Keep in mind that many movies are in multiple genres, for example: Joker is a Crime Drama Thriller and Interstellar is a Sci-fi Adventure Drama. The Drama genre is 3rd in terms of box office proceeds.
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Have you ever felt your mood change when you hear your favorite piece of music? Have you ever wondered why some songs make you feel more jubilant than others?
I have a confession to make... I love listening to film music ❤️ That’s not my confession.
One of my favorite composers is Hans Zimmer and I always feel great when I listen to the music from Gladiator, (which by the way I haven’t even watched yet.) That’s not my confession.
Fun Fact: The soundtrack to Gladiator was a collaboration between a number of composers with Hans Zimmer and Lisa Gerrard being recognized with awards, although Hans received more awards than Lisa. We’ll get to that in a bit...
Also, the lyrics from "Now We Are Free" are in Lisa Gerrard's made up language, idio-glossia which she describes as a "language of the heart". That's why it is easier to listen to while trying to focus, because the words don't distract with any meaning.
When looking into the various tracks on Spotify for Gladiator and other films I noticed that some tracks are much more popular than others, i.e. they have higher numbers of streams or plays.
For example, when I search for Hans Zimmer on Spotify, I see a “Popular” title suggesting that the list of tracks provided are the ones most streamed or played.1
This made me curious about who the “top film music composers” are, so I asked ChatGPT. We all know that generative AI tools are not to be trusted, but the sources2 seemed to be a reasonable starting point so I continued. (Still not my confession).
Hint: To find where he ranks, look in the top right corner
Can you find her on this chart?
Hint: She's the top female star
Now that we have some idea of who the top composers are, let's look at the top tracks by Spotify Popularity.
Can you hum the melody from any tracks?
Hint: Scroll over a few diamonds to find your favorite movie
Alan Menken has only one track with a Spotify Popularity Score of above 30, because he composes mostly for Disney movies. Many of his tracks include voice and those are not included in the dataset since they are more like pop songs.
Do you have any ideas?
Keep in mind that many movies are in multiple genres, for example: Joker is a Crime Drama Thriller and Interstellar is a Sci-fi Adventure Drama. The Drama genre is 3rd in terms of box office proceeds.
If you know about the mere exposure effect4, then you might be thinking that movie success must have something to do with song/track popularity, Watson!
The most successful movies at the box office should mean more people listening to them.
However, while Hildur Guðnadóttir’s Joker is the most successful movie in terms of worldwide box office earnings, her most popular track from the soundtrack, Bathroom Dance is not high in monthly listens on Spotify. “What?!”
Surprise 1: Bathroom Dance - from Joker has a low number of Spotify monthly listens, but Joker is the movie with the highest worldwide earnings of all in the dataset
One of these is much easier to listen to that the other, for sure, so perhaps popularity is related to listenability - is that a word? Tracks from Joker certainly aren't ones I'm inspired to listen to while working. That's not to say that the music isn't super powerful though. Arguably, the music is perfectly brilliant for the scenes in the movie.
A surprise for me, Hildur Guðnadóttir achieved the highest number of awards for the Joker soundtrack, but her tracks are not as popular on Spotify as Cornfield Chase from Interstellar (most popular) or several other tracks coming from movies with high numbers of awards, including Up, Gladiator and Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone.
Since Gladiator was a collaborative effort on the soundtrack with Hans Zimmer, Lisa Gerrard and Klaus Badelt, I wondered how much collabs play into movie score success. If the Oscar's are anything to go by, it is rare that a collaboration wins an Oscar. Note that Gladiator did not win an Oscar for Best Original Score.
Hans Zimmer won Oscars for The Lion King in 1994 and Dune in 2021.
Out of 94 Oscars awarded, there were only 10 collaborations winning an Academy Award for Best Original Score.
A category change in the 1990s has resulted in Rachel Portman and Anne Dudley often being left out of the list of composers who have won an Oscar for Best Original Score.
They are included in this chart. This makes the list of Oscar wins in the 1990s 12 instead of the expected 10 per decade.
👀 Look for
When will we see our next female Oscar winning composer?
Female Directors are very few and far between which could mean less opportunity for women to be hired by women.
Again, only 3 (three) women have won an Oscar for Best Original Score or similar since 1935. Uno, dos, tres. That's less than a handful.
Marilyn Bergman won an Oscar for Best Music, Original Song Score and Its Adaption or Best Adaptation Score for Yentl in 1984, but since it is for songs with words, it is not counted as a Best Original Score.
Only 14 women have been nominated out of 986 Oscar nominations.
Only one (1) woman of color has been nominated for an Oscar for Best Original Score and that was Germaine Franco for Encanto in 2022. One (1) non-binary person has been nominated.5
In stark contrast, John Williams has 49 Oscar nominations so far.
Could track popularity be related to talent, academic pedigree, studiousness or sheer musical genius?
I looked at the top tracks from our set of composers to see if there was any correlation between various attributes tracked by Spotify and I was surprised that I couldn't find anything conclusive to report. Movie music is quite different from pop music because it has no words and because it compliments the story and plot of the movie instead of being something to sing, dance or pine with.
But, did you know?
Hans Zimmer doesn’t read music!
🤯
From a musician’s perspective and based on his fame, this was a HUGE surprise for me!
Earworms are the result of exposure to the same melody enough times, that the melody will stick in your ear or head sometimes to great agitation. Have you ever had one? I don't mind them so much myself, because I appreciate the melody, but some people really hate them.
Could a track's popularity have something to do with the creation of a memorable melody?
SPOILER ALERT!: Possibly!
While, the melody from Bathroom Dance doesn’t occur again in the movie, we have already established that Joker is an outlier in terms of perfomance across a number of criteria.
Hedwig’s Theme recurs 13 times in the 19 tracks (68%) in Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone, the Eternity and a Day: II. By the Sea melody in Eternity and a Day occurs 9 times in 18 tracks (50%), the melody from Married Life in Up occurs 11 times in 26 tracks (42%), and the prominent and incessant melody of Cornfield Chase only occurs 8 times in 31 tracks (26%).
Based on recurring themes, Hedwig’s Theme should be the most popular track out of the 10 in the study, due to probability of listens and worldwide box office proceeds multiplying the chances of a listen, but Cornfield Chase is still more popular on Spotify.
So a repeating melody seems to have some value in a track's popularity, but let's keep looking.
Most of the top tracks are composed with full orchestra with some highlighting a particular instrument.
Could the epic use of the organ be why Cornfield Chase is most popular?
What could it be? Hmmmmmm...
At this point, I’m stumped (and a little obsessed - still not my confession)
In researching various articles about music streaming and gender, I found The Gender Listening Gap6 by Aruna Ranganathan about Gender Bias in Streaming Music, which spurred me to look at Soundcharts Data.
It seems I have been guilty of WYSIATI7 (What You See Is All There Is) - (could this be my confession?)
It turns out the Spotify Popularity Score has nothing to do with actual popularity, but is rather the trend score.
Spotify popularity is not cumulative. It does not reflect total lifetime streams. It reflects recent activity (last few weeks/months).
It is influenced by:
It does not directly show total streams.
A song could have millions of streams but still have a low popularity if it's no longer played often.
A newer song could have high popularity with fewer total streams if it is trending now.
The Streaming Algorithm Perpetuates the Popular
The issue pervades across multiple music genres. A recent article by Anna Herbert, titled "New year, no men: taking down Spotify’s gender bias"8 states:
"[Gender] disparity is then reinforced by an algorithmic bias, as profit-driven streaming platforms are more likely to promote male artists in programmed listening, who are considered to have more cross-gender appeal."
And data from Soundcharts confirmed Gender Bias on Social Platforms...
Hans Zimmer is the only composer with a TikTok account. The others don’t have one yet. (Wow!)
That’s not to say the music of other composers isn’t being shared on TikTok, but rather having an account allows fans to engage with Hans Zimmer as an artist and that makes fans feel closer to him.
Users of YouTube, Instagram, TikTok and Twitter(X) are more male.9 So here's what we have:
Furthermore...
And finally, here's my confession:
I thought that I was going to be able to determine what makes a track popular based on the melody and musical choices made by the composers of the top tracks, but
I was wrong!
I looked at everything from Spotify attributes to the Bechdel Test10 as well as trying to recreate music notation in charts and building my own digital piano online! The truth is I had no idea how popular Hans Zimmer was or why.
What makes a track popular is like many things, a combination of a number of elements including talent, luck, genre, awards, melody, melody occurrence, instrumentation, connections, movie directors, movie success, gender of composer,... and
is most of all presence and fans on streaming platforms and social media.
When is the best time to plant a tree?
20 years ago.
The next best time is now!
Sources
Special Thanks To
Laura, Mum, Perry, Kristina, Dom, Tom, Amy, Jes, Tracy, Stef, Rosie, and the May 2025 MICA DAV Capstone Group: Leah, Heather, Shreya, Kaitlyn, Kong, Victoria, Lahiru, John, Elka, Sarah, Brionna, Alejandro, Aunde, Zane, and Zoe.