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Sisters covers - ALL the data

Posted: 25 Feb 2022, 07:00
by alanm
I analysed 987 covers of the Sisters from 818 unique artists across Spotify, Bandcamp, Soundcloud and YouTube.

The TL;DR:

- Most covered songs: Lucretia by a length, then Alice and Marian.
- Most covered band line-up: Floodland, then FALAA and Reptile House jostling for second place.
- Busiest years for covers: 2021, 2019 and 2020
- Genre: 53% are covers in the style of the original material, then Electronic 15%, Metal 12%, Acoustic 9%
- Most likely to be covered by dodgy darklings: Alice, Body Electric, Dominion
- Most likely to be covered by techno bois: Dominion, Body Electric, Lucretia
- Most likely to be covered by angry metalheads: No Time To Cry, This Corrosion, Black Planet
- Most likely to be an acoustic/unplugged cover: When You Don't See Me, Something Fast, Marian
- Most diverse genres of covers: This Corrosion, Temple Of Love
- Least diverse genres of covers: Something Fast, Alice, Body Electric
- Most prolific cover artists: Brad Salyn, followed by nmacog and botchandango
- No covers: Watch and Phantom, also Driver, Wide Receiver, Better Reptile, I Will Call You

Methodology
Basically, I did a lot of detailed searching on each platform. I worked through the list of released and unreleased TSOM and Sisterhood tracks making queries for covers of each. I tried a variety of alternate names for the track and band where applicable. Where the platforms supported public playlists, and there are Sisters playlists, I perused all of those for applicable covers. "Lucretia, My Reflection" has the most variety of annoying incorrect spellings, although I didn't record that data. Bandcamp was most irritating platform because it doesn't support playlists.

Finally, I dug through old Heartland threads about covers and picked up some material that I missed, although often old links were dead. Despite all this I'm sure I missed some material and expect to be loudly informed about it.

On all platforms I disqualified the following material as a "cover" and excluded it from the data set:

- Live or studio bootlegs of the real band.
- Rips of released material.
- Techno remixes of original material.
- Vocal covers over original material (please don't ever do this on YouTube).
- Mashups of original material (sorry Project Kiss Kass).
- "Covers of the Sisters" own covers (e.g. Emma; more common than you'd think).
- Solo instrumental parts (sorry Wayne and all the YouTube bassists).
- Speed Kings and NME.
- Music from those goddam karaoke vendors.
- Covers of that Leonard Cohen song
- Abrimaal and imitators

Songs
Let's look at total covers.

Everyone and his dog has covered Lucretia (154), and this after I excluded countless "watch me play the Lucretia bassline" YouTube videos. Alice (95) and Marian (71) are clear second and third places, then Temple Of Love (59) and This Corrosion (58) are neck and neck. No Time To Cry (28) may be a surprise at number 6. First And Last And Always (27), Dominion (27), Black Planet (24) and Something Fast (23) round out the top 10.

Driven Like The Snow (17) and 1959 (14) make strong showings for songs that have never been performed in the live set, speaking to the enduring strength of the Floodland material. For one of the better songs on its album Possession (3) has surprisingly few covers. Is this one hard to play, or hard to sing? Same could be said about Ribbons (6). The Steinman collaborations (This Corrosion, Dominion/Mother Russia and More) account for 10.6% of the total covers.

Of the released material, I didn't find any covers of Watch and Phantom. I'm not surprised by the latter. But Watch deserves a cover or two - it lasted longer in the live set than Damage and the later iterations were better than the released single.

Including unreleased material: Driver, Wide Receiver, Better Reptile and I Will Call You are not represented in the data set (I didn't consider Body Politic and Burn It Down to be unique tracks). Wide Receiver is garbage, but Driver is a good song and I was surprised not to find any covers. For the two recent songs I guess we need Von to tell us the actual lyrics before anyone tries them. Maybe a cover that embraces the indistinct mumbling is the way to go?

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Lucretia, My Reflection                      154
Alice                                         95
Marian                                        71
Temple Of Love                                59
This Corrosion                                58
No Time To Cry                                28
First And Last And Always                     27
Dominion                                      27
Black Planet                                  24
Something Fast                                23
When You Don't See Me                         22
Body Electric                                 21
More                                          20
Heartland                                     18
Walk Away                                     18
Vision Thing                                  18
Some Kind Of Stranger                         18
Nine While Nine                               17
Driven Like The Snow                          17
I Was Wrong                                   14
1959                                          14
Floorshow                                     13
Giving Ground                                 13
Burn                                          12
Never Land                                    11
We Are The Same, Susanne                      11
Body And Soul                                 11
Amphetamine Logic                             10
Fix                                           10
Poison Door                                   10
Valentine                                      8
Afterhours                                     6
Adrenochrome                                   6
Lights                                         6
Ribbons                                        6
Summer                                         5
Good Things                                    5
A Rock And A Hard Place                        5
Anaconda                                       5
Train                                          5
Torch                                          5
Bury Me Deep                                   4
On The Wire                                    4
The Damage Done                                4
Under The Gun                                  4
Possession                                     3
Rain From Heaven                               3
Kiss The Carpet                                3
Detonation Boulevard                           3
I Have Slept With All The Girls In Berlin      3
Colours                                        3
Still                                          2
You Could Be The One                           2
Arms                                           2
Flood II                                       2
Finland Red, Egypt White                       2
Blood Money                                    2
Doctor Jeep                                    2
Crash And Burn                                 2
Romeo Down                                     1
But Genevieve                                  1
Will I Dream?                                  1
War On Drugs                                   1
Black Sail                                     1
Come Together                                  1
Show Me                                        1
Flood I                                        1
Mother Russia                                  1
Jihad                                          1
Driver                                         0
I Will Call You                                0
Watch                                          0
Better Reptile                                 0
Wide Receiver                                  0
Phantom                                        0
Genres
I assigned a genre to each cover after listening to it. This part of the analysis is obviously somewhat subjective so take it with a pinch of salt. "Straight" covers are those done in the style of the original material, otherwise I picked from broad genre buckets.

53% are Straight covers. These are all the cover bands and tribute acts, many of the fan-made amateur covers, and a variety of professional dodgy darklings. And techno fans of The Sisterhood.

Nearly 15% are from some "Electronic" genre (when the original track isn't). No I don't care about the difference between your acid house vs synth pop. "Chiptune"-style covers are in this bucket too.

"Metal" is next at 12%. I did initially break out a couple of sub-genres because I am more familiar with the landscape here. Eventually I just rolled them up into the Metal bucket.

"Acoustic" is fourth at 9%. I included unplugged guitar, piano, and random unpowered instruments like ukulele, violin etc in here.

"Alternative" (6%) is the last significant category and is basically defined by the "alternative" recommendations that Bandcamp sends me weekly. A lot of artists self-identify as some kind of "alternative" or "indie" too so this isn't completely subjective.

Industrial, A Capella, Punk, Country, Hip Hop, LoFi, Reggae, Soul and Jazz represent the long tail of genres with very few covers each.

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Straight       52.5%
Electronic     14.8%
Metal          11.6%
Acoustic        9.3%
Alternative     6.2%
Darkwave        2.6%
Industrial      1.0%
Punk            0.6%
Country         0.5%
Hip Hop         0.2%
Soul            0.1%
Unknown         0.1%
Jazz            0.1%
Reggae          0.1%
LoFi            0.1%
Grindcore       0.1%
Vocal           0.1%
Genre by Song
Let's dig deeper into the tracks with 20 or more covers.

Something Fast has the most Straight covers (74%). Basically everyone in a lockdown with a guitar and a laptop drum machine put a cover of this on YouTube.

Discounting that, Alice (64%), Body Electric (62%) and Dominion (52%) are most likely to be in the set list of a tribute band near you. I am surprised Marian (51%) is as low as fourth. No Time To Cry has the least Straight covers at 21%.

Dominion (26%), Body Electric (24%) and Lucretia (23%) are beloved of the Electronic music community. Something Fast has zero techno covers even though it's name has some amusing synergy with the genre.

Fully 42% of No Time To Cry covers are Metal. There is a cluster of metalheads who have redone the well-known Cradle Of Filth cover (not all of who seem to realise it's originally from the Sisters) making it arguably the most influential Sisters cover in any genre. This Corrosion (28%), Black Planet (25%) and More (25%) are other favourites in this genre. Dominion (4%) has the fewest metal covers.

People with a guitar and an emo reach for When You Don't See Me - 23% of it's covers are Acoustic. Something Fast (22%) and Marian (18%) are obvious acoustic covers, This Corrosion (17%) maybe less so at #5. Body Electric has no acoustic covers and that is something I'd like to hear.

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Straight covers
-------------------
Something Fast               73.9%
Alice                        64.2%
Body Electric                61.9%
Dominion                     51.9%
Marian                       50.7%
Lucretia, My Reflection      50.6%
More                         50.0%
First And Last And Always    44.4%
When You Don't See Me        40.9%
Temple Of Love               39.0%
Black Planet                 37.5%
This Corrosion               24.1%
No Time To Cry               21.4%

Electronic covers
-------------------
Dominion                     25.9%
Body Electric                23.8%
Lucretia, My Reflection      22.7%
No Time To Cry               21.4%
Black Planet                 20.8%
Alice                        20.0%
Temple Of Love               15.3%
First And Last And Always    14.8%
Marian                       12.7%
More                         10.0%
When You Don't See Me         9.1%
This Corrosion                5.2%
Something Fast                0.0%

Metal covers
-------------------
No Time To Cry               42.9%
This Corrosion               29.3%
Black Planet                 25.0%
More                         25.0%
Temple Of Love               16.9%
First And Last And Always    14.8%
Lucretia, My Reflection      10.4%
Marian                        8.5%
Body Electric                 4.8%
When You Don't See Me         4.5%
Something Fast                4.3%
Alice                         4.2%
Dominion                      3.7%

Acoustic covers
-------------------
When You Don't See Me        22.7%
Something Fast               21.7%
Marian                       18.3%
This Corrosion               17.2%
More                         15.0%
Temple Of Love               11.9%
Dominion                     11.1%
First And Last And Always    11.1%
No Time To Cry               10.7%
Alice                         6.3%
Lucretia, My Reflection       5.8%
Black Planet                  4.2%
Body Electric                 0.0%
Diversity
I hacked up a "diversity index" for each song by using the sum of squares of the proportions of each genre per song, inverted because big numbers are better.

Once again taking the songs with more than 20 total covers, This Corrosion stands out with the most diverse group of covers. Something about it's combination of cocky beats, relentless groove and over-the-top angst clearly appeals to a wide range of artists.

Temple Of Love is in a clear second place, also attracting the attention of a wide variety of musical styles. Black Planet, First And Last And Always and When You Don't See Me round out the "diversity" top 5.

Something Fast props up the bottom of the list because all it's covers are either straight or acoustic (i.e. straight without drums). Alice and Body Electric are a predictably second and third least diverse.

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Diversity
---------------------
This Corrosion                               2.307116
Temple Of Love                               2.105800
Black Planet                                 1.986254
When You Don't See Me                        1.975658
First And Last And Always                    1.953651
No Time To Cry                               1.862532
Marian                                       1.768930
Lucretia, My Reflection                      1.751584
More                                         1.702513
Dominion                                     1.684214
Body Electric                                1.488651
Alice                                        1.475219
Something Fast                               1.295903
Line-up
Sorting total covers by era, the Floodland "line-up" (312) is well out ahead as the most covered, mostly due to the volume of Lucretia (note that I included The Sisterhood tracks in this line-up bucket which may not be entirely fair). FALAA (263) and Reptile House (261) are pretty even behind that. Despite being an actual live line-up the Vision Thing songs (110) are a lot less popular with covering artists. One could make a case for splitting the post-VT live line-ups by lead guitarist or something but I couldn't be arsed.

All line-ups have roughly the same proportion of straight covers. Floodland unsurprisingly has the highest proportion of Electronic covers (18%). Vision Thing has both the most Acoustic (16%) and Metal (13%) covers, which might speak to its reach outside the traditional Sisters fan-base.

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Floodland            312
FALAA                263
Reptile House        261
Vision Thing         110
Post-VT Live Only     36
Damage/Watch           4

Floodland
-------------------
Straight       47.4%
Electronic     18.3%
Metal          11.9%
Acoustic        8.0%
Alternative     7.7%
Darkwave        2.2%
Country         1.6%
Hip Hop         0.6%
Industrial      0.6%
Soul            0.3%
Unknown         0.3%
Jazz            0.3%
Punk            0.3%
Vocal           0.3%

FALAA
-------------------
Straight       51.0%
Electronic     14.8%
Metal          14.8%
Acoustic       10.6%
Alternative     5.7%
Darkwave        1.9%
Industrial      0.8%
Grindcore       0.4%

Reptile House
-------------------
Straight       55.9%
Electronic     14.9%
Metal           8.8%
Acoustic        7.7%
Alternative     5.4%
Darkwave        3.8%
Industrial      1.5%
Punk            1.1%
Reggae          0.4%
LoFi            0.4%

Vision Thing
-------------------
CoverType
Straight       56.4%
Acoustic       16.4%
Metal          12.7%
Electronic      5.5%
Alternative     3.6%
Darkwave        2.7%
Punk            1.8%
Artist
The median Sisters covers per artist is 1. Most people are happy doing one Sisters cover and then moving on with their lives. The mean is 1.2 but that is propped up by some outliers at the top.

81 artists covered 2 or more songs. Brad Salyn (20) is the most prolific. nmacog (15) and botchandango (10) are the others in double digits. Look these guys up on Soundcloud and YouTube. This data doesn't represent the tribute bands very well because of the limited vids of them that exist on YouTube.

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count    818.000000
mean       1.206601
std        1.065817
min        1.000000
25%        1.000000
50%        1.000000
75%        1.000000
max       20.000000

Brad Salyn                   20
Nmacog                       15
Botchandango                 10
madsmith                      9
Zombie Thirteen               7
Blumenhofen                   6
Temple of Mercy               5
Tobias Forsner/leftydrake     4
The Sisters Of Murphy         4
Paranoid Android              4
Year
2021 was the biggest year by far for Sisters covers (140), followed by 2019 (101) and 2020 (92). In general, the number of Sisters covers each year has grown almost every year that I have data for, with a noticeable spike in 2000 when that unspeakable tribute album came out.

Some of this is recency bias: more recent covers are easier to find and more likely to still be available on the platforms. But the pandemic effects of the last few years and the increasing ease of making, recording and publishing music online certainly have a role too.

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1991      1
1992      1
1993      2
1995      2
1996      2
1997      2
1998      1
2000     18
2001      4
2002      1
2003      1
2004      1
2005      2
2006      2
2007     14
2008     15
2009     12
2010     23
2011     37
2012     66
2013     69
2014     62
2015     80
2016     75
2017     77
2018     65
2019    101
2020     92
2021    140
2022     19
Platform
Spotify has the least covers (71). These are mostly established professional artists with record company deals. Bandcamp (80) has only slightly more. I suppose these artists are also professional but less established and/or successful.

SoundCloud (395) has lots of covers. Most are solidly in the realm of amateur (disclosure: my own included), or at least "musician isn't my only job" artists. YouTube (619) has the most covers. This is basically the full gamut from pros who are also on Spotify, to less established bands, to talented amateurs, to your uncle Bob and his dog covering Something Fast.

There was less overlap that I expected. 84% of covers were on one platform only and 13% were on two platforms. I found only 3 total covers on all four platforms - shout out to the marketing teams for Cradle Of Filth, The Court Of Sybaris and Sleepmask.

Rehashing the diversity index (heh) suggests the Bandcamp hosts the least diversity of covers, which is disappointing. For whatever reason, the covers there are largely straight derivatives of the original material. Spotify is little better. I expected SoundCloud to top the diversity stakes but that honour is held by YouTube, even after applying my strict filtering criteria.

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spotify        71
bandcamp       80
soundcloud    395
youtube       619

nr platforms
1    84.397163
2    13.373860
3     1.823708
4     0.303951

diversity
spotify 7.289250168062473
bandcamp 7.0556640625
soundcloud 9.468760266762985
youtube 12.0369396673852
Conclusion
Other than concluding that I spent way too much time on this, I will leave further interpretation up to the reader. It would be interesting to compare Sisters covers to those from other bands, and to include other platforms (last.fm seems to have some TSOM covers on it too) but it sure ain't gonna be me who collects that data.

I will follow this up with a post listing some of my favourite covers discovered during this exercise. PM me if you want to get hold of the data set and the Jupyter notebook (I used Google Colab and Pandas).

Re: Sisters covers - ALL the data

Posted: 25 Feb 2022, 10:24
by markfiend
Wow that is some in-depth analysis :notworthy: :notworthy: :notworthy:

Re: Sisters covers - ALL the data

Posted: 25 Feb 2022, 10:44
by Being645
Oh hell ... :bat: :eek: :eek: :eek: :bat: ... you're clearly a master of statistics ... :notworthy: :D :notworthy: ...

Re: Sisters covers - ALL the data

Posted: 26 Feb 2022, 00:50
by ruffers
So can we conclude Lucretia is somehow the “best” song in that most people feel they want to get involved?

Re: Sisters covers - ALL the data

Posted: 26 Feb 2022, 23:09
by sultan2075
ruffers wrote: 26 Feb 2022, 00:50 So can we conclude Lucretia is somehow the “best” song in that most people feel they want to get involved?
Easiest bass line?

Re: Sisters covers - ALL the data

Posted: 28 Feb 2022, 06:54
by alanm
ruffers wrote: 26 Feb 2022, 00:50 So can we conclude Lucretia is somehow the “best” song in that most people feel they want to get involved?
Only that it's the most popular to cover. Which I guess implies some sort of sweet spot of popular appeal , distinctive to the Sisters, catchy riffs and hooks, easy to perform, memorable, and readily transposable to other musical genres.

Re: Sisters covers - ALL the data

Posted: 28 Feb 2022, 12:10
by czuczu
I'd have thought Lucretia's 2nd half would make it more difficult, what with it being a patchwork quilt of bits rather than proper parts per instrument.

Re: Sisters covers - ALL the data

Posted: 28 Feb 2022, 13:02
by iesus
SQL :D
Database and Statistic Methods applied :D
Love this ;D :notworthy:
It doesn't even need more data to get sufficient and profound conclusions about the covers made.
The exclusion that was made is rightful and well done.
Do we have data about switches of vocals, for example, using a female voice instead of male? or instrumental covers where it is supposed to have vocals?
Well done! Keep up :notworthy: :bat:

Re: Sisters covers - ALL the data

Posted: 28 Feb 2022, 13:20
by alanm
iesus wrote: 28 Feb 2022, 13:02 SQL :D Database and Statistic Methods applied :D
I considered a SQL database but in the end went with a Jupyter notebook and a CSV file, it was simpler for this sort of thing and easier to store on Github.
iesus wrote: 28 Feb 2022, 13:02 It doesn't even need more data to get sufficient and profound conclusions about the covers made.
I agree. I'm sure I missed a lot of covers, but we have a significant sample here.
iesus wrote: 28 Feb 2022, 13:02 The exclusion that was made is rightful and well done.
Thanks although I feel bad for some folks like "madz guitar" and "Project Kiss Kass" on YT who go to high effort in their content creation.
iesus wrote: 28 Feb 2022, 13:02 Do we have data about switches of vocals, for example, using a female voice instead of male? or instrumental covers where it is supposed to have vocals?
I didn't collect this data unfortunately, although I should have.
Anecdotally there were fewer female vocals than I expected. I suppose it's hard to re-arrange the music around a female range when the originals are all set to Von's bass. Even the male baritones and tenors struggle with the arrangements, IMO it's one of the worst aspects of "straight" Sisters covers.
There were a significant number of instrumentals on YT and SC, although they needed to be "fully realised" instrumentals to pass my filter. I'd guess like 5-10% of the dataset on those platforms?

Re: Sisters covers - ALL the data

Posted: 28 Feb 2022, 13:37
by iesus
alanm wrote: 28 Feb 2022, 13:20
iesus wrote: 28 Feb 2022, 13:02 The exclusion that was made is rightful and well done.
Thanks although I feel bad for some folks like "madz guitar" and "Project Kiss Kass" on YT who go to high effort in their content creation.
I have at least 3-4 "Project Kiss Kass" remixes in my playlist. The 30th anniversary Flood II remix and one of the Dominion ones are among my favourites remixes but to be true the big number of them would alter the extraction of any useful result. Also it is another thing to remix a song and cover it at first place, two different things imho :) :bat: