Old but Gold: Songs That Stand the Test of Time

Have you ever wondered about those classic songs that everybody seems to love? If so, we’ve got you covered! In this article, we are going to look at those classic songs that never get old.

We’ve collected Indonesia’s Top 200 songs from early 2017 until mid 2019 and pre-processed each song to obtain its total number of streams. One song might have multiple entries in our data due to multiple releases (i.e released as a stand-alone single and included as a part of an album) so we merged all these duplicates into one entry. We’ve collected data on the number of weeks a song had stayed on the chart and its initial release year by using Spotify API.

We’re going to start our analysis by looking at the correlations between release year, weeks on chart, and total streams. As shown by the Fig. 1, songs with smaller number of streams (represented by purple dots) tend to group at the bottom of the diagram. It show that songs with smaller number of streams didn’t last very long on the chart. Most of them are songs that were released after 2010, although there are also a few songs that dated way back from the 1970s.

Songs that were released prior to 1990 were mostly by Queen’s. Our analysis suggest that this was due to Bohemian Rhapsody (the movie)’s success in late October 2018. Other classic songs that gained streams after being featured as a movie soundtrack are Electric Light Orchestra’s “Mr.Blue Sky” and Yusuf/Cat Stevens’ “Father and Son” from Guardians of the Galaxy 2. Another case of classic song that gained popularity due to the release of a movie is Celine Dion and Peabo Bryson’s “Beauty and The Beast”. The song was not featured in the new movie but people listen to the song because it was the soundtrack for the original version of the movie.

However, songs with higher number of streams (represented by green dots) are more likely to cluster on the top-right side of the diagram. While most of the green dots are songs that released after 2010, there are some Indonesian songs released before 2010 that remain on the chart for a very long time, such as Dewa 19’s “Kangen”, Sheila On 7’s “Dan…”, Chrisye’s “Seperti Yang Kau Minta”, Ada Band’s “Manusia Bodoh” and Andra & The Backbone’s “Sempurna”. We call them ‘Indonesia’s Timeless Songs’

We’ve also spotted green dots on the bottom-right side like Ariana Grande’s “thank u, next”, Jennie’s “SOLO” and Stephanie Poetri’s “I Love You 3000” to name a few. We call these songs ‘Instant Hits’ since they have got a large number of streams despite the fact that they were released very recently and haven’t spent a long time in the chart.

Deeper Look on Indonesian Classic Songs

Now we’ve known that Indonesia’s Top 200 chart does not only consist of songs that were released recently. This leads us to s question: Why do some Indonesian songs, stand the test of time?

We decided to take a look at Indonesian songs that were released before 2010 and their number of streams through the years. We’ve narrowed our list to ten top songs based on their number of streams.

We analyzed the sudden increase of streams for each song and we found out that some of these increases were in coincidence with the time these artists performed in some notable concerts.

The streaming number of Dewa19’s “Kangen” had increased in the month they did their performance at We The Fest (July, 2019) and Larut Dalam Harmoni (May 2018). Sheila On 7’s songs had also experienced the same increase as they performed at Soundrenaline (September 2018) and Pekan Raya Jakarta (July 2019) being held.

This finding shows that performing in concerts could help the artist’s popularity since some concerts heavily promoted their shows, which leads to more publicity for these artists.

We can also see that in the Top 10 most of the songs are featuring male vocals. Sheila on 7’s “Dan..” and Dewa 19’s “Kangen” are the top two most-streamed classic songs and also the only top songs from the 90s in the Top 10. Meanwhile, Bunga Citra Lestari’s “Kecewa” and Ten 2 Five’s “Kecewa” are the only two songs that feature female vocals. This leads to the question of whether Indonesians tend to prefer male vocals to female ones. Further research needs to be done to address this question.

In conclusion, Indonesia’s Top 200 chart also features some songs that were released before 2010, although they usually only last for a number of weeks. However, there are also some timeless songs that consistently gain a significant number of streams to appear in the chart, despite being released before 2010.

We’ve compiled these “Indonesian Timeless Songs” into a playlist. Wondering about the non-Indonesian ones? We have the playlist for that too! Scroll down to check it out!

Authors: Josia Paska Darmawan and Wava Carissa Putri