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SPOTIFY DATA

Iron Maiden songs are getting sadder

BY Luiz Fernando Toledo

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Is Eddie smiling or just furious? (art: Derek Riggs/Pinterest)

Iron Maiden's happiest songs were released in the 80's and 90's. Anyone who has listened to the most popular metal band ever probably knows - and enjoys - tracks like Aces High, Running Free, Wrathchild and The Trooper , among the happiest songs ever created by the band. After the 2000's the band became sadder, like in The Reincarnation of Benjamin Breeg or The Great Unknown (from The Book of Souls album).

This is the conclusion of an analysis using Spotify API data from every studio album of the band (excluding live albums and singles), based on the "valence" of each song. According to Spotify documentation, valence is a "measure from 0.0 to 1.0 describing the musical positiveness conveyed by a track. Tracks with high valence sound more positive (e.g. happy, cheerful, euphoric), while tracks with low valence sound more negative (e.g. sad, depressed, angry)." Lyrics are not considered.

Read the code and data analysis here. You might need to create your own Spotify keys to make it work in a separate notebook.

Be aware: this is not science. It's just a simple data analysis for a class in the Master Science in Data Journalism at Columbia Journalism School. It's not intended to offend anyone. I'm actually a fan of the band and play in a metal band. :)

Powerslave: the happiest unhappy

Released in 1984, Powerslave is definitely the happiest Maiden album ever. It doesn't mean it is a "happy" album, according to Spotify metrics, as it only reaches half of the happiness bar.

By reviewing the songs separately, I found a few that could make Eddie smile (?) - all released between the 80's and 90's.

Ironically, the happiest Iron Maiden song is Wrathchild.

It tells the story about a young person who is searching for his/her unknown father. Does it look sad? Well, listen to it and then compare it to the other songs.

The top 4 - Lord of Light, Hell on Earth, the Great Unknown and Isle of Avalon were released after 2010, though there are six songs from the 80's and 90's on this list too.

How happy is an average concert from the band?

Now let's take a look at how a full concert would look in terms of happiness. I based this chart on an "average setlist" containing the most common song sequence for their shows in 2019 - I didn't find anything from 2020 or 2021, probably due to the pandemic.

Happiness x popularity

So why are there so many sad songs? Do people enjoy it more than the happy ones? Spotify data also displays a variable called "popularity", a number from 0 to 100 that reveals how popular a song is at the moment.

There isn't really a pattern. 5 out of their 20 most popular songs are happier than a "neutral" song (which happiness is 0.5 in a scale from 0 to 1). If we actually try to do the math with all their songs, we find a very small correlation. Maybe we should just ask the fans.

Can you dance while listening to Iron Maiden?

Bonus chart: there's just one song that is suitable for dancing. And Iron Maiden fans hate it.

'The Apparition' seems to be very suitable to dance compared to the others, though you probably will never see Iron Maiden performing it live as they never played it during a concert. Some fans even argue that this is "easily their worst song".

Methodology

I have used the Spotify API to download the data. You can read the full code here. Happiness was measured by the song "valence", which is a value from 0 to 1 that considers how positive a song is, according to Spotify.

Only studio albums were considered. Live albums and singles were removed from the analysis.