Analyze the music and lyrics of Kanye West and related hip-hop artists using the Spotify and Genius Lyrics APIs.

This project is an extension of work originally completed for the U.C. Berkeley MIDS course, w209: Data Visualization. Kanye West is one of the most popular and controversial artists of his generation. Given his prominent place in the hip-hop scene, I am interested in quantifying attributes of his music and lyrics in order to understand how Kanye differs from his peers and where they are similar. To quantify his music and lyrics, I leverage the Spotify and Genius Lyrics APIs. I will also use Spotify to identify ‘related’ artists as the comparison group.

• Obtain and Prepare Data
  • Pull track data from Spotify for Kanye and related artists
  • Clean the track data to remove duplicates (live and special editions)
  • Pull lyrics for all the tracks from Genius Lyrics
• Validate Data
  • Check for songs that are missing lyrics
• Create New Features
  • Total Word Count
  • Unique Word Count
  • Unique Word Percentage
  • Number of Verses
  • Total Drug References
  • Drug References by Drug
  • Total Swear Words
  • Swear Words by Word
  • Total Syllables
  • References to God
  • Repetitiveness
• Analysis
  • Compare Spotify and Lyrical Metrics Against Popularity
  • Can we predict artist through Spotify and lyrical metrics?
• Possible next steps
  • Sentiment Analysis

• getData.py - Pulls track and album data from Spotify for Kanye West and related artists, removes duplicates (ex: live and special editions). Pulls lyrics from Genius Lyrics for each track and combines the data sets. Writes the result to data_with_lyrics.csv for easy retrieval.

To run getData.py, you will need developer tokens for the Spotify and Genius Lyrics APIs stored in a file called creds.py. The format should be:

spotify_username = "your_spotify_username_token"
spotify_password = "your_spotify_password_token"
genius_token = "your_genius_token"