Graphing the Play Counts of Taylor Swift Songs

September 24, 2014 | 1 min read

This is a histogram showing the play counts in my music library for all of the songs on all four of Taylor Swift’s studio albums.

Shape

The histogram is unimodal, which is unsurprising. I like most of the songs, dislike few, and really like a few. Also, the histogram is skewed right. This makes sense as I often put all four albums on shuffle, so every song gets a fair amount of plays. There are, however, some songs that I will purposely listen to, and they make up the tail of the histogram.

Outliers

There are no outliers, which means that even my favorite songs—Enchanted, White Horse, Fifteen¹—don’t get played that much more than the other songs. I think having no outliers is my proof that I’m not that self-proclaimed “superfan” who listens only to her number one hits; I’m the real deal.

Center

On average, I have played each song 57 times.

Spread

The standard deviation is about 22.

1. A non-exhaustive list. ↩