Viewing a single comment thread. View all comments

spicer2 OP t1_jc6fzop wrote

Tools: Excel

Source: MusicBrainz (online music encyclopedia)

Methodology/FAQs: I've seen a few other people attempt to figure this out but I've never been completely satisfied with their methodology. Music YouTuber David Bennett Piano has a video where he used Wikipedia disambiguation pages to arrive at a final list which is clever, but not robust enough for my tastes.

I had to do some careful filtering on the data to make it useful, so to be clear on what you’re seeing: this is the number of *original compositions* with that title. This means cover versions are excluded – if you don’t do that, the list is just full of Christmas songs that have been recorded many times over. I also filtered it so it is only *songs* – this means things like musicals, soundtracks, and classical albums are excluded (otherwise you get a load of “Preludes”). This is also why the figures are lower than some other sources you might have seen for this kind of data.

Some other interesting tidbits:

-”I Love You” is 28th in the all-time list;

-The most common animal is “Butterfly” (55th);

-The most common color is “Blue” (61st);

-”Untitled” (as in, an actual title called “Untitled”) is 63rd;

-The most commonly used place name is "California" (75th);

-If you exclude “Grace”, the most common name is “Maria”. And if you exclude that, it’s “Caroline” (unsweetened).

160

Upstairs-Boring t1_jc6l8f6 wrote

This is quite interesting!

I'm curious about what the difference is in having the title "untitled" and what you classified as untitled? I'm assuming the latter means that it was blank but does that mean the title exists but was missing from the database or that the song had been purposely left with no name?

23

LustfulBellyButton t1_jc81mg7 wrote

I did’t get the methodology.

  1. The numbers relative to each word in the chart represent how many songs are named with that word/syntagma or how many songs contain that word/syntagma?

  2. What’s the country/language frame? Are the data counting only the songs made in the US, or they are also counting the songs written and published in English from other countries?

  3. What’s the time frame, or what’s the oldest song of the data?

  4. Because of #2 and #3, I’d also like to say how misleading/English-centered this title “of all times” can be

14

Strange_Ad_6206 t1_jc8jruc wrote

The title is pretty arrogant. It's "tracks recorded and published by the record industry."

4

se_nicknehm t1_jc7ccvb wrote

a search for "intro" on discogss gave me 436.842 results... but 52.371 results for record titles, 529 results for artists and 238 results for labels should be excluded

this still leaves me with 330.556 results - some of them are double or even tripple because discogs counts each release/version of the same record (f.e. CD, vinyl, "special edition" etc.), but still ...it's a MUCH higher number than 694

8

SwagDrQueefChief t1_jc88lis wrote

Do we really wanna count all those 100 song long grindcore album where they haven't named a single song?

2

The_mystery4321 t1_jc6qu86 wrote

Last bit had me in fits of giggles lol. Nice work OP, very interesting!

5

robogobo t1_jc9qpxj wrote

Prelude seems like olden days speak for intro.

1

miclugo t1_jcajreh wrote

I get why you consider excluding "Grace" (because probably when it appears in song titles it's often as the common noun) but why exclude "Maria"? Also, what's the most common male name?

1