An online portfolio for Computational Musicology at the University of Amsterdam (Spring 2023) by Owen Halpert
I grew up with Coachella --- as a child I was surrounded by its influence in the Los Angeles region, in high school I was lucky enough to attend all four years, and in college I road tripped with my fellow students for the 2022 lineup.
I owe a lot of my passion for music and my broad taste in genres to attending Coachella. With an extremely diverse lineup, attendees can walk from one stage to the next and instantly be transported between wildly different musical experiences.
Even with this diversity, every year there are critics of the released Coachella lineup, as seen through the Reddit lineup announcement comments:
Yea....this isn't the festival I went to in 2010😔 -bigbrett666
Awesome if you like pop and edm but sucks if you like live music. -dpcpv75
This Coachella lineup is MID. No catering to the hip hop and rap fans. SMH debating selling my box -kmart2588
Some people say too much electronic, some say too little. Some say the artists are too new and unrecognizable, some complain about too many throwback artists and want more relevance.
While there is always some validity in each of these criticisms, for my project I'd like to further analyze the trends of Coachella artist selection. To do so, I will use musicological metrics to show variance in genre, danceability over the years, and changing levels of emotional "valence" (A Spotify measure from 0.0 to 1.0 describing the "musical positiveness" conveyed by a track). I will look at artists' live performances at Coachella, analyze melodic aspects of different tracks, and more.
The Spotify tracks I will use to analyze this progression will be yearly lineup playlists. I can then analyze and compare years as a whole. These playlists were assembled by user Alex Rodriguez, who explained that the playlists are made up of "Top 5 songs per artist, attempt to spread across their notable releases and shorter edits where possible."
Shortcomings with this methodology might be that the selected tracks for each artist may not be representative of their true genre, that the playlists may not always be fully inclusive of all artists on the lineup, or that they are simply so large that meaningful comparisons by some metrics will be difficult to make. Nonetheless, we can use these as a starting point to focus in on some trends within instead of trying to analyze the years as a whole.
To give a sense of the breadth of these playlists, we can examine the outliers. Looking at the 2023 lineup playlist, an extremely atypical track is BTSTU by Jai Paul. Paul was added to the lineup as an artist with a cult following who is extremely secretive and has never performed live. He is as elusive, if not more, than headliner Frank Ocean. Conversely, we see One Kiss by Calvin Harris, which we can say is much more typical, given that Harris has performed at Coachella 8 times and is one of the most mainstream EDM artists.