- Music
- 11 Feb 20
Angelic Diamonds combed through thousands of Spotify playlists in hunt of the No. 1 love song -- Donna Lewis' 'At the Beginning' took the top spot in a surprising turn.
Valentine's Day is only a few days away, and everyone's got love on the mind. Maybe you're curating a playlist to send to a loved one, or maybe you're making one about being single. Angelic Diamonds decided to streamline the process with their "Ultimate Love Playlist" -- a collection of the top 100 love songs of all time.
To make the playlist, the team combed through over 3,000 Spotify playlists which included words relating to love and collected the songs that appeared most frequently. They also tracked the amount of times the word "love" was mentioned in each song and used a sentiment analysis tool to rank the happiness levels on a score of 0 to 100.
Their findings?
Donna Lewis dominated the list at No. 1 with 'At the Beginning' from Disney's 1997 animated film Anastasia, present on 496 playlists. Next up is John Legend with 'All of Me,' present on 247 playlists. Ed Sheeran took up the most spots on the top 100 lists, with seven tracks in total and three in the top ten alone ('Thinking out Loud', 'Perfect' and 'Happier). Whitney Houston and Kygo mentioned the word "love" a whopping 80 times in the 2019 'Higher Love' remix. For a song that's under 4 minutes, that makes about one mention every three seconds.
Our Irish lads in Snow Patrol made the list with 'Chasing Cars' and Van Morrison made number 21 with 'Brown Eyed Girl.' No sight of U2 or Thin Lizzy, though.
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The results are a bit surprising -- Céline Dion's 'My Heart Will Go On' is nowhere to be found. The Beatles, Bruce Springsteen, Fleetwood Mac, Billy Joel are similarly missing.
It begs the question, are Spotify playlists really the best way to measure the ultimate love song? There are for sure playlists under different names that are still full of love songs that have been left out of the equation. Plus, coming from personal experience, a good number of playlists are strung together without rhyme or reason. And then there's the biggest conundrum -- what about people that don't use Spotify? Some artists are in the same vein, like Taylor Swift and JAY Z who removed their music from the streaming platform.
There's clearly no perfect way to measure the best love song (though I do firmly believe that Robyn's iconic 'Dancing On My Own' takes the cake here), but more than anything this list shows us just how broad the definition of a love song really is. Flo Rida's 'Low' and John Legend's 'All of Me' may be on complete opposite sides of the love song spectrum, but maybe they're just two sides of the same coin.