Published May 2, 2026, 12:30 PM EDT

David has been lifelong fan of technology who loves putting his passion into words.

A journalist by training, he discovered the power of Unix-like operating systems when learning how to edit video on macOS, back when it was still called Mac OS X, in the mid-2000s.

A lover of retrocomputing, he appreciates the vast history of Unix that Linux continues today.

David holds a BA in communication from California State University, East Bay. His writing has appeared in Techopedia, TMCnet , The Motley Fool blog network, and HTG's sister publication MUO , among others.

Whenever I'm at the computer, I seem to have Spotify going in the background. With data on Spotify songs available, I wanted to see if any traits the hit songs had in common. I used Spotify to see if I could build a model of a hit song.

Getting the dataset

Kaggle to the rescue

To examine music data, I would have to find a dataset. As do many other tech companies, Spotify makes data available to developers.…