Predicting Song Success: Understanding Track Features and Predicting Popularity Using Spotify Data

This paper presents the use of different prediction algorithms in order to recognise the popularity of a song. That recognition gives features that are directly affecting popularity of a song. For this research, data from several hundreds of the most popular songs were used in combination with songs that often appear on different playlists from different musicians. The reason for this mixing of songs is done to ensure that the model works as efficiently as possible by comparing popular songs features with those of that are no longer trending. The processing of the collected data gave an excellent insight into the importance of certain factors on the popularity of a certain song. As a result of research, month of release, acoustics and tempo were represented as features that are mostly correlated with popularity. Through the processing and analysis of a large amount of data, four models were created using different algorithms. Algorithms that were used are Decision Tree, Nearest Neighbour Classifier, Random Forest and Support Vector Classifier algorithms. The best results were achieved by training the model with the Decision Tree algorithm and accuracy of 100%.