Feb. 13, 2024, 8:12 p.m.
The Star Spangled Banger! + an opportunity for students/recent grads
New visual essays from The Pudding
The Pudding
The Pudding is a publication for visual essays. You may have stumbled upon some of our projects, such as Women’s Pockets are Inferior, How Bad is Your Spotify or Apple Music?, or A People Map of the US.
We have *three* new updates that we are excited to share with you!
Exploring National Anthem Performances: we isolated the vocals of 138 US National Anthem performances and compared each performer’s pitch to the standard. Who is the ultimate diva?
How Spotify’s expanding catalog reflects 2023's musical frontier: we look through Spotify’s database of 6,000 genres.
Join Our 2024 Cohort: we created a summer fellowship for current college or graduate-level students or recent-grads to author a project on The Pudding. Applications are open!
As always, thanks a ton for continuing to subscribe and allowing us to share our work with your inbox. Special shout-out to Patreon subscribers; your support means a lot!
The Star Spangled Banger!
When you think of legendary National Anthem performances, there’s a good chance Whitney Houston’s 1991 Super Bowl rendition comes to mind. Performers often make calculated choices to stay classic and traditional or infuse it with flair. We wondered: is it possible to quantify how much performers deviate from the traditional notes of the anthem? The answer is yes, and we call it the diva score.
We looked at 138 performances from major political and sporting events. We then created charts that track pitch (or frequency) of the vocals: the lower the line, the lower the notes and the higher the line, the higher the notes.
For example, here is one of Fergie’s performances of the phrase “o say does that star spangled...,” with the red line indicating her pitch and the white bars indicating the standard notes of the anthem.
That is, Fergie’s rendition has no shortage of flair, to say the least.
Vox Media’s Switched on Pop had us on their podcast to talk about our findings, which you can listen to here:
You can also read the visual essay here, which includes an in-depth look at every line of the national anthem and the most-unique performances:
How Spotify's expanding catalog reflects 2023's musical frontier
Spotify maintains a database of over 6,000 genres, and it’s changed the way that I think about music. In 2016, they began publishing a list of the most popular genres on the platform, and you can now see what’s changed over the past 7 years:
Many of these genres are generally performed in Spanish, Korean, or Hindi, which isn’t surprising, as Spotify users from North America and Europe represent a much smaller share of streams than in 2016.
Every year, Spotify is available in more countries, such as India in 2019 and South Korea in 2021. Fittingly, you can see genres with artists from Latin America, Asia, and Africa begin to dominate in popularity.
So many non-English genres have ascended in popularity: K-pop is, by far, the biggest gainer since 2016. Over the past 7 years, it grew to the 17th most-streamed genre. Reggaeton has similarly exhibited a K-pop-like ascent, with more streams than R&B and EDM.
This is just the start of our exploration of Spotify’s genre database. You can browse the whole project here.
Join Our 2024 Cohort
We created a summer fellowship for aspiring visual storytellers (current college or graduate-level students or recently-graduated applicants) to author a project on The Pudding. It comes with project-based, mentorship, a stipend, and much more. Apply now, or tell someone else to!
Contributor projects by Aaron Williams and Aaron Reiss both won awards at The Information is Beautiful Awards. You can explore both projects here:
2023 Pudding Cup Winners
We received a slew of awesome submissions this year. Our two grand prize winners were Jess Carr and Denise Lu. Jess explored the use of text on Vogue front cover design. Denise (our first two time Pudding Cup winner!) went deep on her “obsession” with the band Pavement in only the way a true fan could.
Quick asides!
Have a cool essay idea that you want to make? Check out our pitch guidelines.
Want to hire our team to produce data-led, visual stories? Check out our sister studio, Polygraph.
#stuffwelove at The Pudding
Here’s also some special links that are regularly shared on our Friends of The Pudding slack-channel (get access via Patreon)!
The Menu Trends That Define Dining Right Now - The New York Times analyzes design trends on 121 different menus from throughout the US.
Netflix released viewership data on 18,000 shows - someone should probably make something with the information!
Thank you subscribers! And take care! — Matt & Russell