Stat Significant | Stats + Stories Episode 369

Have you ever wondered if people actually hate Coldplay? Do you want statistical proof that Game of Thrones did not stick the landing in its finale? Have you wondered whether you're actually seeing Nic Cage in more movies? Well, you're in luck. There's a newsletter for that and it's That's the focus of this episode of Stats and Stories, where we explore the statistics behind the stories and the stories behind the statistics. I'm Rosemary Pennington. Stats and Stories is a production of the American Statistical Association in partnership with Miami University's Departments of Statistics and Media, Journalism and Film. Joining me is regular panelist John Baylor, Emeritus Professor of Statistics at Miami University. Our guest today is Daniel Peris, a data scientist and journalist who writes about the intersection of statistics and pop culture. He previously worked in the entertainment industry and at DoorDash when the company only had around 150 employees. Paris is also the author of the newsletter Stat Significant that explores popular culture through stats. Daniel, thank you so much for joining us.

Thank you for having me.

How did popular culture become this conduit for you to kind of play with statistics?

Yeah, so I actually, when I started The newsletter Stat Significant, I originally wrote about a bunch of different things. I wrote about crypto, I wrote about sports, I wrote about a lot of different things. And I found my background is that I was a film major in college before transitioning to a career in data science. So I actually found that the, what I wrote about pop culture just flowed a little bit easier cuz I was able to lean on so many years of, of knowledge and random trivia factoids that I have about popular culture. And I also found that those were more accessible. You know, if you write about football or you write about baseball, then you're only going to capture the audience that cares about those things. And so when I would switch from an essay about music into an essay about football, a lot of people would open the email that was about music, and then about one quarter of those people would open the email that was about football. So actually, over time, I gravitated towards popular culture, and it also just I think I would struggle to imagine that I could still be doing this 2 years later if I was only writing about baseball versus popular culture where it's just at the intersection of a lot of my interests.

Well, and I think it's at the intersection of a lot of our interests as well. I mean, I found myself just going, oh yeah, I want to read that one next. I want to read that one next as I was looking at the lists of your topics. One thing that you start with is a question. Almost all of yours are a question about something. So what, what do these, where do these questions come from for you? What, what is kind of the spark of inspiration when you get these questions?

I don't think it's anything too formal. I usually will just be watching something or having a conversation with somebody and then the thing will just spring to mind. So that's usually one, one way that it happens. And I now have this backlog of around 200 questions that I just like keep adding to. And then there are some that are like not even fully formed thoughts where I don't even know where I would get the data or how I would even approach it. But I just have one that says, write something on pop punk at some point. And maybe someday you'll see that I publish an essay on pop punk and that's great. The other way that I usually come up with essays or questions that I think is a little bit more tangible is I'll find a dataset. And then once I have the dataset, I'll understand that I can use this dataset in different ways to answer maybe a long-running question that I've had. So as an example, one of my consulting clients, because I do data consulting, is a streaming service called Accuradio, and they allow people to rate songs on a scale of 1 to 5. And I also can see what people are listening to and all these other things. And that's incredible because now I have this dataset that I can use to answer this long backlog of questions I've had on how people interact with music in the streaming world.

So as a quick follow-up, you know, my complementary question was the idea— what are some of the sources of data that you pick? And you've already teased us with one, this collaboration with this Accuradio group. Are there other places that you look and dive in for getting information sort of routinely?

Yeah, I basically have two repositories or resources that I regularly use. The first one is a site called Kaggle, which I assume a lot of your listeners are familiar with. And that is, it's hard to actually describe Kaggle because it does a bunch of different things, but I believe it's a platform to help people with their data science and machine learning skills. So they're most famous for doing these machine learning challenges where Netflix might provide a dataset and a bunch of people will try to build the best recommendations algorithm. So the site also incentivizes people to upload datasets and then the users can actually vote on the quality of those datasets. So I found a lot of datasets from Kaggle and that's great cuz they're pre-digested and I don't have to do a ton of cleaning or transformation. The other is that I subscribe to a newsletter called Data is Plural, which is run by a data journalist named Jeremy Singer Vine, who was early at BuzzFeed. And I think he's one of like the first real data journalists. Because that was one of the first sites that was writing stories with data. And I believe now he's actually a data journalist at the New York Times. But each week he basically sends out 5 interesting datasets. And so one dataset that I thought was really fun that I was able to build a story around is that someone categorized or quantified the age gaps between actors who are made to be romantic love interests. And so as an example, in some of the James Bond films from the '70s, I think Roger Moore plays James Bond, and I think he was in his 50s, and a lot of his love interests were in their 20s. And so you have this repository of like 7,000 relationships and the gaps between them. And there was definitely like a lot of fodder there.

[Speaker:ELIZABETH] So I will admit to having been a Coldplay fan early when they were first coming out in the first couple of albums. And have slowly become a Coldplay hater over the years. I am curious, how did you come up with this idea to explore whether we all hate Coldplay, and how did you figure out whether we do in fact hate Coldplay?

Yeah, so I often am in search of trying to write an essay about a single cultural figure who also, where you can, where the figure is like, it's a single thing, there are these universal themes that surround that one thing. In short, they're effectively these cultural icons that become memes. So some of the figures that I've also written about is Nicolas Cage is one, which I think you already mentioned. Nicole Kidman is another one. I wrote one about Nickelback as well. So I've long wanted to write about Coldplay because this is a band where people have extremely strong opinions. And if you go on the internet, you'll see all these people bashing Coldplay. But then recently I was looking at some Spotify streaming data and they're the 6th most listened to artist. And so the sort of germ of the question becomes, okay, why does this band have such a big listener base while at the same time I'm just constantly being told that they're terrible? And so ultimately it became about like trying to quantify both sides of that equation. You know, why, why is this actually like one of the most commercially successful music acts of the 21st century?. And ultimately, I was able to quantify that, how they're effectively the most mainstream band of the 21st century, especially when you look at the decline of rock. There are very few, you know, traditional kind of like rock bands that are operating at the scale that they're currently operating at. While at the same time, what I was able to find is that if you were to say, look at like Pitchfork album ratings, they often get savaged by Pitchfork, and Pitchfork writes these really strong reviews. And then ultimately, when you're talking about a meme, you have sort of like these elements of bad luck that lead these figures to become particularly polarizing. So in the case of Coldplay, there's sort of these like two— I wouldn't necessarily call them bad luck, but there are these two additional cultural grievances that sort of culminate in the meme. And one is that the lead singer of Coldplay was married to Gwyneth Paltrow, who has become a contentious cultural figure, especially with the rise of Goop. And so a lot of Coldplay's media coverage, around 20% of media coverage surrounding Coldplay, mentions Gwyneth Paltrow. And it could just be an article about Gwyneth Paltrow that mentions Coldplay and, you know, lead singer of Coldplay, but that does forge a connection in people's minds. Also, the couple famously named their child Apple, and they also, instead of getting divorced, they got, I believe it was consciously uncoupled was the terminology that they used. Right. And, you know, that's just, again, it's like a small little grievance. And then you add in, so in The 40-Year-Old Virgin, and this is definitely a scene that has not aged well, but the characters Seth Rogen and Paul Rudd go back and forth playing a game called, you know how I know you're gay? And one of them says, you know how I know you're gay? Because you like Coldplay. And it's one of those things where it sort of comes together and all of a sudden people, you have this, all of these grievances and maybe people's distaste for their music sort of crystallize into a meme. And so now a lot of people are introduced to the fact of hating Coldplay before they actually listen to Coldplay's music and form an opinion about whether they like it or not. And so it was fun to, with a lot of these articles where I explore like a cultural meme, it's fun to sort of like go go through the looking glass or down the rabbit hole, where it starts with a simple question, and then I actually learn basically that these figures are sort of the beneficiary of very bad luck.

You know, you sort of illustrated it here in your description and your analysis of Rosemary's question, that after you do some focused analysis, there is then reflection on possible drivers of the result, particularly if there are surprising results that are being obtained. And, you know, as a, Staying on this music theme, I was taken with a couple of your essays. One, the idea of how does your music listening habits change with age? And I noted that when we've had conversations about music here in the studio, Rosemary and I and Charles tend to be sampling from different pools. And that's kind of a fun perspective. And then when I was— the idea of when do you stop finding new music or the other piece about about the death of rock, which I'm not wearing my black armband today, but I was tempted. Because the time that you're describing this music being dominant on the charts, 60% of the charts being of a certain genre, I'd like you to talk a little bit more about how did you decide that maybe we bid a fond farewell to rock?

Yeah. So a lot of essays, especially the ones you were talking about, especially as it relates to music, I think stem from, I wouldn't say like a personal grievance, but a sort of existential question that I have, which is that I was raised— my father is a big fan of classic rock, and for much of my life, that was my favorite music. And then at a certain point, it felt like this music that I was raised to love and was my preference just stopped existing. And so the question I had was, why am I no longer able to find music that is in this tradition that I was raised into? So that's where the question came from. And I also wanted to approach it— I don't think it was the way that I approached that essay was trying to figure out an end where I didn't just prove that rock was dead. It was actually trying to pinpoint a period in time or a point of demarcation at which there was this baton pass from rock and roll to pop and hip-hop. And ultimately, there's this saturation point in the early '80s where, as you alluded to, rock is about 60% of the Billboard charts. But you also see rock become over-commercialized. And a lot of people point to certain bands like Mötley Crüe and sort of the hair metal bands and the glam bands as this point where rock and roll sort of lost its philosophical center and people became not— it just didn't become as much like about rebellion because it was the mainstream. And then at the same time, you also see the rise of all these other technologies, which is like synthesizers and drum machines, and that effectively burst the rise of pop. And then later in the late '80s, you see the rise of rap and hip-hop. And oftentimes music, especially quote unquote popular music, which is Billboard charts, orients towards youth culture. And so if you have rock and roll, which is now actually decidedly mainstream and is not as attractive to youth culture, you have these new ascendant genres that are now more attractive to youth culture. And that's effectively when this transition happened, which is sometime in the mid-'80s. And then you see rock precipitously decline from that point forward.

You're listening to Stats and Stories, and we're talking with Daniel Paris, author of Stat Significant newsletter.

You know, as I was reading through a couple of these music-related essays, I found myself thinking of a couple of things. There was a really neat book called Twilight of the Gods that was by Stephen Hyden, I believe was the author, just sort of the death of classic rock and the transition, which I've I was thinking about, but also I recently saw the movie about Dylan, The Complete Unknown, and there was a really interesting take on it for me was that you're seeing a particular genre, folk, being dominant for a certain part of the population and kind of Dylan's tastes and interests evolving. And I'm probably going to be— don't stop listening now if you haven't seen the movie yet. I don't want to be I don't want to be having any spoilers here.

Does Bob Dylan become a music star? Are you going to spoil it?

Yeah, yeah, no, but it's the genre shift that was associated with kind of his embracing of electric and the electric guitar and some of the other devices. So I found that that kind of, the idea of shifts of genres is really appealing. But one aspect that you also hit was the idea of when your music tastes seem to kind of I won't say ossify, but perhaps get established. And you said it was about 13. And so how did that come about? So after 13, we're stuck?

You're stuck. I'm not stuck.

I got, you know—

People have very strong reactions to this essay. It's definitely my most read article. And the title is, When Do We Stop Finding New Music? And it also has the most comments by like an order of magnitude compared to any other thing that I've written. And so this ultimately, usually for most of my essays, I do custom research where I find a dataset and I produce a few graphics and I build a story around it. This one was a little different where I started with the question because like a lot of people, I listen to new music and it just doesn't sit right with my ears. Like there's something physiologically that does not compute when I hear this. And so I have increasingly, I don't discover new music. And so I just had this question of why is this happening? Am I normal? And that sent me down a research rabbit hole and I was able to find a pretty well-established body of research on how your ability to discover music, new music changes with age. So to your point of what you're referencing, a lot of our taste, especially for the rest of our life, gets established during our early teenage years and even our preteen years. And so when they looked at Spotify data, and I believe this is analysis by the New York Times, they found that people were often playing music from this period of time when they were between the ages of, say, like 12 and 15. And I like to call it, I have this playlist that I call my bar mitzvah playlist that I just listen to all the time. And it's the music, you know, it's effectively the music of of my youth. And then once you hit around 25, you start to see declining levels of what is known as open-earedness. And open-earedness is your ability to maybe hear music that you're not familiar with, or even like a new music styling, and actually maybe appreciate that. And so from the age of 25, you start to see declining open-earedness, and it effectively doesn't go up for the rest of your life. It just continually goes down. And they find too that when you look at someone's preference for music, your taste continuously spirals outside of the Billboard Top 100. And so with each year, your average ranking of your music on the Billboard charts gets lower and lower. And they also find, and this data point I found particularly depressing, apologies to your listeners, is that when you have children, and they compared people who have children, who don't have children, this effectively accelerates. And so your music falls even further out of the mainstream. In the piece, I call it unfortunately, like apparent tax. The majority of people read the essay and they say, oh, okay, this is great. Like I can, you know, put shape or I can actually tangibly understand this phenomenon that has occurred that I, you know, maybe didn't understand before. Whereas I think about like 10% of people are like, this is wrong. Like I still find new music, I go to shows and that's great. To be honest, I would prefer to be that. But no matter what I do, I keep listening to Green Day and Fall Out Boy and My Chemical Romance. And it's extremely hard for me to find new music.

So I'm a big Star Wars fan and love those films. But the Star Wars fandom is really interesting sometimes, you know, with the new trilogy of films, real love-hate reactions. I think Star Wars fans sort of tend to believe their fandom is unique. And you actually have an essay that is exploring whether this fandom is actually unique or not. Why? What propelled that one? And what did you find?

I have— I mean, Star Wars is arguably the most valuable media franchise of all time. At the same time, it also has a very devoted, insular fan base. But obviously it's a gigantic fan base. And then you have, in I believe the late 2010s, Disney bought the rights to Star Wars, which means it's now been enveloped within a certain mode of franchise storytelling. And where it used to be this scarce commodity, especially for, you know, a 20-year period where there were no Star Wars films between the original trilogy and the prequels, it now— there's a lot of Star Wars, you know, reliably we get 2 Star Wars TV shows every year, and we're going to get a Star Wars movie, I believe, next year or something like that. And I guess I was just curious because ultimately, you know, when you look at just the frequency of Star Wars content that's being put out, if you work backwards from that point, you have to assume there's a gigantic fan base and there was a reason that Disney paid billions of dollars to acquire Star Wars and why they felt it was worthy of building an entire Star Wars wing of Disneyland. I used to be a big Star Wars fan. Apologies to any Star Wars listeners. And then I just, I don't really understand what the sort of purpose behind some of the recent Star Wars series and movies are. But anyone who is a Star Wars fan, that's great. Ultimately what I looked into is just what is this like trajectory or this, the common Star Wars fan look like? So one thing that I found was that the, traditional Star Wars fan usually gets exposed to these movies at the age of like 5 or 6, which is actually what happened to me, which is that my dad would take me to a movie theater in downtown DC, this giant movie theater called the Uptown, and we'd watch the early— this was before the prequels, so we would watch these movies from the 1970s, and I thought they were the coolest things ever. And he likes to remind me that when I became a film major, that is, I probably owe it to those experiences. And I'm not too unique. That seems to be the case for a lot of people. And I think I struggle with that because, you know, my dad was basically passing on these movies that he loved to me, and I was an impressionable 5 or 6-year-old. And I decided, wow, like, these movies are the coolest thing I've ever seen. I'm going to love these forever. But then Walt Disney buys the rights to that thing and now decides that they're going to pump out as many Disney+ shows as they can, and they're going to make the movies, and they're going to continuously relaunch it. And so that, that was a lot of what I was exploring in that essay. I think the other thing too, really, that I found is that Star Wars fandom is effectively universal. Like, when you look across all of these different generations, they've done a really good job, whether just by serendipity or by meticulous corporate planning, of making sure that everyone loves Star Wars. That this is shared between, you know, kids 5 and 6 and beloved by people who are in their 60s and 70s. This is truly like one of the, you know, most universal stories and properties. At the same time, I think a lot of people are trying to wrap their minds around where it's going. And so it's, it's really interesting to watch it play out in real time. I think so many people are invested in Disney's corporate strategy and what they actually do with these stories.

Yeah, it was really striking. I'm looking at one of the graphs where it's sort of mapping like the percentages of people who are fans and not a fan. And it is pretty like steady across generations and then across regions too. And that is, I don't know that I've ever seen anything like that before in relation to like fandoms around media.

Yeah, I mean, it's funny. There's like this sort of heuristic that I have, which is when you go to another country, and you see people wearing t-shirts for American TV shows and movies. So I mean, the most common one is you go to like Hungary and you see somebody wearing a Friends t-shirt and you're like, how did— how does that resonate? And, you know, it's about a bunch of like New York 20-somethings and the show is so universally beloved. And that's the case of Star Wars too. You know, you see people all over the world wearing different, you know, having different cultural memorabilia about Star Wars. And it's, it's something to especially that absence. And this is actually one of the other points I tried to make in the essay, which is that for a long time, Star Wars actually benefited from its absence, which is that it became this artifact of fan culture. You know, one of the first quote unquote fandoms is built around Star Wars and Star Trek. And a lot of what kept Star Wars relevant between the original trilogy and the George Lucas prequels is that they would have conventions and people would create fan fiction and they would get together and they'd readjust these movies. And so what's interesting with Disney, and you're seeing the same thing with Marvel too, which is that a lot of these media properties benefit from absence or from scarcity, but they can't have it be scarce because they need people to keep watching, especially with Disney Plus. And so it's this ongoing dilemma. And to be honest, I given the incentive structure for them being a public company, I don't see a world where they can make those commodities scarce again.

Yeah, before I change gears for a television question, I still have very fond memories of being a teenager going to see the first movie at the theater, the first Star Wars movie dropping at the theater, and it was an experience in the cinema like none other I'd had before. So it was defining for— and I think the fact that you can reinvent yourself at different generations is effective. But so one thing, Star Wars is never going to end, but some television shows do. And you did have an essay that talked about kind of what shows got their finales right and which didn't. And that really spoke to me because there are some that I've watched and I thought, yeah, that was the right way for that to end. And there were others that I watched and I said, are you kidding me? So I could see why that question would come up. And you had this really lovely index to look at, to compare these different shows, looking at kind of ratings of the last show as some change relative to the averages of previous seasons. So can you talk a little bit about kind of that construction of an endpoint and then some of the insights that you gained?

Yeah, so basically the analysis that you're talking about is I looked at which television shows stuck their— stuck the landing or had a finale that was worthy of the rest of the show. And so what I looked at is I looked at the IMDb rating for the finale and I compared it to the average IMDb rating for the rest of the series. And a lot of the finales that you hear people complaining about definitely did not score well. I think Game of Thrones is probably one of the most famous. How I Met Your Mother was another one. I watched that show for 11 years and was absolutely devastated by that finale, just kind of flew in the face of everything that I enjoyed about that television show. And what's interesting, too, is that you see these finales kind of retroactively paint the memory of everything that that show is about. Like, I spent so many hours watching Game of Thrones. And now I feel pretty ambivalent about that time. You know, some of the best television I've ever watched were episodes in those, you know, last 2 of the 3 seasons. And then the final 5 episodes made me want to reappraise my enjoyment, which is a big bummer. So ultimately what I found was, I mean, you have a lot of finales that have these like high quality endings that go out on a, on a good note. I think The Office was one of them. Friends, I think had a good finale. Breaking Bad also is one where it's often, I think, thought of that it was a strong conclusion. And then on the other side, you have some finales that really didn't work out. And so you have like Game of Thrones, House of Cards, Two and a Half Men, How I Met Your Mother. So what you see from these sort of what I call disaster finales is one, it's— this is sort of Occam's razor where like some of the reasons why these failed are extremely simple. I think a big one is that a lot of them lost their main character. So House of Cards lost Kevin Spacey, and then its last season was not very good because they had to completely pivot the story. Two and a Half Men lost Charlie Sheen. They had to completely reorient the series around Ashton Kutcher. Scrubs lost its main cast, but then somehow continued on, and obviously people didn't like it as much. So that, that's a pretty common, common thread. And then there's also, you know, a lot of these, a lot of these series went way too long. Like you see a lot of the ones with the highest ratings that are these transcendent finales is what I called them. They actually only, those series last like 3 to 5 seasons. And then the ones that get really poor marks, you see some of those running as much as 15 to 12 seasons. And so one thing I looked into is at what season typically do you see this inversion point where people's enjoyment of a series drops off? Basically what I found is that on average, for shows that make it to the 5th season, it's the 6th season where you start to see the rating actually tail off. And so there's another essay I wrote sort of exploring like traditionally when do shows jump the shark? And I guess the TL;DR is the 6th season.

Well, that's all the time we have for this episode of Stats and Stories. Danny, thank you so much for being here today. Yeah, thanks, Dani. Stats and Stories is a partnership between the American Statistical Association and Miami University's Departments of Statistics and Media, Journalism and Film. You can follow us on Spotify, Apple Podcast, or other places where you find podcasts. If you'd like to share your thoughts on the program, send your email to statsandstories@miamioh.edu or check us out at statsandstories.net. And be sure to listen for future editions of Stats and Stories where we discuss The statistics behind the stories and the stories behind the statistics.