How can I keyword search for JUST hit pop song titles?

May 26, 2020 4:15 AM

I want to do a search of all CHARTED pop songs that ever had a specific word in the title and generate a list. Like "Saturn." How can I do this? If I go to some of the lyrics sites they give you ALL the lyrics of ALL the songs they have. Is there some way to narrow this down to JUST titles and JUST Billboard charting songs?
posted by rileyray3000 to Writing & Language (2 answers total)

The Billboard charts themselves are searchable (you'd presumably want the Hot 100), but it costs money to look at results. (Also, it returns every instance of a song in the top 100, so if it's there multiple weeks, you get multiple results.)
posted by Huffy Puffy at 5:23 AM on May 26, 2020

I found this Billboard Weekly Hot 100 1958-2019 dataset (seems legit, was able to painlessly join for free with a gmail address). Click "query", paste in the following and click "run query" to get you every appearance of a song with "saturn" in the name.

SELECT *
FROM hot_stuff_2
WHERE LOWER(song) LIKE "%saturn%"

You can replace saturn (but keep the %'s and quotes) with whatever lowercased word or phrase you want to search for, and someone with better SQL chops than can I help you with a query that will de-duplicate results (a song that was on the charts for 5 weeks will show up 5 times in the results of this query).

Hint: this query returns no results, but try it with "%alive%", for example.
posted by STFUDonnie at 5:28 AM on May 26, 2020