Hey buddy, sorry to burst your hate bubble, but you are betraying your own lack of understanding of this project. What you're referring to as the "summary" is a set of our initial research questions that inspired us to pursue the project. The results are well... on the results page: https://sites.google.com/site/visualizingahit/results

You are correct that this is a student exercise, but I think that your definition of "research" is a bit narrow. Perhaps this is more of an exploration. We used data visualization to spot trends that could lead to more formal research. It's not really old stuff because it was only recently that data sets in this domain have been made available via public APIs.

Finally, I'm surprised you see "nothing" in the data. I think there's some interesting stuff in there, particularly the "Hit Lasting Power" section, which shows that average weeks on the charts absolutely exploded in the mid 90s, suggesting that there may be a connection between media consolidation (Telecommunications Act of 1996) and song lasting power on the Billboard Hot 100. Again speculation, but the formula for making it onto that chart is sales + radio play, so it's worth investigating.

Right. The folks at Tableau did some visualizations with our data and you can see that most hits are written in the Key of C major: http://public.tableausoftware.com/views/billboard_songs/AnatomyofaHit?:embed=yes&:tabs=yes&:toolbar=yes However, it's likely that most songs are written in C major since it's the easiest to play on piano (all the white keys). So, yeah, that's the next step for our project.

Yes, the outliers would be particularly interesting! But to clarify, we didn't come up with a "formula", just visualizations based on descriptive metadata. There are so many variables outside of descriptive data (peer influence, lyrical zeitgeist, etc.) that would require years of research if at all possible. This is simply one semester's final project. Our data set (a mashup of Billboard's open data and EchoNest's open data) is published on the study website: https://sites.google.com/site/visualizingahit/home We'd love to see what others do with it!

Hey everyone, just want to clear up a few things. First, we never claimed to have discovered a "hit formula". The media glommed onto our hypothetical opening paragraph and apparently didn't pay too much attention to our results. Please read the study observations, not the articles, for the full story. This was for a data visualization class and we thought it would be cool to mash up the Billboard data with the EchoNest data. There is no "control group" as we were only observing descriptive metadata from "hit songs". We are working on doing some statistical analysis to look at correlations. However, the data is available and we encourage others to play with it as well. Cheers, Shaun and Thomas