Song A Day Studio · Data lab
Every Song A Day song from January 1, 2009 to October 20, 2026, set next to the weather where it was recorded, the moon, the planets, the day's news and how many people watched it. Then the hunches got tested, superstitions included.
Each block is a year, months down and days across. Pick what to color by, then hover or tap a square to see that day's song.
These held up. Each compares like with like (songs from the same month, week or year), so the seasons, the moves between cities and YouTube's slow drift can't fake a result. Two separate reviewers then tried to knock each one down.
On Saturdays and Sundays, about one song in three is excited, silly, angry or otherwise high-energy. On weekdays it's closer to one in two. Compared within the same week, weekends run 10 points lower. Monday to Friday don't differ from each other.
Holds upAbout one song in five was written away from home. Those run 17 seconds longer on average, are less often anxious, and get about 28% fewer views than songs from the same month at home.
Holds up1,328 songs on the road, 5,174 at home.
Songs name that day's headlines far more often than chance: 167 strong matches where 48 would turn up by accident. Most come from the same day or the day before. Those news songs get about twice the views of songs from the same month.
Around US elections and inaugurations, 32% of songs are about politics, against 9.5% the rest of the time.
Holds upClean-shaven songs get about 1.7 times the views of bearded songs from the same month, and still 1.44 times with topic, mood and everything else held equal. Clean-shaven days also bring fewer tired songs: 65 where 106 were expected.
Holds upThe share of dark moods jumped around 2016 and 2017, from about 11% of songs to about 21%, and stayed there. Almost all of the rise is angry songs, mostly about politics. Sad songs swing from year to year but show no trend.
Holds up, as a stepAgainst songs from the same month, with everything else held equal, songs about Apple get 4.7 times the views. Politics, Trump, TV and pop culture beat the average too. Poetic songs, commissions and conference songs get about half.
Silly, excited, angry and happy songs all beat pensive ones by 1.4 to 1.6 times. And it's a long tail: Baby Yoda alone is a quarter of all views, and the top 1% of songs have three quarters of them.
Holds upNone of these change anything. Where the test had enough songs to see a small effect, it says how small.
High-energy moods on 42.7% of 220 full-moon songs against 41.5% on other days. Same tempo (105.5 vs 105.8 bpm), same length, same share of minor keys.
Anxious, confused, angry or annoyed moods on 11.6% of 1,243 songs against 10.5% otherwise. The test could have seen a 2-point shift and didn't. Views and minor keys are unchanged too.
Unhappy moods on 15.6% of 32 songs against 17.1% on other days.
Supermoons: 44.9% high-energy against 41.5%. Eclipse days were, if anything, a little lighter: 11.1% unhappy against 17.1%.
When the planets bunch up in the sky (tightest: April 20, 2024), songs are no wilder and no faster. Conjunctions and retrograde planets change nothing either.
Neither the Sun's sign nor the Moon's shifts the mood mix once the season is accounted for.
Tired or sad songs on 13.9% of Mondays against 14.3% on other days.
Sad songs on 6.5% of wet days against 7.0% of dry ones, comparing the same month. No link to minor keys or tempo either.
Warm days aren't faster, cold days aren't more minor, and sunshine doesn't lift the mood. Short winter days hint at a few more sad songs, but not reliably.
#1397 “Hurricane Song One” went up the day before Hurricane Sandy hit. The next day, #1398, had the strongest wind of any song day: 60.6 km/h with 32 mm of rain.
Songs with “snow” in the title fall on snow days 44% of the time. All songs: 7%. #3683 “It's Sunny But It's Cold Outside” was clear with a high of −8.3 °C.
Hottest song day: #6422 in Palm Springs, 46.1 °C. Coldest: #2246 in Jersey City, −22.4 °C. Wettest: #286 in Berkeley, 80 mm.
#4373 “Jupiter and Saturn” was written the day of their closest meeting since 1623, and #5577 on the day of the 2024 total solar eclipse.
Written the same day as the story: Bob Dylan's Nobel, the first close-up of Pluto, the end of the Opportunity rover and the Ever Given.
#3974 “Baby Yoda Baby Baby Yoda” has 9.8 million views. The median song has about 400. #1618 “SOHCAHTOA” gained 283,000 views between August and October 2026. Back-to-school season.
Shortest: #5097 “This Is The Whole Song”, 5 seconds. Longest: #4908, 19 minutes 37 seconds. The median is 2:13.
The public spreadsheet stops at #5101 (December 19, 2022). A find-and-replace that fixed instrument typos also rewrote seven YouTube IDs: “bAsE45R51bs” became “BassE45R51bs”.
79% of songs with a known key are major. C leads (778 songs), then F, D and G. Most of 2010 (#358 to #727) has no minor keys at all, which is how keys were written down that year, not how the songs sounded.
Songs come from the Song A Day spreadsheet and catalog, cleaned and checked against YouTube. Each song's place was matched to coordinates and its day's weather fetched from Open-Meteo. Moon phase, planet positions, retrogrades and eclipses were computed for 5 pm New York time. Headlines are from Wikipedia's Current events portal, 99,951 of them. Views are from YouTube in October 2026.
67 questions were tested with shuffle tests that compare songs only with others from the same month, week or year, then corrected for how many questions were asked. Two reviewers re-ran every result that looked real with different methods. They kept the ones above and downgraded four: the moods don't really change between the cities he lived in, seasons don't shift the mood mix, the politics link is mostly election weeks, and “darker over time” turned out to be a jump in angry songs.
Everything is public: the cleaned data (one row per song, 121 columns), the code, every result and both reviews, at github.com/songadaymann/songaday-data.