Intro Part Two: Rating Pop Punk Songs the Y!LS Way

The mechanics of rating a song and why a track's length isn't always a track's length

Part of an ongoing introduction series to the project. If you haven't already, start with the very first post for a project overview before continuing on to this one.

The process for listening to songs, plugging their attributes into the POSI formula, and then getting their official rating is two-fold.

Music Listen-Through

First, I listen through the album straight through with noise cancelling headphones on. When I hear an attribute of Perfect Pop Punk (PPP), I add one “point” to an attendance clicker.

At the end of the song, the total number of musical points is added to that song's blue column in the tracking spreadsheet:

(the number two in the preceding column indicates this is track number two on that album)

Lyric Read-Through

After the song is complete, I read through the lyrics on Genius and tally one point for each lyrical element of PPP I see. This total is added to the pink column:

I repeat this process for every song on the album.

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On the same line in the spreadsheet, I also add the song's length in seconds. As a reminder, the formula for POSI is:

(Music points + Lyric points) ÷ total seconds in song = POSI

Averaging the POSI scores of each song together gives me the overall rating for that album (in black):

Also listed are that album’s average number of music and lyric points per track (just for reference).

Special Adjustments

For many songs, there are up to two little tweaks we need to make before we can declare its POSI rating official:

1) Short Song Tax

Due to how POSI is structured, a shorter song less than three minutes is going to rate higher than a four-minute song with the same amount of music and lyric points.

To prevent the leaderboard from being dominated by short songs, I've built some adjustments into the formula that aim to even the playing field.

• Songs between 2:30-3:00 have their rating deducted by 10%

• Between 2:00-2:29: minus 15%

• Between 1:00-1:59: minus 20%

• Less than 1:00: minus 25%

As of writing, ten of the current Top 25 songs are over 3:00 while the rest have time adjustments. I may tweak the percentages so that this ratio is closer to 50/50 by the time all 500 albums are logged, but for now I think this solution is working well.

2) Intro/Outro Adjustments

If a song has a particularly long intro or outro (e.g., ambient noise or a long power chord fade-out) that's longer than 10 seconds, I subtract the length of that outro (beginning at the time of the last note) from the time of the song in the spreadsheet. I also add a note indicating the change (this lies in a hidden column, but can be seen if expanded).

For example, "Don't Leave Me" by blink-182 is 2:23 (or 143 seconds) long. At the 2:06 mark, there is a final power chord that then fades out for the final 17 seconds. After a five-second grace period, that's 12 seconds where nothing is happening and thus no points can be earned. To make it so that the song isn't "penalized" for having a long outro, I subtract this 12 seconds from the song length.

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Next week's post we will look closely at what qualifies as a Perfect Pop Punk point that gets tallied and put into the above formula.

Until then, more detail as well as the full ratings to date can be found on yeahlastsummer.com.