An application of Colin Morris' TED "Pop Music is Stuck on Repeat" theory to Brazilian funk/pop hits.
Measuring a song repetitiveness is as simple as compressing it. Repetitive lyrics are redundant and good compression algorithms can exploit redundancy at scale to shrink text more efficiently.
I used the Python's stdlib zlib library. zlib supports one algorithm called DEFLATE, that is a variation of LZ77 (Lempel-Ziv 1977). This algorithm provides good compression on a wide variety of data with minimal use of system resources. This is also the algorithm used in the ZIP archive format.
From a dataset of 30 top funk/pop songs from known listings in Brazil, I stored their lyrics in simple text files, as listed here, sending them through a pipeline of processors that will unaccent, deponctuate and tokenize the whole text.
After retrieving this cleaned output from the pipeline, I applied the compression to all lyrics and collected a few metrics, like original size, compression size, compression ratio and space savings.
These are the results, ordered by the higher compression ratio:
| Song | Author | Size | Comp. size | Comp. ratio | Space savings |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Amar? Amei | MC Don Juan | 2002 | 208 | 9.62 | 89.61% |
| Que tiro foi esse | Jojo Maronttinni | 1241 | 144 | 8.62 | 88.40% |
| Agora vai sentar | MC's Jhowzinho e Kadinho | 1628 | 234 | 6.96 | 85.63% |
| Olha a explosão | MC Kevinho | 1320 | 199 | 6.63 | 84.92% |
| Parado no bailão | MC L Da Vinte | 1109 | 178 | 6.23 | 83.95% |
| Só quer vrau | MC MM | 1706 | 287 | 5.94 | 83.18% |
| Quem tem o dom | Jerry Smith | 1871 | 315 | 5.94 | 83.16% |
| Cheguei | Ludmilla | 1531 | 259 | 5.91 | 83.08% |
| O bebê | MC Kevinho | 1354 | 247 | 5.48 | 81.76% |
| Favela chegou | Ludmilla | 1356 | 256 | 5.30 | 81.12% |
| Rabiola | MC Kevinho | 1605 | 304 | 5.28 | 81.06% |
| Din Din Din | Ludmilla | 1962 | 374 | 5.25 | 80.94% |
| Facilita | MC Kevinho | 1570 | 312 | 5.03 | 80.13% |
| Amor de verdade | MC Kekel | 1995 | 402 | 4.96 | 79.85% |
| Agora é tudo meu | Dennis DJ | 1474 | 303 | 4.86 | 79.44% |
| Papum | MC Kevinho | 1138 | 238 | 4.78 | 79.09% |
| Vamos pra gaiola | MC Kevin | 1313 | 281 | 4.67 | 78.60% |
| Salvou meu dia | MC Kevinho | 1508 | 332 | 4.54 | 77.98% |
| Deu onda | MC G15 | 737 | 166 | 4.44 | 77.48% |
| Vai menina | Pedro Sampaio | 762 | 174 | 4.38 | 77.17% |
| Solteiro nunca está só | MC Kekel | 830 | 194 | 4.28 | 76.63% |
| Ta tum tum | MC Kevinho | 1654 | 398 | 4.16 | 75.94% |
| Amor bandido | Lexa | 1786 | 446 | 4.00 | 75.03% |
| Medley da gaiola | MC Kevin | 2088 | 541 | 3.86 | 74.09% |
| O grave bater | MC Kevinho | 793 | 208 | 3.81 | 73.77% |
| Só você | Dennis DJ | 1098 | 294 | 3.73 | 73.22% |
| Terremoto | Anitta | 1646 | 457 | 3.60 | 72.24% |
| Vai malandra | Anitta | 1877 | 540 | 3.48 | 71.23% |
| Você partiu meu coração | Nego do Borel | 1491 | 478 | 3.12 | 67.94% |
| Bola rebola | Tropkillaz | 2201 | 722 | 3.05 | 67.20% |