taylor 2.0.0 | Jake Thompson

I’m remarkably excited to announce the release of taylor 2.0.0. taylor provides data on Taylor Swift’s discography, including lyrics from Genius and song characteristics from Spotify.

You can install it from CRAN with:

install.packages("taylor")

This blog post will highlight the major changes in this release, including the addition of data from Midnights.

library(taylor)

Midnights

The most important update is the addition of data from Midnights. You can now find Spotify data and lyrics for all 23 songs in taylor_all_songs. The Target-exclusive tracks (“Hits Different,” “You’re On Your Own, Kid (Strings Remix),” and “Sweet Nothing (Piano Remix)”) are not yet on Spotify. For now, only lyrics are available for these tracks. Spotify audio data will be added if and when these tracks get added to Spotify.

library(tidyverse)

taylor_all_songs %>% 
  filter(album_name == "Midnights")
#> # A tibble: 23 × 29
#>    album_name ep    album_re…¹ track…² track…³ artist featu…⁴ bonus…⁵ promotio…⁶
#>    <chr>      <lgl> <date>       <int> <chr>   <chr>  <chr>   <lgl>   <date>    
#>  1 Midnights  FALSE 2022-10-21       1 Lavend… Taylo… <NA>    FALSE   NA        
#>  2 Midnights  FALSE 2022-10-21       2 Maroon  Taylo… <NA>    FALSE   NA        
#>  3 Midnights  FALSE 2022-10-21       3 Anti-H… Taylo… <NA>    FALSE   NA        
#>  4 Midnights  FALSE 2022-10-21       4 Snow O… Taylo… Lana D… FALSE   NA        
#>  5 Midnights  FALSE 2022-10-21       5 You're… Taylo… <NA>    FALSE   NA        
#>  6 Midnights  FALSE 2022-10-21       6 Midnig… Taylo… <NA>    FALSE   NA        
#>  7 Midnights  FALSE 2022-10-21       7 Questi… Taylo… <NA>    FALSE   NA        
#>  8 Midnights  FALSE 2022-10-21       8 Vigila… Taylo… <NA>    FALSE   NA        
#>  9 Midnights  FALSE 2022-10-21       9 Bejewe… Taylo… <NA>    FALSE   NA        
#> 10 Midnights  FALSE 2022-10-21      10 Labyri… Taylo… <NA>    FALSE   NA        
#> # … with 13 more rows, 20 more variables: single_release <date>,
#> #   track_release <date>, danceability <dbl>, energy <dbl>, key <int>,
#> #   loudness <dbl>, mode <int>, speechiness <dbl>, acousticness <dbl>,
#> #   instrumentalness <dbl>, liveness <dbl>, valence <dbl>, tempo <dbl>,
#> #   time_signature <int>, duration_ms <int>, explicit <lgl>, key_name <chr>,
#> #   mode_name <chr>, key_mode <chr>, lyrics <list>, and abbreviated variable
#> #   names ¹album_release, ²track_number, ³track_name, ⁴featuring, …

Midnights has also been added to taylor_albums. A user score provided by Metacritic has also been added to this data.

taylor_albums
#> # A tibble: 14 × 5
#>    album_name                          ep    album_release metacritic_…¹ user_…²
#>    <chr>                               <lgl> <date>                <int>   <dbl>
#>  1 Taylor Swift                        FALSE 2006-10-24               67     9.2
#>  2 The Taylor Swift Holiday Collection TRUE  2007-10-14               NA    NA  
#>  3 Beautiful Eyes                      TRUE  2008-07-15               NA    NA  
#>  4 Fearless                            FALSE 2008-11-11               73     8.4
#>  5 Speak Now                           FALSE 2010-10-25               77     8.7
#>  6 Red                                 FALSE 2012-10-22               77     8.5
#>  7 1989                                FALSE 2014-10-27               76     8.2
#>  8 reputation                          FALSE 2017-11-10               71     8.3
#>  9 Lover                               FALSE 2019-08-23               79     8.4
#> 10 folklore                            FALSE 2020-07-24               88     9  
#> 11 evermore                            FALSE 2020-12-11               85     8.9
#> 12 Fearless (Taylor's Version)         FALSE 2021-04-09               82     8.9
#> 13 Red (Taylor's Version)              FALSE 2021-11-12               91     9  
#> 14 Midnights                           FALSE 2022-10-21               94     9  
#> # … with abbreviated variable names ¹metacritic_score, ²user_score

Finally, a new color palette inspired by the Midnights album cover has been added to the album_palettes, and the package website has been updated with a new theme and logo, also inspired by the album cover.

This palette can be used inside any of the scale_*_taylor() functions.

taylor_album_songs %>% 
  filter(album_name == "Midnights", !is.na(energy)) %>% 
  mutate(track_name = fct_inorder(track_name)) %>% 
  ggplot(aes(x = energy, y = fct_rev(track_name))) +
  geom_col(aes(fill = track_name), show.legend = FALSE) +
  scale_fill_taylor_d(album = "Midnights") +
  labs(x = "Song Energy (From Spotify)", y = NULL)

Breaking Changes

In addition to adding Midnights to taylor_all_songs and taylor_album_songs, other audio data has also been updated. Spotify has updated the audio data for Red (Taylor’s Version) and “Renegade” (Taylor’s feature with Big Red Machine) since the last release. These data sets have been updated to reflect these changes accordingly.

Minor Changes

There were also a number of minor improvements:

Additional singles and remixes have been added to taylor_all_songs: “Lover (Remix)” with Shawn Mendes; “Carolina” from the Where the Crawdads Sings soundtrack; Ed Sheeran’s “The Joker and the Queen;” Taylor’s cover of Earth, Wind, and Fire’s September; and “Three Sad Virgins” from Saturday Night Live.
“This Love (Taylor’s Version)” has been added as a non-ablum song. Presumably, this song will eventually move to 1989 (Taylor’s Version).
The album color palettes have been slightly tweaked to better capture the vibe of each album, rather than just pulling colors from the cover.

See the changelog for a complete list of changes.

Acknowledgments

Featured photo by Morgan Macia on Unsplash.