A Multi-Level Visual Analytics Approach to Artist-Era Alignment in Popular Music

Abstract

Existing computational studies of popular music primarily model aggregate trends or predict chart performance, offering limited support for interpreting artist-level alignment against historical stylistic baselines. We introduce an interactive visual analytics framework that treats each artist-decade as a unit defined relative to an era-specific baseline, characterized along two complementary dimensions: profile shape similarity, capturing directional correspondence with the era's feature pattern, and profile contrast ratio, capturing stylistic intensity relative to the era's dispersion. Together, these dimensions define a quadrant-based trajectory space for reasoning about conformity, divergence, and amplification over time. Applied to weekly U.S. Billboard Hot 100 chart entries from the all-time top-10 artists across six decades (1960s-2010s), linked with Spotify audio features, the framework reveals that alignment and intensity can meaningfully diverge across artist trajectories.