Essential Mix Statistics
Explore the statistics and history of the BBC Radio 1 Essential Mix.
The BBC Radio 1 Essential Mix is an institution within dance music. Running since 1993 it has hosted the biggest names in the industry in its weekly two hour mix sessions and plays a pivotal role within the scene.
Using the crowdsourced tracklist website MixesDB I gathered information about the performers, artists, tracklists and genres from more than 1400 editions of the Essential Mix. Look below for some insight into the history, evolution and trends of the last 26 years in dance music.
If you are interested in the code behind both getting the data and visualising it or the raw data itself you can find it on Github. If you have any questions you can hit me up on @karltryggvason on Twitter or shoot me an email at ktryggvason@gmail.com.
How Many Tunes?
Lets start of with what is quite possibly the driest graph but the one that was the impetus for me to compile all this information in the first place. My basic question was: has digital dj'ing resulted in djs playing more tracks in their mixes? The Essential Mix tracklists seemed like a good data set to research this. A standard two hour format with decades of history to dig into.
Technology has changed dj'ing a lot in the last 20 years. Up until the early 2000s the tools of the trade were fairly stable: two or more Technics SL 1200 turntables plus a mixer of your choice. But since then technology has disrupted the industry massively, from cdjs to timecode vinyl systems to midi controllers and beyond there are now dozens of ways to mix recorded music together.
People can, and will, argue endlessly about the pros and cons of each approach. But I think it is undeniable that technology has made it easier and faster to beatmatch than ever before. This means that djs are free to do other things: effects, loops, multi deck blends, tune selection and pose for the crowd (argue the more cynical among us). But should a dj let tracks breathe and speak for themselves or should they try to creatively put as many of them in a set as they can? There are many styles and schools of thought.
Loking at the graph I feel supported in my hunch that technology has resulted in djs mixing from one song to the next one faster. The line in this chart represents the average number of songs per mix by year. The lightest shaded area represents the middle of the range, this is where 50% of all the mixes fall (so excluding the bottom and top 25% respectively) in terms of the number of songs included. The middle covers the range from 5th to 95th percentile and the darkest area represents the extremes on both ends, the mixes with the fewest and the most mixes.
You can see that right after bottoming out in 2001 the average number of tracks played in an Essential Mix starts inching upwards. In the 90s the majority of mixes had between 20 and 30 tracks, around 4-6 minutes per track on average. But around 15 years ago that started moving up to between 30 to 40 tracks per mix or 3-4 minutes per track.
The outliers also become more and more pronounced. Mixes with more than 50 songs are now pretty standard and they regularly hit 60 to 70. The Brookes Brothers set the record so far in 2011, with 115 tracks, there's just over a minute for each track. I get tired just thinking about it...
But if that covers how many tunes you can find in Essential Mixes, naturally the next question is: Which tunes?
Most Played Tracks, Artists and Genres
In the tables below you can see the most played tracks, artists and labels in the history of the Essential Mix. You'll find the top 250 most played from each of these categories. Click each row for more information about who played the entry in question and when.
In tracks, Donna Summer's disco classic I Feel Love, Mystery Land by Y-Traxx and the Underworld stable Born Slippy come in at the top with 15 plays each and after that its one classic after the other. Older tracks naturally appear more frequently than newer tracks (having had more years to have been played). Interesting to see Donna Summer top the list as she is one of only a very few women on there, dance music is sadly a very male dominated scene.
Underworld tops the artist top list as well, but Daft Punk come in a close second. The list is understandably somewhat UK centric. On the label side the almighty White Label comes out on top, Unreleased and Acetate get a fair few mentions as well. Otherwise the top places are taken up by some of the bigger more established labels in the scene, with FFRR taking first place by quite a margin.
That gives us a bit of insight into what has been played on the Essential Mix and leads us naturally into the question: who's played there?
Which DJs?
I fetched data for 1344 mixes (discounting some duplicates) on which 889 artists have played. Of those 658 have played the Essential Mix once, while around 130 have featured twice (many of those are the winners of the Essential Mix of the year, which gets replayed as the last episode every year).
In this chart you can see which djs have had multiple occurrences and how they are divided (click on each column to see which djs it includes). Obviously Pete Tong, the host of the show is a bit of an outlier, in the MixesDB data he gets credited as an artist around 80 times. Also, again, older artists or those with a longer career are likely to have made more appearances. So you have a lot of the older acid-house era british djs racking up the most appearances.
Categories and Genres
The last bit of data to look into is the categories. I've filtered out the ones related to the tracklists or the artists and that leaves us with genre information. Now this is always going to be subjective. Where is the line between techno, tech house and house? Ask ten nerds and you'll get ten different answers. But regardless, its interesting to see how genres are born, evolve and (in some cases) die.
In the first chart, you can see that house reigns supreme in the Essential Mix. There are 444 mixes categorized as house, almost twice as many than the runner up, tech house. After that is the other big 4x4 genres, but then there's quite a drop off before the more breakbeat oriented genres show up.
In the second chart you can select categories to see how they are spread out through the years. I found clicking around here to be quite the history lesson. Its interesting to see how genres like minimal and dubstep spike and die down and how you can see trends with the rise and fall of trance in the late 90s / early 00s and the resurgence of electro in the last couple of years, to mention a few examples.
Outro
I hope you enjoyed this statistical perspective into the history of the Essential Mix. Big ups to MixesDB and the community over there, their tireless trainspotting work is really neat.
There are some caveats. All of this information is parsed from incomplete user entered tracklists and not from detailed, structured or verified data. Some of it is purely subjective (category and genre tags) while other facets are pretty objective (dates, track counts). There is a lot of data, more than has been possible to humanly verify in detail. Minor variations in spelling or casing, typos, might play a role in the results.
Again the code and the data can be found on Github. Special thanks to Coverprice who provided help on normalizing and cleaning up the artist names. If you see any bugs or inconsistencies in the data you can let me know on@karltryggvason on Twitter or send me an email ktryggvason@gmail.com.