Exploring My 2018 in Music with R

If your social media feed is anything like mine, you probably see a lot of posts like this toward the end of the year.

Spotify promomotional image for “Spotify Wrapped 2018”

It can be fun to see what kind of music other people like and to share your own music tastes. It’s also a great advertisement campaign for Spotify (see their nice logo in the top left of these graphics).

The only problem for me is that I’m not a Spotify user, so when I try to open my #2018Wrapped data, I am greeted with a very nicely packaged empty box. Fortunately, as I wrote about in my last post, I log all of my music streaming using a free, open-source service called ListenBrainz. I am going to use that data to create my own end-of-year music graphic similar to the ones posted by my friends who use Spotify.

The Data

I’m doing this project in R for a couple of reasons. First of all, I kind of like R. Honestly this wasn’t the case a few years ago. It has tons of great stats tools, but a lot of things are very much designed for statisticians.

library("jsonlite")
library("tidyverse")
library("xml2")
library("RCurl")
library("scales")
library("purrrlyr")
plays <- fromJSON("data/music-data-2018.json")

I’m only interested in my activity from 2018, so I will filter my dataset down to only the entries with a timecode in 2018.

stamp <- as.numeric(as.POSIXct("2018-01-01", format = "%Y-%m-%d"))
recentPlays <- plays[plays$timestamp >= stamp, ]
recentPlays <- as_tibble(recentPlays[
    c("artist_name", "track_name", "release_name", "timestamp")
])
nrow(recentPlays)

[1] 13226

That’s a lot of music! How was that listening distributed over time?

recentPlays$date <- as.POSIXct(recentPlays$timestamp, origin = "1970-01-01") %>%
    as.Date()
recentPlays %>%
    ggplot(., aes(format(date, "%Y-%U"))) +
    geom_bar(stat = "count") +
    labs(x = "Week", title = "Tracks streamed per week.") +
    theme(
        axis.text.x = element_text(angle = -90, hjust = 0),
        panel.border = element_blank(),
        legend.key = element_blank(),
        panel.background = element_blank(),
        plot.background = element_rect(fill = "transparent", colour = NA)
    )

Tracks streamed per week

Top Artists

We can use this data to answer some pretty easy questions. For example, who were my top artists in 2018?

top_artists <- recentPlays %>%
    count(artist_name, sort = T)
top_artists %>% head()

artist_name	n
Charli XCX	870
Carly Rae Jepsen	427
Ariana Grande	311
Kacey Musgraves	277
Marina And The Diamonds	223
Lady Gaga	215

Critically acclaimed pop perfection yes!

Top Songs

I can also do something similar to find my top tracks for the year.

recentPlays %>%
    count(artist_name, track_name, sort = T) %>%
    head(5)

artist_name	track_name	n
SOPHIE	Immaterial	41
Charli XCX	No Angel	40
Charli XCX	I Got It (feat. Brooke Candy, CupcakKe and Pabllo Vittar)	36
Charli XCX	Focus	34
Charli XCX	Lucky	33

I listen to a lot of Charli XCX, so this list doesn’t really have a lot of variety (though Charli is absolutely one of the most versatile artists in pop today). Let’s filter the results to only show one song per artist.

top_songs <- recentPlays %>%
    group_by(artist_name, track_name) %>%
    count(sort = T) %>%
    ungroup() %>%
    distinct(artist_name, .keep_all = T) %>%
    head(5)
top_songs

artist_name	track_name	n
SOPHIE	Immaterial	41
Charli XCX	No Angel	40
Troye Sivan	My My My!	32
Kacey Musgraves	High Horse	31
Carly Rae Jepsen	Party For One	26

Top Albums

ListenBrainz also logs the release name, so it’s pretty easy to compile a list of my top albums.

topAlbums <- recentPlays %>%
    group_by(artist_name, release_name) %>%
    count(sort = T)
topAlbums %>% head()

My most-streamed albums of 2018.

artist_name	release_name	n
Charli XCX	Pop 2	296
Kacey Musgraves	Golden Hour	247
Carly Rae Jepsen	Emotion (Deluxe)	191
Marina And The Diamonds	Electra Heart	179
Charli XCX	Number 1 Angel	153
Ariana Grande	Dangerous Woman	144

Let’s say I just want to know which albums from the last year I streamed.

getAlbum <- function(row) {
    mburl <- sprintf(
        'https://beta.musicbrainz.org/ws/2/release/?query=artist:%s+release:%s+AND+status:official+AND+format:"Digital%%20Media"&inc=release-group&limit=1',
        curlEscape(row$artist_name),
        curlEscape(row$release_name)
    )
    Sys.sleep(0.25)
    groupData <- read_xml(mburl)
    xml_ns_strip(groupData)
    release <- xml_find_first(groupData, "//release[@ns2:score=100]")
    xml_ns_strip(release)
    # If it is empty
    if (class(release) == "xml_missing") {
        release <- xml_new_document() %>% xml_add_child("")
    }
    # Go with the earliest release date given.
    date <- xml_text(xml_find_first(release, "//date"))
    artistId <- xml_text(xml_find_first(release, "//artist/@id"))
    df <- data.frame(date, artistId, stringsAsFactors = FALSE)
    colnames(df) <- c("date", "artistId")
    return(df)
}

recentAlbums <- topAlbums %>%
    filter(n > 100) %>%
    by_row(..f = getAlbum, .to = ".out") %>%
    unnest(cols = c(.out))

recentAlbums %>%
    filter(str_detect(date, "2018")) %>%
    dplyr::select(artist_name, release_name, n, date) %>%
    filter(n > 75)

artist_name	release_name	n	date
Kacey Musgraves	Golden Hour	247	2018-03-30
Clarence Clarity	THINK: PEACE	119	2018-10-04
SOPHIE	OIL OF EVERY PEARL’S UN-INSIDES	119	2018-06-15
Amnesia Scanner	Another Life	118	2018-09-07
Troye Sivan	Bloom	118	2018-08-31
IDLES	Joy as an Act of Resistance.	103	2018-08-31

Minutes streamed

Initially I considered a brute-force approach to this problem; however, it does not seem a good use of resources to get the length for every single song. Instead I’ll write a function to grab lengths for songs…

getLengths <- function(row) {
    song_stripped <- trimws(sub("\\(.*\\)", "", row$track_name))
    mburl <- sprintf(
        "https://beta.musicbrainz.org/ws/2/recording/?query=artist:%s+AND+recording:%s&limit=2",
        curlEscape(row$artist_name),
        curlEscape(song_stripped)
    )
    # To comply with the rate limit.
    Sys.sleep(0.5)
    albumData <- read_xml(mburl)
    xml_ns_strip(albumData)
    length <- xml_integer(xml_find_first(albumData, "//length"))
    return(length)
}

…and sample 100 of my streams.

set.seed(425368203)
len_sample <- recentPlays %>%
    sample_n(100) %>%
    by_row(..f = getLengths, .to = "length") %>%
    unnest(cols = c(length))

This gives me a reasonable mean length.

mean_len <- len_sample %>%
    dplyr::summarize(Mean = mean(length, na.rm = T))
mean_len

Mean
229878.5

Which I can use to estimate the total for the population.

mins <- nrow(recentPlays) * mean(as.numeric(mean_len)) / 60000
mins

[1] 50858.81

Top Genre

Observation: the top quartile of artists make up the vast majority of my streams this year.

top_artist_ids <- recentAlbums %>%
    group_by(artistId) %>%
    filter(!is.na(artistId)) %>%
    summarize(Sum = sum(n)) %>%
    arrange(desc(Sum))
top_artist_ids %>%
    summarize(sum(Sum))

sum(Sum)
2294

Conclusion: This is a good time to use a sample again.

fetchGenres <- function(row) {
    mburl <- sprintf(
        "https://beta.musicbrainz.org/ws/2/artist/%s?inc=genres",
        row$artistId
    )
    Sys.sleep(0.25)
    groupData <- read_xml(mburl)
    xml_ns_strip(groupData)
    genres <- xml_text(xml_find_all(groupData, "//genre/name"))
    return(genres)
}

top_genre_ids <- top_artist_ids %>%
    by_row(..f = fetchGenres, .to = "Genres") %>%
    unnest()
topGenres <- top_genre_ids %>%
    group_by(Genres) %>%
    summarize(Sum = sum(Sum)) %>%
    arrange(desc(Sum))
topGenres %>% head()

Genres	Sum
pop	1458
dance-pop	1196
electropop	1195
synth-pop	1081
pop rock	819
electronic	568

Creating the graphic

library("ggpubr")
library("png")
library("raster")

myTheme <- ttheme(
    colnames.style = colnames_style(color = "white", fill = "#8cc257", linewidth = 0),
    tbody.style = tbody_style(
        color = "white", linewidth = 0,
        fill = "#8cc257"
    )
)

bgTheme <- theme(
    plot.background = element_rect(fill = "#8cc257", color = "#8cc257"),
    panel.border = element_blank(),
)

top_artist_names <- top_artists$artist_name %>% head()

artistTable <- ggtexttable(
    top_artist_names,
    rows = NULL,
    theme = myTheme, cols = c("Top Artists")
) + bgTheme

trackTable <- ggtexttable(
    top_songs$track_name,
    rows = NULL,
    theme = myTheme, cols = c("Top Songs")
) + bgTheme

minutes <- as_ggplot(text_grob(paste("Minutes Listened", toString(round(mins)), "", "Top Genre", toString(topGenres[1, 1]), sep = "\n"), color = "white")) + bgTheme

img <- readPNG("images/albums.png")

im_A <- ggplot() +
    background_image(img[1:250, 1:250, 1:3]) +
    theme(plot.margin = margin(t = .5, l = .5, r = .5, b = .5, unit = "cm")) +
    bgTheme

ggarrange(im_A, artistTable, minutes, trackTable, ncol = 2, nrow = 2)