The Grammys are you set to air on Sunday, Feb. 12 on CBS. I’ve always enjoyed watching the award show. I used to watch every year when I was a young’en. Now life is busier and news is easier to acquire, so I haven’t sat and watched in several years now. But that hasn’t stopped me from paying attention.
Now that I have some Tableau chops, I wanted to a way to quickly and easily learn and discover some new music from the nominees. And that’s what I’ve done.
Below are screenshots, click here for the interactive version
It’s a well known fact, in the data industry that the majority of time spent on a data visualization is spent on wrangling the data. This project is NO exception. I spent no less than 20 hours just compiling the data for this.
The first step was to gather all the nominees. Wikipedia makes that fairly simple. Simple cut and paste into excel and then do a little of formatting and you’ve got yourself a nice clean dataset.
The next part was that because this was a music viz, I knew I wanted to incorporate music somehow. I’ve also seen several examples of other vizzes that incorporated Spotify embedding links. So it was decided, it was done. I was dead set on gathering embed links for all the nominees. Easy peezy, right? Well, kinda.
Though not really. Because its not as simple as using the text string of [nominee]+[song or album]. No, each song and album have their own unique link made of random characters. Spotify makes it really easy to grab the embed code as a option in the context menu of any selection. So it turned into the task of going through each and every single row (426) and grabbing that link.
I will say, Spotify is pretty amazing and the depth and breadth of music is never ending. Interestingly 90% of all 2017 Grammy Nominations are on Spotify. Beyonce, obviously, is not. She’s on Tidal with her hubby, Jay-Z. So her plus a few others had to be YouTube links.
So apart from being able to discover and listen to some of the lesser known categories, what I enjoyed the most was creating the playlists for Producer of the Year, Non-Classical. These nominees produced some of the more well known songs of the past year. Combined they produced 35 songs. So now you can listen for trends across songs & artists from the same producer.
From one viz, come the next idea. Looks like I’m going to be working the history of the Grammy awards…
Until next time!