Music Machinery

For my Boston Music Hack Day hack I built Yet Another Party Playlisting App (YAPPA), because the world needed another party playlister – but really, I built it because I needed another hack, because 15 hours into the 24 hour hackathon I realized that my first hack just wasn’t going to work (more on that in another post). And so, with 9 hours left in the hack day, I thought I would try my hand at the party playlisting app.

The YAPPA is a frequently built app. In some sense one can look at the act of building a YAPPA as a hacking exercise. Just as a still life painter will practice by painting a bowl of fruit, or a pianist will practice scales, a music hacker can build their hacking muscle by creating a YAPPA.

The essential features of a YAPPA are straightforward – create a listening experience for a party based upon the tastes of the guests.  Allow guests to suggest music for the party, apply some rules to select music that satisfies all the guests, and keep the music flowing.

With those features in mind, I created my party playlisting app. The interface is dead simple – guests can add music to the party via the master web interface or text the artist and song from the mobile phones to the party phone number. Once the party has started, PAPPA will keep the music flowing.

The key technology of PAPPA is how it picks the music to play next. Most YAPPAs will try to schedule music based on fairness so that everyone’s music taste is considered. Some YAPPAs also use song attributes such as song hotttnesss, song energy and danceability to make sure that the music matches the vibe of the party. PAPPA takes a very different approach to scheduling music. That’s because PAPPA takes a very different approach to parties. PAPPA doesn’t like parties. PAPPA wants everyone to go home. So PAPPA takes all of these songs that have been carefully texted to the party phone number, along with all the artist and song suggestions submitted via the web and throws them away. It doesn’t care about the music taste of the guests at the party. In fact it despises their taste (and the guests as well). Instead, PAPPA selects and plays the absolute worst music it can find. It gives the listener an endless string of the most horrible (but popular) music. Here’s a sample (the first 3 songs are bait to lure in the unwitting party guests):

1. Royals by Lorde
2. Levels by Avicii
3. Blurred Lines by Robin Thicke
4. #Twerkit featuring Nicki Minaj by Busta Rhymes
5. From The Bottom Of My Broken Heart by Britney Spears
6. Amigas Cheetahs by The Cheetah Girls
7. Do Ya Think I’m Sexy by Paris Hilton
8. Incredible by Clique Girlz
9. No Ordinary Love by Jennifer Love Hewitt
10. Mexican Wrestler by Emma Roberts
11. I Don’t Think About It by Emily Osment
12. A La Nanita Nana by The Cheetah Girls
13. Don”t Let Me Be The Last To Know by Britney Spears
14. Wild featuring Big Sean by Jessie J
15. Heartbeat (Album Version) by Paris Hilton
16. Love The Way You Love Me by The Pussycat Dolls
17. When You Told Me You Loved Me by Jessica Simpson
18. Jericho by Hilary Duff
19. Strip by Brooke Hogan
20. Pero Me Acuerdo De Tí by Christina Aguilera
21. Bang Bang by Joachim Garraud
22. Right Now featuring David Guetta (Sick Individuals Dub) by Rihanna
23. Wilde Piraten by The Cool Kids
24. Friend Lover by Electrik Red
25. Betcha Can’t Do It Like Me by D4L
26. Who’s That Girl by Hilary Duff
27. Get In There, Frank! by Fun
28. Hold It Don”t Drop It by Jennifer Lopez
29. Sweet Sixteen by Hilary Duff
30. Live It Up featuring Pitbull by Jennifer Lopez
31. Freckles by Natasha Bedingfield
32. I Want You by Paris Hilton
33. Hold It Close by Fun
34. Magic by The Pussycat Dolls
35. How To Lose A Girl by Mitchel Musso
36. Fairy Tales by JoJo
37. Slow It Down featuring Fabolous (Album Version (Explicit)) by The-Dream
38. Mr. Hamudah by Charles Hamilton
39. Promise by Vanessa Hudgens
40. Metamorphosis by Hilary Duff

How does PAPPA find the worst music in the world?  It looks through all the data that The Echo Nest is collecting about how people experience music online to find the songs that have been banned frequently. When a music listener says “ban this song” they are making a pretty strong statement about the song – essentially saying, “I do not ever want to hear that song again in my life”.  PAPPA finds these songs that have the highest banned-to-play ratio (i.e. the songs that have been proportionally banned the most when play count is taken into consideration) and adds them to the playlist. The result being a playlist filled with the most reviled music – with songs by Paris Hilton, Jennifer Love Hewitt and the great Emma Roberts. The perfect playlist to send your guests home.

At this moment, lets pause and listen to the song Mexican Wrestler by Emma Roberts:

[spotify http://open.spotify.com/track/48rQ4vyXnSTeqbBkZba5og]

What happens to all those carefully crafted text messages of songs sent by the guests?  No, there’s no Twilio app catching all those messages, parsing out songs and adding them to a play queue to be scheduled. They just go to my phone. That’s so if people are not leaving the party fast enough, I can use all the phone numbers of the guests to start to text them back and tell them they should go home.

By the way, if you look at the songs that were texted to me during my two minute demo you’d realize how fruitless a YAPPA really is. There’s no possible way to make a party playlist that is going to satisfy everyone in the room. Tastes are too varied, and there’s always that guy who thinks he is clever by adding some Rick Astly to the party queue. Here’s what was texted to me during my two minute demo:

1. Gregory Porter – be good
2. Rebecca Black – It’s Friday
3. Weird Al Yankovic – Fat
4. Lady Gaga – Applause
5. Weird Al Yankovic – Amish Paradise (from a different phone number from the other weird Al fan)
6. Ghostbusters
7. boss ass bitch
8. Basement Jaxx raindrops
9. John Mayer your body is a wonderland
10. jay z holy grail
11. Underworld spikee
12. wake me up
13. Britney Spears – Hit Me Baby One More Time
14. Slayer War Ensemble
15. Bieber baby
16. KANYE
17. Royksopp
18. Ra Ra riot
19. Rick Astley
20. Mozart
21. OSM
22. Mikey Cyrus
23. Hi paul
24. Stevie wonder overjoyed

Imagine trying to build a party playlist based upon those 24 input songs. Admittedly, a hackathon demo session is not a real test case for a party playlister but I still think you’d end up with a terrible mix of songs that no smart algorithm, nor any smart human, could stitch together into a playlist that would be appropriate and pleasing for a party.  My guess is that if you did an A/B test for two parties, where one party played music based upon suggestions texted to a YAPPA and the other party played the top hotttest songs, the YAPPA party would always lose. I’d run this test, but that would mean I’d have to go to two parties. I hate parties, so this test will never happen. Its one of the flaws in our scientific method.

Who are the worst artists?
Looking at the PAPPA playlists I see a number of recurring artists – Britney Spears and Paris Hilton seem to be well represented. I thought it would be interesting to create a histogram of the top recurring artists in the most banned songs list.  Here’s the fascinating result:

One thing I find notable about this list is the predominance of female artists.  Females outnumber males by a substantial amount.  Here’s some pie:

80% of the most banned artists are female. A stunning result. There’s something going on here. Someone suggested that the act of banning a song is an aggressive act that may skew male, and many of these aggressively banning males don’t like to listen to female artists. More study is needed here. It may involve parties, so I’m out.

Wrapping it all up

I enjoyed creating my PAPPA YAPPA. Demoing it was really fun and the audience seemed to enjoy the twist ending.  The patterns in the data underlying the app are pretty interesting too. Why are so many banned songs by female artists?

If you are having your own party and want to use PAPPA to help enhance the party you can go to:

                     static.echonest.com/pappa/?phone=603+555+1212 

Just replace the phone number in the URL with your own and you are good to go.

PAPPA – Paul’s Awesome Party Playlisting App – Ruining parties since 2013