With the amazing release of Femme Fatale, I decided to put it into a historic context. And by that, I mean comparing the first letters of songs from Britney albums over time. Exciting!
I’m using the tracklist of my most complete versions of Britney’s albums. This means, I often use international versions (including European, Japanese, and Australian releases). I have an eighth category for songs I don’t have on any of the 7 main albums; I’m neither counting Greatest Hits – My Prerogative, The Singles
Collection (in either version), B in the Mix – the Remixes, nor minor releases like the Chaotic DVD as albums. This sorting also means that where there are differences in albums, I’ll go with my version (this, for example, means that I’ll count Radar as a track of Blackout and not of Circus, as it first appeared on Blackout in Europe). Songs starting with a (less used) parenthesis have been counted half in the category of the first letter of the parenthesis and half in the category of the first letter afterwards (thus, (You Drive Me) Crazy gets half a point in Y and half a point in C, same for (Drop Dead) Beautiful, and (I Got That) Boom Boom). I’ll be ignoring little words like “the” in the beginning of titles. Finally, I’ll be ignoring any remixes.
First, let’s look at the starting letter for all albums:
Colorful.We see the most popular letters are B, I, S, and T. The letters J, N, V, X, and Z have never been used. Let’s look at an unstacked version of this:
We see that Circus is the album using most different letters. Femme Fatale seems to have some odd spikes compared with the rest of the albums. Let’s investigate the letters of Femme Fatale compared with the back catalogue:
The scale is so that equal height (approximately) corresponds to equal percentage. FF has a suspicious large number of songs starting with H and T. In fact, FF nearly doubles the number of songs starting with a H and increases the number of songs starting with T by 50%. Let’s look at how large percentage of the total FF accounts for:
Here are the numbers I used for the charts:
And here’s the song titles I used:
