Evolution of the love song

For The Pudding, David Mora and Michelle Jia examine the death of the love song, or rather, the evolution of the love song to include other types alongside the sappy and puppy dog types.

Each bubble represents a song, and bubble size represents the number of weeks each song spent in the Billboard Top 10. Then they go back and forth between the bubble view above, beeswarm charts, and an alluvial diagram below.

FD readers will likely be interested in the footnotes at the end of the piece. There are notes on methodology, song classification, and a link to download the data.

The Pudding has been publishing at a rapid pace these past couple months. It’s quite a treat.

Chart Types Used

Alluvial DiagramBeeswarm