Main Dataset for "Evolution of Popular Music: USA 1960–2010"

Each row corresponds to a recording. The file is viewable in any text editor, and can also be opened in Excel or imported to other data processing programs.

Below is a list of the column headers, with annotations. public_id unique ID of the recording artist_name name of the recording artist artist_name_clean artist name all upper case, no spaces, with secondary artists ("featuring") removed. track_name name of the track, i.e. usually name of the song first_entry date of the first entry into the Billboard Hot 100 quarter, year, fiveyear, decade transformations of first_entry to coarser time periods era era the track belongs to (1,...,4), as determined by Foote segmentation on the PC data (see below) cluster cluster membership of the track, as derived by k-means clustering on the PC data (see below) hTopic_01, ... , hTopic_08 harmonic Topic weights, see description in the paper tTopic_01, ... , tTopic_08 timbral Topic weights, see description in the paper PC1, ... , PC14 principal components of the harmonic and timbral Topics harm_… 193 columns of chord change counts; the chord change is indicated in the column label (e.g. harm_M.2.M means major chord followed by another major chord 2 semitones up). timb_01, ... , timb_35 35 columns of timbre class counts (see description in supplementary information)