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A data set containing lyrics to, and characteristics of, all officially released Taylor Swift songs. This includes albums, EPs, and individually released singles.

Usage

taylor_all_songs

taylor_album_songs

Format

taylor_all_songs is a tibble with 356 rows and 29 variables. Each row is one song.

  • album_name: The name of the album. NA if the song was released separately from one of Taylor's studio albums or EPs.

  • ep: Logical. Is the album a full studio album (FALSE) or an extended play (TRUE).

  • album_release: The date the album was released, in the ISO-8601 format (YYYY-MM-DD).

  • track_number: The order of the song on the album or EP.

  • track_name: The name of the song.

  • artist: The name of the song artist. Usually Taylor Swift, but will show other artists for songs that Taylor is only featured on.

  • featuring: Any artists that are featured on the track.

  • bonus_track: Logical. Is the track only present on a deluxe edition of the album (TRUE) or is does it also appear on the standard version (FALSE).

  • promotional_release: The date the song was released as a promotional single, in the ISO-8601 format (YYYY-MM-DD).. NA if the song was never released as a promotional single.

  • single_release: The date the song was released as an official single, in the ISO-8601 format (YYYY-MM-DD). NA if the song was never released as an official single.

  • track_release: The date the song was first publicly released. This is the earliest of album_release, promotional_release, and single_release.

The next set of variables come from the Spotify API. See the documentation at https://developer.spotify.com/documentation/web-api/reference/ for complete details.

  • danceability: How suitable a track is for dancing. 0.0 = least danceable, 1.0 = most danceable.

  • energy: Perceptual measure of intensity and activity. 0.0 = least energy, 1.0 = most energy.

  • key: The key the track is in. Integer maps to standard Pitch Class notation.

  • loudness: Loudness of track in decibels (dB), averaged across the track.

  • mode: Modality of a track (major/minor). 0 = minor, 1 = major.

  • speechiness: The presence of spoken words in a track. Values above 0.66 indicate that the track is probably made entirely of spoken words. Values between 0.33 and 0.66 indicate both music and speech. Values less than 0.33 indicate the track is probably music or other non-speech tracks.

  • acousticness: Confidence that the track is acoustic. 0.0 = low confidence, 1.0 = high confidence.

  • instrumentalness: Confidence that the track is an instrumental track (i.e., no vocals). 0.0 = low confidence, 1.0 = high confidence.

  • liveness: Confidence that the track is a live recording (i.e., an audience is present). 0.0 = low confidence, 1.0 = high confidence.

  • valence: Musical positiveness conveyed by the track. 0.0 = low valence (e.g., sad, depressed, angry), 1.0 = high valence (e.g., happy, cheerful, euphoric).

  • tempo: Estimated tempo of the track in beats per minute (BPM).

  • time_signature: Estimated overall time signature.

  • duration_ms: Duration of the track in milliseconds.

  • explicit: Logical. Does the track contain explicit lyrics (TRUE) or not (FALSE).

Finally, the last set of variables includes those calculated from the Spotify API data, and a list-column containing song lyrics.

  • key_name: Corresponds directly to the key, but the integer is converted to the key name using Pitch Class notation (e.g., 0 becomes C).

  • mode_name: Corresponds directly to the mode, but the integer is converted to the mode name (e.g., 0 becomes minor).

  • key_mode: A combination of the key_name and mode_name variables (e.g., C minor).

  • lyrics: A list-column containing the lyrics to each song. The lyrics can be unnested with tidyr::unnest() (i.e., tidyr::unnest(taylor_all_songs, lyrics)). Each element is a data frame with 4 variables. :

    • line: The line number of the song.

    • lyric: The lyric for the given line.

    • element: The element of the song the line and lyric belong to, as defined by https://genius.com/ (e.g., Verse 1, Chorus, etc.).

    • element_artist: The artist performing the element. Usually Taylor Swift, but other artists appear if they are featured on the track (e.g., HAIM is featured on no body, no crime).

taylor_album_songs is a tibble containing the same 29 variables, but only with 240 rows, one for each song from an official studio album (see Details).

Details

taylor_all_songs contains all songs in Taylor's discography. Lyrics come from Genius, and songs characteristics come from the Spotify API. Some data is known to be missing. The Beautiful Eyes EP is not available on any streaming service, and therefore has no data from the Spotify API. Similarly, the song American Girl, a cover of the Tom Petty original, was released exclusively on Rhapsody (now Napster), and therefore also does not have data from the Spotify API.

For songs released separately from Taylor's official albums or EPs, album information is not included. For example, I Don't Wanna Live Forever was released as part of the Fifty Shades Darker movie soundtrack. However, the album_name column for this song is NA, indicating that it does not appear on one of Taylor's albums.

Songs are only included one time. For example, if a song appears on both the standard and deluxe version of an album, there is only one record of the song in the data set. Similarly, compilations are not included. For example, following the release of folklore, Taylor released several EPs that were subsets of the original folklore album (e.g., folklore: the escapism chapter, folklore: the sleepless nights chapter, etc.). These are not included. Finally, all bonus tracks (with the exception of voice memos or similar) are included; however, for consistency, the album name is always the shortened, common name. For example, the lakes is a bonus track from folklore (deluxe edition), but the album_name is listed only as folklore. The bonus_track variable can be used to determine which songs appeared on the standard version of an album vs. a deluxe or platinum edition.

taylor_album_songs contains the same information as taylor_all_songs, but only for Taylor's official studio albums. Thus, taylor_album_songs is a subset of taylor_all_songs, with EPs and individual singles excluded. Critically, this subset also only includes versions owned by Taylor when possible, because we stan artists owning their own work. This means that although both Fearless and Fearless (Taylor's Version) appear in the full taylor_all_songs data, only Fearless (Taylor's Version) appears in this subset. This also means that this data set will change as additional re-releases are made available (i.e., Red was replaced with Red (Taylor's Version) in version 1.0.0).