Musical Pareto Front

             About a month ago I was talking with a few friends of mine and mentioned a thought that had come to me a few days before, which I named the “Musical Pareto Front”. Upon my explanation, one of them suggested I make a blog to share thoughts like these. Naturally, I decided that should be what my first post is about.

In design, a Pareto front is a tool used to determine whether or not your product will succeed on the market. The basic idea is to take the 2 most important metrics the product must have (I suppose more than 2 could be used, but 2 is the easiest to visualize) and give it a score for each. These scores will then be plotted on an X-Y plane with each axis representing one metric. To produce the Pareto front, all similar products on the market must be plotted, and then the line connecting all the products that are better than every other product at either metric X or metric Y is the Pareto front. If your product is not on the front, that means there is a product that is better at both metrics and thus would be a clear choice over yours.

            Say, for example, we determined that the two most important metrics for a supermarket are affordability and food quality. A simplified Pareto front may look like this:

             As you can see, Wegmans is both cheaper and higher quality than the fictional ABC Food, so there’s no reason to shop at ABC Food. However, the other three all have justifiable reasons why someone would shop there, stemming from how they personally value affordability and quality.

             Okay, so now for what the Musical Pareto Front is: It is the same thing as a standard Pareto front, with the two metrics being how good the song is, and how recently it came out. You may be wondering why a song coming out recently is a valuable metric. Well…it’s really not, but it made for an interesting thought so I rolled with it. While I have a fairly varied music taste, my favorite is classic rock, so naturally most of my favorite songs are from decades ago, which makes that metric relevant.

             Taking these two metrics and creating a Pareto front is essentially equivalent to naming your favorite song, then your favorite that was released after that one, and so on. Realistically, the most recent song to be released would be on it by default even if you hated it, so I set the cut off to be such that at least one of the songs on the front came out in the last year. Here’s what I produced for myself:

             This exercise provoked thoughts about the music industry over the years and about my personal taste. Interestingly, my favorite band, Led Zeppelin, did not show up at all. They have a handful that I would score above 9.7 on this imaginary music scale, but none could touch the incredible Thunder Road, which came out after most of Zeppelin’s albums. I don’t think a perfect song has ever been recorded, hence the 9.99 rating, but I have come to the somewhat saddening conclusion that I will probably never hear a better song than that. Seriously, if you’ve never heard it, listen to it right now.

             The Weeknd really came out of nowhere on this one, and I’m far from a fan, but that song is just so…groovy. 2015 in general was a good year in music in my opinion. In fact, I think it’s the first year I can remember when the songs on the radio were better than the year before. Here’s to hoping 2016 continues that trend.