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What is the key of YOUR favorite songs?

Sixpence None the Richer

Remember back when Web Watch told you about how THERE SHE GOES by SIXPENCE NONE THE RICHER was called THE MOST PERFECT SONG EVER RECORDED?  It was called that, in part due to its ideal song length, and for other reasons as well.

While it may not be a way to tell if what you’re listening to is THE perfect song or not, if you’re a LAST.FM user than we can at least identify if the key of your favorite songs all fall into the same ballpark or not.

In other words, do you favor listening to songs that are in the same key or not?

There’s no need to sign into your Last.FM account (and Web Watch wouldn’t encourage handing out your passwords to any of these types of services anyway) — all you have to do is click over to HacKEY and type in your Last.FM username.  Since all Last.FM playlists are public, HacKEY can then scan the top 50 listened-to songs in your playlist and pull additional metadata from the Last.FM database about each song.    In this case, the song keys.

Web Watch ran HacKEY on our own Last.FM playlist, and here are the results:

  • 25% of all our favorite songs were in F major
  • 15% were C major
  • 10% of our songs were either B-flat major, G Major, or E minor
  • Rounding out at 5% were B-flat minor, G-flat minor, A major, and E major.
  • The remainders were lumped together as “others”

Web Watch had thought that we preferred minor keyed songs, but with our Last.FM playlist showing us preferring majors over minors with a 75% vs 25% margin, we may need to rethink our music tastes.

As for what key THERE SHE GOES is written in?  Sounds like B-flat to us.