poptimists | Pop Science The Revenge

I have spent an enjoyable half hour assessing the results of

stevem78's Spice Girls AlBUM survey in an attempt to draw deeper ANALYTICAL MEANING from the data set.

First of all, I looked at whether Spice "works as an album".

My method here is to look at the gap between the overall mark given to the album and the averaged mark given per song.

At an aggregate level, the average overall mark is 6.81. The expected mark - i.e. the average mark of all songs on the album - is 6.5. This is a gap of 0.31, a numerical value that represents the extra quality the music gains by being packaged in this particular way.

In other words, considering Spice as an album rather than as discrete tracks improves it by 5%. We can call this its RF - Rockism Factor.

I then looked at the votes of individual Poptimists, examining individual gaps - these were naturally more variable.

At the low end of the scale, we have Poptimists for whom the album format apparently reduces the quality of the record.

zmachine and

strange_powers had the highest negative gaps - they like the music on average more than they like the album.

At the high end, three voters saw a huge 2.4 point jump between their average ratings of the tracks and their liking of the album as a whole - these were

badidodo,

justfanoe and perhaps inevitably

alexmacpherson, all of whom find that the album format improves their enjoyment of Spice Girl music by around 50-60%.

The next point of investigation is single vs album tracks - did the Spice Girls pick their singles right?

It seems that they did. The average rating of one of the five singles is over 2.08 points higher than the five album-only tracks. For some individuals this gap widened considerably -

alexmacpherson,

jauntyalan, and

poptasticuk having the widest gap in ratings between single and album tracks. At the other end of the scale,

fathands and

kuttiis gave a higher rating on average to album tracks than to singles - though the gap is very small in both cases.

Finally, we ask the key question: which track is the most important on Spice?

This is not the same as "which track is best?". Clearly, science suggests that taking an album as an artwork, the most important component in that artwork will be the one which correlates most closely to the quality of the work as a whole. In other words, we can assess the contribution of each track to the overall impression of the album (represented by the overall mark given). The higher the correlation, the more opinion of that track is likely to impact opinion of the whole.

Given this methodology, the most important track on Spice is in fact LAST TIME LOVER, with a 0.833 correlation to overall opinion. (1 being the top possible score). Say You'll Be There is second and Wannabe is third - both songs which score much higher than Last Time Lover - but nonetheless LTL can take its place as the secret heart of the record.