What Makes a Hit Song?
What Makes a Hit Song?
Why do some songs take off while others never reach more than a few thousand plays? With millions of tracks uploaded each year to streaming services each year it is natural to wonder what separates a top hit from something less successful. Hits have several things in common, and each visualization below reveals a different part of the story. This aims to tackle these questions in order to define what makes a hit.
Data? This project analyzes three different data sets which contain metrics and characteristics of hit songs. The first data set contains all the songs on Spotify that have at least 1 billion streams as of November 2025. The songs were put in a playlist and then extracted using Spotifys web developer api. The data used for these visualizations is scraped from the Spotify using their free developer API. The second data set is 9000 songs that charted on the billboard hot 100 charts since 1990. The third is 17000 Spotify songs many of which are hits and many of which are not.
Radar Chart of Average Audio Features: This radar plot gives a bird’s eye view of the average audio profile of songs that charted on the billboard hot 100 charts since 1990. Danceability, energy, and valence all stand out as relatively high. Liveness, acousticness, speechiness, and instrumentalness are noticeably lower. This visualization uses the principle of comparative profiling to show how multiple audio features stack up against one another and reveal the overall shape of a hit song.
What this tells us: Charting songs tend to be energetic and emotionally bright. High danceability and high energy could be potentially important. Lower acousticness and instrumentalness show that hits often lean on groovy and possibly electronic layers rather than acoustic or instrumental arrangements. This chart sets the foundation for everything that follows by showing the overall personality of hit music.
Energy Relationships Billboard Songs: Energy vs Danceability, Valence, Loudness, and More: These paired scatterplots with trend lines zoom in on one dominant feature: energy. Across every comparison, higher energy predicts a modest rise in other qualities like danceability, valence, and loudness.
What this tells us: Energy acts as a central pillar in the audio identity of hits. More energetic songs tend to be more danceable and slightly more positive in emotional tone. Louder songs also tend to be more energetic, which aligns with modern mixing techniques where artists push tracks to feel more intense. Even though none of these relationships are perfect, the consistency is important: energy lifts everything around it. Energy is not just another audio variable. It is the backbone of the modern hit.
Shiny App: Shows how a songs audio features relate to its success on Spotify and YouTube. Using data that includes Danceability, Energy, Acousticness, Tempo, and other musical characteristics, along with Streams, Views, Likes, and Comments, the app helps users see which traits tend to appear in high performing songs. Interactivity makes this much easier to understand than static graphs. Users can adjust the hit threshold, choose any audio feature and engagement metric to compare, and filter the dataset to reveal trends that might otherwise be hidden. Controls for point size, transparency, and coloring make it easier to work with such a large dataset and customize the display.
What this tells us: The Shiny app shows that certain features tend to appear more often in high performing songs. When users adjust the hit threshold the user can see songs with lower plays and how that may compare with hit songs. The app also highlights how Spotify and YouTube reward songs differently, which explains why some tracks climb through audio streaming while others rise through visual engagement. Overall the interactivity helps reveal how musical traits and the differences between songs with many Streams (Hits) and songs with lower streams.
Distribution of Song Keys: This bar chart shows how many songs of the billboard hot 100 appear in each musical key. The plot gives each key a color to increase interpretability and quick digestion.
What this tells us: Some keys appear more often than others. C sharp and D flat stand out as the most common. Keys like D sharp and E flat appear far less often. This could reflect preferences for popular songwriting. It seems that a large number of hit songs cluster in keys that sit comfortably within vocal ranges and work well with electronic production. This visualization could suggest that having vocal driven music as apposed to instrumental music is vital for charting success. This is backed up by our radar chart which indicates instrumentalness as low in charting songs.
Are Songs Getting Longer?
Song Duration Over Time (Songs With 1 Billion Spotify streams or more), Animated: This animated plot shows song duration from 1957 to 2025. The trend line slopes downward, and the animation reveals how the distribution of track lengths has deacreased in recent decades.
What this tells us: Hit songs have become shorter. In the 1960s and 1970s, songs ranged widely from three to seven minutes. Over time the range narrows and centers around three to four minutes. Today many hits fall below three minutes. Perhaps this indicates that shorter songs perform better on streaming platforms because they increase play counts and replay value. The rise of short form media like TikTok which emphasizes replay ability could also have an effect on the decline in song length.
Spotify Song Explorer: This interactive Shiny exploration tool lets users filter all the over 1 Billion streamed songs by duration, popularity, year, explicit content, album type, and point size. The scatterplot shows popularity versus duration across decades. You can also look at releases per Month and Year.
What this tells us: Popularity is not strongly tied to duration within modern norms. Whether a track is two and a half minutes or five minutes, popularity usually depends more on other factors like virality, playlist inclusion, and cultural momentum.Explicit and Clean songs appear in both high and low popularity ranges, meaning explicit vs clean does not affect success. The filtering controls highlight the diversity of hit songs and let the viewer observe how the structure of popular music changes over time and across genres. The app also shows that more modern songs have 1 Billion steams and demonstrates that June has the most hits while February has the least. Its unclear if either of these findings have ulterior influences or have much influence on a hit
Word Cloud of Most Frequent Song Title Words: The word cloud highlights the most common words found in hit song titles. Love dominates the chart, followed by words tied to relationships, emotions, time, and life.
What this tells us: Its clear from this graphic that the language of hits is emotional and often simple. Words like “love”, “time”, “night”, “heart”, and “girl” appear again and again because they are relatable to a vast audience. This indicates that writing about emotional and common life experiences is likely beneficial for creating a popular song.
Streams vs Total YouTube Engagement: This final scatterplot compares Spotify streams to total engagement on YouTube, colored by platform with the most plays.
What this tells us: Spotify and YouTube serve different roles but songs with alot of streams often have alot of plays. This could indicate that marketing and releasing music on both platforms is vital for success. Green points show the songs that have more streams than Youtube plays and Red points show songs with more plays than Spotify streams. This graphic shows that hits can rise from multiple platforms. Some songs break out through music videos, lyric videos while others grow through playlists and streaming algorithms. A hit in todays world succeeds by connecting and balancing all of the mediums. This also highlights that audio features alone cannot explain success. Distribution, visuals, marketing, and platform are equally important.
Final Takeaway: A clear story emerges.
A hit song usually has:
-High energy and strong danceability -Low acoustic and instrumentation -A modern Hit is usually around 3-4 minutes -Explicit vs Clean does not matter very much -Relatable and wide appeal in title -A comfortable, crowd-pleasing musical key -Broad engagement across youtube and Spotify
Together the eight visualizations show that hit songs share a recognizable profile. They tend to be energetic, highly danceable, and built with modern production rather than acoustic or instrumental arrangements. Their lengths usually fall between three and four minutes, and whether a track is explicit or clean has little impact on its success. Hit song titles often use familiar, relatable words, and the music itself is usually written in crowd pleasing keys that fit well with contemporary vocals and production. Finally, true hits reach listeners across multiple platforms, gaining strong engagement on both Spotify and YouTube. Its also clear that there is no single formula, but the combination of originality, relatability, and accessibility is what consistently pushes tracks toward the top.