Makeover Monday: How Repetitive are the Top 100 Songs of All Time?

11/15/2016 Matt Chambers 0 Comments

For this Makeover Monday, I wanted to be able to show the songs with the most repetition as well as where the repetition falls within each song.

I calculated the percent of unique lyrics (unique lyrics/total lyrics), and then sorted the songs by this metric. "Hound Dog" by Elvis Presley is the most repetitive song in the list given that only 13.6% of the lyrics are unique. Once I had sorted the songs, I wanted to show where within each song the lyrics were repeated.

To do this, I came up with the Lyric Appearance Ratio. This is a metric I created to quantify how repetitive a lyric is within a song. It is the unique count of each word within a song divided by the total number of unique words within a song.

For example, the word "you" appears in the song "Hound Dog" 25 times and there are 31 unique words. This is a ratio of .81, which is highly repetitive.