Bonfire Records is a big name in record labels having produced and released numerous hit singles, albums and podcasts over the years. Their business model has evolved from production of Durium, LP and Vinyl records all the way to master audio Blu-ray discs. Their best years of market share were courtesy of the good old digital L-Cassette.

Despite launching careers of many big stars and being a household name for a long time, Bonfire Records has been struggling to maintain market dominance in the recent years. The company has been slow in adapting to the revolution of streaming media. Recently a major restructuring brought in new management in hopes to revive Bonfire to new glory. The management has strategically engaged with many young and old professional musicians as well as retailers and listeners to gather comprehensive feedback on the directions to choose in future.

The company has also hired a team of Decision Support Analysts (DSAs), of which you are a member. You are supposed to work with two different leaders in the company at the same time: Creative Director and Development Director. These two individuals come with very different personalities and decision making approach.

The Creative Director, George Walker II, 73, is a classical-trained musical genius who had his own stardom until he fell sick many years ago. He says he's a musician for the love of it and not for the money. Although he has toured with as diverse musicians as Elvis Presley and Aretha Franklin, his preferred work is private jamming with his Jazz ensemble. He doesn't believe in making more money than is needed to stay afloat. Musical excellence is always his top priority. Despite his age and often strong opinions, he's in his job purely due to his musical mastery and respect in the industry.

The Development Director, Mihi Choi, 42, is a former professional musician herself. However, her real claim to fame has been to mentor and provide platform to indie musicians through her touring musical fairs. Most of the music brought forward by her turned out to be commercial successes as well, which has supported numerous up and coming artists. Many award-winning artists credit their success to Mihi and revere her as their guru. The most important thing to note about Mihi is that she is admittedly "pragmatic" who believes in "feeding the artist" more than chasing after perfection of music. She believes that if the artist is doing financially well then good music will follow.

It is quite challenging navigating through important artist signing decisions when Mihi and George are not on the same page. This has been particularly difficult recently when the opportunities have come up to sign new artists for singles as well as albums. Mihi believes that signing artists who are more likely to succeed in streaming media platforms are the ones who could bring Bonfire Records back among the industry front runners. However, George believes that the only right way to bring back the glory days and respect of Bonfire Records is through producing the music that will be loved for decades to come.

In a recent meeting of the Board of Directors, both presented their ideas passionately. The meeting was inconclusive with regards to a specific decision to go one way or the other. However, the Board did look towards the DSAs' team to come up with an evidence-based way to resolve this conundrum.

DSAs have been asked to make meaningful statements and recommendations to settle these questions:

1.Is there a scientific way to recommend the kind of music deal that Bonfire Records should sign with artists?

2.Which of the artists under consideration should be signed for the singles they are proposing?

While there may not be perfect data available to aid finding answers to these questions, what you do have available is the data scraped from Spotify.

All eyes are on your team of DSAs now!

Tasks, Analysis and Results

1.Clean the data and show general patterns;

2.Use appropriate charts to describe the relationship between the key response variable; popularity and the following key variables (individually); tempo, valence, energy and liveness. Comment on the result.

3.How has the average popularity varied over the years? Decades? Show on a time-series.

4.From how far in past the song data may be relevant in making predictions about popularity of future songs?

5.In a panel discussion, David Glover says winning rap battles with explicit lyrics is not a true reflection of talent. Whereas Snoop Dogg said he wouldn't have been as popular as he is if he weren't explicit. Whose statement is supported by statistics? (Assume that no factors other than explicit lyrics are relevant here).

6.Is tempo homogenous in years 1969 to 1979 (both years inclusive)?

7.Is music popularity independent of the decade it represented?

8.Are regional varieties of jazz music similarly popular?

9.Which of the song characteristics is most and least highly correlated with popularity? Does danceability have anything to do with energy of the song?

10.For which of the following singles would you recommend signing artists?