taylor 1.0.0

I’m all too excited to announce the release of taylor 1.0.0. taylor provides data on Taylor Swift’s discography, including lyrics from Genius and song characteristics from Spotify.

You can install it from CRAN with:

install.packages("taylor")

This blog post will highlight the major changes in this release, including the addition of data from Red (Taylor’s Version) and other updates to color palette functionality.

library(taylor)

Red (Taylor’s Version)

The biggest update is the addition of data from Red (Taylor’s Version) You can now find Spotify data and lyrics for all 30(!!) songs in taylor_all_songs.

library(tidyverse)

taylor_all_songs %>% 
  filter(album_name == "Red (Taylor's Version)")
#> # A tibble: 30 × 29
#>    album_name   ep    album_release track_number track_name     artist featuring
#>    <chr>        <lgl> <date>               <int> <chr>          <chr>  <chr>    
#>  1 Red (Taylor… FALSE 2021-11-12               1 State Of Grac… Taylo… <NA>     
#>  2 Red (Taylor… FALSE 2021-11-12               2 Red (Taylor's… Taylo… <NA>     
#>  3 Red (Taylor… FALSE 2021-11-12               3 Treacherous (… Taylo… <NA>     
#>  4 Red (Taylor… FALSE 2021-11-12               4 I Knew You We… Taylo… <NA>     
#>  5 Red (Taylor… FALSE 2021-11-12               5 All Too Well … Taylo… <NA>     
#>  6 Red (Taylor… FALSE 2021-11-12               6 22 (Taylor's … Taylo… <NA>     
#>  7 Red (Taylor… FALSE 2021-11-12               7 I Almost Do (… Taylo… <NA>     
#>  8 Red (Taylor… FALSE 2021-11-12               8 We Are Never … Taylo… <NA>     
#>  9 Red (Taylor… FALSE 2021-11-12               9 Stay Stay Sta… Taylo… <NA>     
#> 10 Red (Taylor… FALSE 2021-11-12              10 The Last Time… Taylo… Gary Lig…
#> # … with 20 more rows, and 22 more variables: bonus_track <lgl>,
#> #   promotional_release <date>, single_release <date>, track_release <date>,
#> #   danceability <dbl>, energy <dbl>, key <int>, loudness <dbl>, mode <int>,
#> #   speechiness <dbl>, acousticness <dbl>, instrumentalness <dbl>,
#> #   liveness <dbl>, valence <dbl>, tempo <dbl>, time_signature <int>,
#> #   duration_ms <int>, explicit <lgl>, key_name <chr>, mode_name <chr>,
#> #   key_mode <chr>, lyrics <list>

Red (Taylor’s Version) has also replaced the original Red in taylor_album_songs. So if you want only songs from Taylor’s albums, you will get Red (Taylor’s Version), and Fearless (Taylor’s Version), by default, because we stan artists owning their art.

taylor_album_songs %>% 
  distinct(album_name)
#> # A tibble: 9 × 1
#>   album_name                 
#>   <chr>                      
#> 1 Taylor Swift               
#> 2 Fearless (Taylor's Version)
#> 3 Speak Now                  
#> 4 Red (Taylor's Version)     
#> 5 1989                       
#> 6 reputation                 
#> 7 Lover                      
#> 8 folklore                   
#> 9 evermore

Red (Taylor’s Version) has also been added to taylor_albums, and has the highest Metacritic score of any of Taylor’s albums.

taylor_albums
#> # A tibble: 13 × 4
#>    album_name                          ep    album_release metacritic_score
#>    <chr>                               <lgl> <date>                   <int>
#>  1 Taylor Swift                        FALSE 2006-10-24                  NA
#>  2 The Taylor Swift Holiday Collection TRUE  2007-10-14                  NA
#>  3 Beautiful Eyes                      TRUE  2008-07-15                  NA
#>  4 Fearless                            FALSE 2008-11-11                  73
#>  5 Speak Now                           FALSE 2010-10-25                  77
#>  6 Red                                 FALSE 2012-10-22                  77
#>  7 1989                                FALSE 2014-10-27                  76
#>  8 reputation                          FALSE 2017-11-10                  71
#>  9 Lover                               FALSE 2019-08-23                  79
#> 10 folklore                            FALSE 2020-07-24                  88
#> 11 evermore                            FALSE 2020-12-11                  85
#> 12 Fearless (Taylor's Version)         FALSE 2021-04-09                  82
#> 13 Red (Taylor's Version)              FALSE 2021-11-12                  96

Finally, a new color palette inspired by the Red (Taylor’s Version) album cover has been added to the album_palettes, and the package website has been updated with a new theme and logo, also inspired by the album cover.

Breaking Changes

In addition to Red (Taylor’s Version) replacing Red in taylor_album_songs, there is one other breaking change in this release. The type argument of color_palette() has been deprecated in favor of an automatic interpolation.

In previous version, if we wanted to interpolate additional colors from a smaller color palette, we needed to specify type = "continuous".

my_colors <- c(ku_blue = "#0051ba", "firebrick", "#ffc82d")
my_palette <- color_palette(my_colors)

# old
color_palette(my_palette, n = 10, type = "continuous")
color_palette(my_palette, n = 2, type = "discrete")

In the latest release, this happens automatically. If you specify an n that is larger than the size of the palette (for example, n = 10 when my_palette has only 3 colors), we now automatically interpolate additional colors. Similarly, if you specify an n that is smaller than the number of colors in the palette, an evenly spaced sample will be taken.

Minor Changes

There were also a number of minor improvements:

• “Wildest Dreams (Taylor’s Version)” has been added as a non-ablum song. Presumably, this song will eventually move to 1989 (Taylor’s Version).
• color_palette() now preserves color names, either through values in colors(), or a named vector supplied to pal.

See the changelog for a complete list of changes.

Acknowledgments

Featured photo by Erik Mclean on Unsplash.