one of our selections play while we animate lyrical sentiment.
You chose 2000! We've picked a few top songs from the 2000s in your selected genre. Press "Play Song" to hear one of our selections play while we animate lyrical sentiment.
You chose 2010! We've picked a few top songs from the '10s in your selected genre. Press "Play Song" to hear one of our selections play while we animate lyrical sentiment.
You chose 2020! We've picked a few top songs from the '20s in your selected genre. Press "Play Song" to hear one of our selections play while we animate lyrical sentiment.
At every 10% duration through each song, we took a chunk of our lyrics (corresponding to that portion of the song) and ran sentiment analysis on each set of words, after which each proportion is given a positivity score between 1 (being most positive) and -1 (being most negative)
It's time to write a chorus for your song! Check out the most popular words and phrases used in songs from above to help you write a few chorus lines in the text box underneath. Get creative!
In the text box below, compose a few lines for a chorus based on any inspiration from above. The possibilities are endless, just make sure to separate your chorus into 4 or more lines.
See how similar the lines of your song are to one another on the heat map below. The more similar, the more cohesive your song.. Hover over each box to view the similarity score between lines.
-->YOUR SONG
Write lyrics in Step 3 to display the repetition matrix,
lines of the chorus to compare,
and their associated similarity score.
Hover over each visualization and click to select your song's duration and tempo. To maximize the likelihood of your song being a hit, we recommend choosing a value near the peak of the distribution. To undo, click again and make a new selection.
Success! You've successfully written a hit chorus. Check out the radar plot below to see how your chorus stacks up against other hit songs!
We hope you learned a bit about how to write a hit chorus!