Well hello there! Welcome to my Decade of Music Project Summary Day One. What’s on the agenda for today? Well, we’re just going to do a bunch of general summary stats today, ‘cause I’m curious about several different things that involve looking at the numbers for the entire decade.

First, let me preface this whole thing with a note about my ratings system. Here’s how it works, generally:

• 5-Stars: These are the songs that I’m always excited to listen to. If I’m alone when one of these songs starts, I usually say “YES!” out loud.
  
• 4-Stars: These are the songs that I’m usually excited to listen to, but that don’t bring me the same level of joy as the 5-Stars.
  
• 3-Stars: Songs that are above average; I’m okay with listening to these on a semi-frequent basis.
  
• 2-Stars: Songs that I usually wouldn’t listen to by choice, but I don’t mind hearing occasionally.
  
• 1-Stars: Songs that I have, but don’t really enjoy all that much. (There aren’t too many of these.)
  
• 0-Stars: Songs that fall into the following genres (unless good enough to be one of the other ratings): classical, instrumental, soundtrack. I have no idea why I classify songs of these three genres as 0-Stars. I’ve just always done it that way. It doesn’t mean they’re the “worst” songs in my collection…I think I just do it to help classify songs that (typically) don’t have lyrics for times when I want to listen to lyric-free songs. I guess.

SO. For the following statistics that involve ratings (stars), I’ve removed all 0-Star songs just to keep things consistent across years. This is because I downloaded more classical/instrumental/soundtrack songs in some years as compared to others, which would skew the average ratings unfairly (again, 0-Stars are just a category, not really a technical “ranking”).

Just letting you know.

Yearly Statistics

First, I downloaded a grand total of 3,652 songs with a total time of 14,394.05 minutes (that’s about 239.9 hours or about 10 days’ worth of music)!

Here are the median song lengths per year (since song lengths were highly skewed).

Year with median shortest songs: 2012
Year with median longest songs: 2014

Here are the average song ratings per year (0-Stars removed).

Year with lowest-rated songs on average: 2013
Year with highest-rated songs on average: 2019

I’m surprised 2013 is the lowest; I would have suspected 2015 or 2016. 2019 is probably highest just because of the fact that it contains the newest and therefore most “exciting” songs for me.

Total number of each rating.

That doesn’t surprise me.

Ratings (stars) by year.

Total number of each genre.

Interesting? Maybe. Maybe not. But hopefully the next few days will be even more exciting as I go through some of the specifics of the project.