When we visualize the top 100 songs from each year, sorted by their genre and "popularity" score however, we see something a bit interesting.
Dance Pop falls from being the largest genre in the top 100 songs for nearly a decade, to swiftly falling, and not even being in the top 5 by 2023.
Instead, Pop rapidly takes Dance Pop's seat, becoming the largest genre of the past seven years for these top songs.
This is made even more clear when we take a comparison of all the artists who made these top 100 songs who are identified to be with some Pop genre, and divide this population into Dance Pop, Pop, and Other subgenres of Pop.
There are no Pop artists in the year 2000. Yet over the years, a tug of war begins between Dance Pop, and Pop with all the other subgenres of Pop. Rapidly the number of Dance Pop artists who have made a top song declines before Pop has an explosive growth in recent years.
However, when we investigated the performance of dance pop within pop music, we found that the replacement of dance pop by pop music seemed to be related to the music format.
Pop and Dance Pop Trend
Format Popularity
As shown in the data above, between 1998 and 2020, the status of CDS was constantly declining, while Digital format gradually became popular. In 2020, CDS were almost completely replaced by Digital,
and at the same time, dance pop also dropped sharply. Perhaps the decline of CDS has affected the decline of dance pop to a certain extent.
Here are all 2000 top songs on Spotify from 2000-2023. Each bubble is a song. The bigger the bubble,
the more popular the song is.
If we spread these bubbles on a time line, we can see dance pop is getting less
popular in the recent years. We can see Calvin Harris, Bruno Mars, Jason Derulo and Dua Lipa
contributed to a lot of the dance pop songs in the past decade. And artists such as Britney Spears,
Nelly, Jennifer Lopez, Flo Rida, P!nk and Christina Aguilera had barely made any dance pop songs in the past 10 to 15 years.
The Emotional Landscape of Music Genres
This interactive vinyl wheel represents how different music genres feel across five key features: Valence, Energy, Danceability, Acousticness, and Liveness.
Each genre slice is divided into five small bars, each bar corresponding to an emotional feature:
Valence – How happy or positive the music sounds
Energy – How intense or lively the music feels
Danceability – How suitable the track is for dancing
Acousticness – How organic or natural the track sounds
Liveness – The presence of a live audience sound
A bar chart showing that genre’s full emotion profile
A spider chart comparing the selected genre directly with Dance Pop
Through this visual journey, we observe how genres vary in emotional characteristics — and in particular, how Dance Pop, once defined by high energy and danceability, is now challenged by more diverse and emotionally varied genres like Hip-Hop, R&B, and EDM.
How to Explore: Click any genre on the wheel. The two comparison charts below will update to reflect its emotional profile — and how it stacks up against Pop.
Features:
Valence = Happiness
Energy = Intensity
Danceability = Groove
Acousticness = Natural Sound
Liveness = Live Feeling
Trend of Popularity between different Genres
Let's take a look at the The Trend of Popularity between different Genres over the years 2000-2024. As the chart initially shows the values of the Average Popularity of the different Genres between 2000-2024, the line graph updates to show the Relative Popularity of the other Genres with respect to our Hero: DANCE POP
Dance Pop, by definition in the Relative Popularity chart, is the baseline
—so every other genre’s movement reflects Dance Pop’s relative position of strength.
If many genres lie above 1.0, Dance Pop is relatively less dominant.
If many genres lie below 1.0, Dance Pop is highly influential or dominant in that time.