Applied Data Analysis 2017

My Way of seeing music covers

By Pierre-Antoine Desplaces, Anaïs Ladoy, Lou Richard

Everybody knows the definition of a cover song (and can cite several of them) as a new performance of a previously recorded song, by someone other than the original artist or composer. Something that is quite unknown is how the concept of cover version started. Actually, this phenomena started in the 1950s when record companies tried to reach out to more people by a way of reproducing original songs such that those were more appealing to a particular demography. If we go back to the racial segregation period in the United States, there were black radio stations and white radio stations. Covers versions were recorded by White artists and then diffused on white radio stations, without acknowledgement or financial compensation for the original (black) artists and it was clearly a "racist tool" as said the singer-songwriter Don McLean.

Fortunately, the mentality changed and cover versions are nowadays used as a revival of old songs, sometimes with a radically different style, in a different language or with lyrics added for the case of instrumental compositions. Even if it's becomes a very profitable business for music industry, the goal of a cover version is still to spread a part of musical history to younger generations or to other cultures around the world.

Our goal

Through a spatial and time analysis of cover songs history, our goal is to explore cultural or social underlying patterns and how it is diffused in a globalized world.

We can observe on this bar chart of time repartition of cover songs, that covers started to emerge in the 60's. In the first half of the century, very few cover songs appear. We note an augmentation of the number of covers per year in 2000, with a peak in 2007-2008.

The repartition of original songs through time is less sparse than for covers. The majority of covered songs are tracks from 1960 to 1980, which is not surprising. But we can notice that a part from this category of middle-aged songs, recent songs are more covered than old ones (before 1950).

Another interesting time analysis is to visualize the number of covers for original songs from each year.

Here we plot the number of cover versions of songs that have been released on each year. The covers can be from anytime. For example, there have been 185 covers of songs which original version has been released in 2000. We notice that the distribution looks eerily gaussian. There are more covers recorded more than 10 years after the original song than not (about 80%).

Let’s have a look at the most covered songs : the first thing we notice is that the majority of them (6 in the top 10) are Christmas songs ! We can also note that the artists written here are the earliest performers of each song in our dataset and probably not the actual writers as those songs are old traditional songs. Then we can look at the last six decades and their most covered songs. What we mean here is that we look for songs that were written in that decade but the covers can be from anytime. Obviously, more recent songs have been less covered, and we have also seen that our data contains less original songs for recent years, hence the lower numbers.

Map representation of songs

Let's look at the geographical repartition of the songs.

For both song categories, covers or originals, the United States produce the majority of the songs, with more than 3'000 original songs, and more than 6'000 covers. As they are far away before the rest of the world, it is hard to analyse the others countries with this scale.

In order to have an idea of the production of songs in other countries, let's take a look at the map below, grouping the data by groups of equal size instead of divinding the range of values in equal intervals.

On this map, we observe that there is no difference between the repartition of original songs and their covers. They are mostly born in occidental countries : United States and european countries ; but also in Brazil and Australia. If we look closer at european countries, we see that the 4 countries with the most covered songs are France, United Kingdom, Italy and Germany. If we only look at the covers in Europe, we find the same 4 countries, as well as Sweden. There are mor covers from a different country than the original song : 65.201527849 %.

Analysing Genres

Now, let’s see the repartition of the different genres for original songs :

The story of My Way

To illustrate our work with a more precise example, we will retrace the story of one of the most covered song My Way, through space and time.

My way is a perfect illustration of how culture spread around the world. Indeed, the song led to 281 music covers in 33 different countries over a 49 years period. Even if the original song was French, written by Claude François, it was mostly covered in United States (82 music covers) and United Kingdom (39 music covers) following by its native country, France (24 music covers).

With the interactive map below, you can follow the apparitions in the world and through time of My Way covers. We can see that covers are mostly european, but the song has been covered in every continent. The french song is first covered in Canada by Michel Pagliaro, and then in United States by Franck Sinatra, with lyrics we-ritten by Paul Anka. The song then travels all around the world, and it was covered by diverse artists, from Joan Baez to Sid Vicious, Elvis Presley and Aretha Franklin.