
The Skip - robzyb
http://musicmachinery.com/2014/05/02/the-skip/
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daturkel
For those who don't know, Paul Lamere, the author, is a really cool guy that
works over at The Echo Nest (recently acquired by Spotify). I had the pleasure
of meeting him and chatting with him a few times last summer while I was
interning there and he's basically a music+tech genius. Lots of the echo nests
coolest api demos are all his doing. I'd link to stuff but I'm on my phone,
but definitely browse through his blog. If this is your area of interest, Paul
is the guy to read.

edit: on my comp now, so I can add this link to some cool EN API demos, many
of which are Paul's if I recall correctly:
[http://static.echonest.com/labs/demo.html](http://static.echonest.com/labs/demo.html)

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analog31
I wonder how this affects the writing of songs.

“It’s not enough to have one hook anymore,” Jay Brown, the president of Roc
Nation, and Dean’s manager, told me recently. “You’ve got to have a hook in
the intro, a hook in the pre-chorus, a hook in the chorus, and a hook in the
bridge.” The reason, he explained, is that “people on average give a song
seven seconds on the radio before they change the channel, and you got to hook
them.”

[http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2012/03/26/120326fa_fact_...](http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2012/03/26/120326fa_fact_seabrook)

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k-mcgrady
>> "I wonder how this affects the writing of songs."

It depends on why you're writing the song I guess. If you're writing a pop
song you want to get to the top of the charts following that formula is
probably essentially (although it obviously doesn't guarantee success). Just
listen to some of the top pop songs - they clearly have a formula. The problem
is that when everything follows the formula you can't listen to much of it
because it gets boring.

I'd say if you're writing a song you want to last, something that will
potentially go down as a classic, forget about formulas a write what you think
sounds good.

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leephillips
"The problem is that when everything follows the formula you can't listen to
much of it because it gets boring."

This is why I can't stand pop music, and can't understand why it's so ....
popular. I've already heard the C-major scale in 4/4 time, layered with false
emotion by a 20 year old who's seen it all.

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adwf
That's the exact reason that most pop music is marketed at teenagers. For
them, it's the first time they've heard it (relatively speaking). As you get
older, you've heard all the 4/4 C-major stuff you can stand. Even if you're
not particularly musical, you will still subconciously recognise that pop
songs are repetitive and fairly unoriginal after a while. But it's an easy
sale for the record labels, so that why they do it.

That doesn't mean that there doesn't occasionally come along a good song or
two. It's still perfectly possible to write a 4/4 song in C and have it be
interesting/fun/good to listen to. Unfortunately you'll have to wade through a
whole load of crap in the pop charts before you find it ;)

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nitrogen
This is the deeper insight behind the saying, "There's a sucker born every
minute."

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jkrause314
Another analysis I'd like to see is how many songs people skip in a row. When
I skip a song I end up skipping a bunch of songs until I find just the right
one that I want to listen to at that moment, and I speculate that most of the
quick skips come in these sorts of runs. If that's true, then it'd be
interesting to try and figure out what properties the songs users end up on
have as compared to the ones that they skip over.

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Grue3
At first I was surprised skip rate was so high, because I couldn't imagine
somebody using a service where they skip every other song, but your
observation explains this nicely. Even for my carefully selected music
library, I sometimes burst-skip a bunch of songs, which would undoubtedly
taint my skip statistics.

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rtpg
Very tangential but I used to skip songs a lot and make a lot of custom
playlists but have moved towards listening to albums front-to-back and not
skipping songs. I still have a couple small playlists that are a sort of
"greatest hits" of my collection that I shuffle every once in a while.

It has greatly improved my listening experiences in general, and has made me
discover songs I forgot I had/ I didn't listen to much before.

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NAFV_P
> _Skipping has become an important part of how we listen to music._

Is this a polite manner of saying that most modern popular music sucks?

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mattmanser
I skip based on the mood of a song. You can quite easily cull songs you don't
like from your playlists.

One of my friends jokes all his albums are now 3 songs long.

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quarterto
Interestingly, Last.fm introducing a skip limit of 6, with no way to remove
the limit even for paying subscribers was what finally pushed me away from
Last.fm and on to Spotify.

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Kiro
I'm surprised there's no increase in skipping toward the end of the song. I
usually skip in the outro when there's 10-20 seconds left.

~~~
k-mcgrady
Especially with electronic music becoming so popular. The last 30 seconds of
most EDM tracks is just a repeating beat to enable a DJ to mix it into the
next track easier.

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rcthompson
I think the constant non-zero skip rate throughout the entire song length is
explained by people who would have skipped the song at the beginning but who
weren't present when the song started (e.g. they went to the kitchen to get a
drink). These people would skip the song as soon as they get back, which could
be at any point within the song.

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johnymontana
I may have missed this in the article, but is this dataset publicly available?
I would love to have access if it is.

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hammock
I had no idea spotify made this kind of data available. Has anyone seen anyone
else analyzing it?

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nathancahill
I believe it's available here [0], with an approved account. No idea how to
get access though. My "account does not have access to Spotify Analytics".

[0] [https://analytics.spotify.com/login](https://analytics.spotify.com/login)

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JoeAltmaier
I'd be interested in how often skipping is used on new songs vs ones we've
heard many times before. Is it possible that a song can only become popular if
it hooks the listener in the 1st 10-20 seconds? Important for songwriters to
know.

Skipping is not a new 'iPhone' phenomenon. CD player in your car has a next-
track button. Even the car radio - changing the channel was common. So no,
music today isn't getting some sort of 'raw deal', or at least no more than
ever.

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chillingeffect
> "get out of your chair, walk over to the turntable, carefully pick up the
> tone arm and advance the needle to the next track. That was a lot of work "

mfw "lot of work."

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gesticulator
One possible explanation for why user's skip behavior varies by time of
day/week is that they're more likely to be playing songs around friends. A lot
of times you'll want to show just one part of a song to someone, or you want
to manage several requests for songs when you're out.

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analog31
Going a bit further... I wonder if anybody has thought of using the skip rate
as a way of A/B testing pop songs, for instance similar arrangements of the
same song.

