Are there less One-hit wonders as time goes on?

2021-10-14

Testing stupid assumptions with web scraping and pandas.

So i had a thought / observation that when you play a playlist that focuses on songs from the previous years (like 'Top Hits of 2010s' ), it seems like there are more One-hit wonders in comparison to today.

For example, if we play a playlist of hits from 2009, it seems / feels like there is a greater range of unique songs or more artists which could be classified as One-hit wonders.

How can we check if it is true?

  1. Scrape the data from Wikipedia about the top singles of year x

  2. Get the count of how many artists are mentioned in the year x

  3. Split the cells that have the words ' and ' or ' featuring '.

  4. Plot the data

Results

image with results from github

image with results from github

Conclusions

  1. Doesn't seem like there's a trend in respect to One-hit wonders.

  2. Number of unique artists is growing.

  3. Artists with 2 hits per year do start to increase a bit from ~1990, which could maybe explain why it seems like there is less uniqueness in songs. Maybe. Or more collabs.