What Makes a Song Popular?

If “Baby Shark” can be on the Billboard Global 200 for over 180 weeks yet “Stairway to Heaven” can bore the first live audience it was ever played to, is there a way to analytically determine song popularity? To understand this, the following data was pulled from a Kaggle dataset which used the Spotify API. Then, relevant factors were analyzed and graphed to understand the dataset and what influences song popularity.

Most musical factors studied here don’t have a large effect on song popularity, but two that do include song loudness and song duration: popular songs tend to be shorter and louder.