And for those who have ever studied guitar or piano, they quickly learn that certain keys are easier to play than others.īlack keys on a piano are thin and somewhat hard to strike accurately, and the player/composer has to remember where they are. So I would assume a lot of composition today begins on one of those two instruments. The guitar and the piano are probably the two most popular instruments in modern Western music history. The key signature will also determine what notes and chords your song should use if you want it to sound consonant/pleasant. When people talk about the ‘key signature’ or ‘key’ of a song, they are referring to the tonal center of the song. So, why is G major the most popular key signature in Spotify’s catalog? It’s likely because most popular Western contemporary music instruments are biased towards certain keys. G is convenient for both guitar and piano. “E is convenient for guitar, but not piano.Ĭ is convenient for piano, but not guitar. It’s the also the most popular minor key, with 4.8 percent of all the music on Spotify. A minor, the relative minor of C major, is the easiest minor to play on a keyboard.
We saw a similar phenomenon with minor keys. On a keyboard or a guitar - both incredibly popular instruments for composing western music - that path is through G Major. Much like electricity going through a circuit, songwriters often take the path of least resistance. Why is G Major the top key on all of Spotify? And why is C Major number two? More mysterious, at first glance anyway, is the order of the notes. People like happy-sounding music, and even listen to music in order to feel happy, in many cases. Some songs straddle the line, including both modes, but on the whole, this makes sense. Overall, major keys (the “happy”-sounding ones) are way more common than minor keys. “So, the hypothesis here is that the key signature should be a convenient key for both guitar and piano.” “With regard to Western contemporary music (which dominates our catalog), instrumentation is largely based around guitar, piano, or both,” said Ning. Spotify data analyst and jazz pianist Kenny Ning took it upon himself to analyze the key of every track on Spotify, to determine how frequently they appear, and we turned the result into a chart. These two elements determine what key a given piece of music is in, and are known as the “key” of the song. In addition, every song in western music is based around only one of these notes, as well as a mode - almost always major, which sounds happy, or minor, which does not. That’s over 30 million songs, the vast majority with various combinations of the same 12 notes. Unless you count the microtones between what the notes in the genres many of us are most familiar with, there are only 12 notes in all of music.
Guest Post by Eliot Van Buskirk on Spotify Insights
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