Yesterday, I wrote about who the Deepest Artists are. So naturally, today I’ll turn that on its head and take a look at who are the Shallowest Artists. I define a shallow artist as an artist that despite having a substantial number of released songs, has most listens concentrated in their top five tracks. These are the artists that are best known for just a small number of songs.
For each artist, I’ve calculated a Shallowness Score which is merely the percentage of an artist’s plays that occurs in an artist’s top 5 songs. A Shallowness Score of 71% means that 71% of all listens occur in the top 5 songs. Thus, 71% of all listens to Survivor (of Eye of the Tiger fame) are found in their top 5 songs.
Update: This post used to reference the Pitch Perfect Treblemakers, but Glenn points to an ambiguous artist issue with the Treblemakers where multiple artists were conflated. The Pitch Pefect Treblemakers only have 4 songs so they are no longer a candidate for this list.
Here are the top 15 Shallowest Artists. Click to see the full chart:
Click to see the full chart
As you’d expect, there are plenty of new artists on the list, artists like Icona Pop, Avicii and Zedd that have had a few charting songs. Being tagged as a shallow artist isn’t necessarily bad, it just means that your music is dominated by a handful of hits. That’s why we find Adele and Jeff Buckley on the same list as Paris Hilton and Smash Mouth.
Check out the full list of the Shallowest Artists as well as the full list of the Deepest Artists.
Music Machinery 