Paul Lamere wrote a post on Music Machinery yesterday about deep artists, where by "deep" we mean the opposite of one-hit wonders, artists with large, rich catalogs awaiting your listening and exploration. Paul and I both work at The Echo Nest, trying in one way or another to make sense out of the vast amount of music data the company collects.
Often there is more than one sense to be made of the same data. Sometimes many more than one. I liked Paul's intro about one-hit hits as "non-nutritious" music, with "deep" artists as the converse nutritious music, but after that statement of concept, it seemed painfully ironic to me that his calculations resulted in the #1 score for depth going to the Vitamin String Quartet, which I think of as the artificially-fortified sugar-coated cereal of music. Their catalog, like that of the Glee Cast at #3, is certainly vast and consistent. But I wanted to measure a different kind of depth.
So I ran some different calculations, and made a different list. For this one I took 10k or so reasonably well-known artists, and for each artist calculated an inversely-weighted average popularity of their 100 most popular songs excluding their top 10. If Paul's list is the opposite of one-hit-ness, then mine is the opposite of ten-hit-ness. I'm trying to find the artists whose catalogs are not necessarily the most vast, but where the vastness has been explored most rewardingly, artists where their 100th (or 110th) hit is still empirically world-class.
The good news is that this worked. The bad news is that the resulting list is more than a little boring. We might not have been able to guess this ordering, exactly, but very few of these artists below stand out as fundamentally surprising. Yes, yawn, the Beatles at #1. Eminem at #2 hints at a novelty that the rest of the list doesn't really continue to deliver. I hadn't heard of Argentine singer Andrés Calamaro at #33, but he has won a Latin Grammy and sold millions of records, so that's my ignorance. Conversely, I love Nightwish and Ludovico Einaudi, but didn't fully realize how many other people do, too. Otherwise, yeah, you probably knew about these people already.
But sometimes data reveals new truths, and sometimes, like this, it confirms existing ones. And revealing new truths is cooler, but only if the new truths actually have truth to them, and the best way to confirm our ability to generate true truths is to sometimes generate predictable true truths predictably. Anybody who presumes to do data-driven music discovery ought to have to show that they know what the opposite of "discovery" is. If purported math for "nutritious" doesn't mostly start with vegetables you already know you're supposed to be eating (like Paul's has Bach, Vivaldi and Chopin at #2, 4 and 5), don't trust it.
So the occasional boring is OK, even good, and in that good boring spirit, here's my good boring version of the deepest artists:
The Beatles
Eminem
Pink Floyd
Iron Maiden
Red Hot Chili Peppers
Radiohead
David Bowie
Metallica
Depeche Mode
Bob Dylan
Muse
Coldplay
Green Day
Korn
Tom Waits
Rihanna
Kanye West
Megadeth
Daft Punk
The Smashing Pumpkins
Nine Inch Nails
The Cure
Madonna
Linkin Park
AC/DC
Beyoncé
The Rolling Stones
Queen
Britney Spears
The National
Jay-Z
Bruce Springsteen
Andrés Calamaro
Johnny Cash
John Mayer
U2
blink-182
Placebo
Christina Aguilera
The Offspring
The Black Keys
Foo Fighters
Taylor Swift
Michael Jackson
Lady Gaga
Moby
Marilyn Manson
Nightwish
Mariah Carey
Jack Johnson
Black Sabbath
Nirvana
Motörhead
Nick Cave & The Bad Seeds
Avril Lavigne
Arctic Monkeys
Bob Marley
Judas Priest
Oasis
Blur
Queens of the Stone Age
Beastie Boys
Death Cab for Cutie
Céline Dion
Gorillaz
Slayer
R.E.M.
Jimi Hendrix
Rise Against
Parov Stelar
Dream Theater
The White Stripes
The Doors
Bad Religion
In Flames
Maroon 5
Beck
The Killers
Michael Bublé
Modest Mouse
Hans Zimmer
2Pac
Massive Attack
Elliott Smith
Bon Jovi
Robbie Williams
The Ramones
Ludovico Einaudi
Aerosmith
The Who
Sting
Scorpions
Sufjan Stevens
Lou Reed
Ayreon
Rush
NOFX
Paul McCartney
Neil Young
Nas