Despite the fact that there is a vast amount of salsa songs out there and the dance forms associated with salsa music are among the most popular in the world, there is a surprising lack of data available with respect to salsa songs. While certain music platforms and search engines may provide more data than others, most promoters, DJs and dancers seem to be on a constant search for new music they can dance to and filtering out even relatively straight forward metadata such as beats per minute seems to be a much harder task than it would be for other types of music.
Most classes and parties I have been to have a collection of songs that has been tried and tested and which gets rarely updated such that many songs end up being vastly overplayed and I have been to many parties where the DJ’s reputation seems to increase almost instantaneously the moment they play some songs that the majority of dancers have not heard previously.
For songs coming from Cuba this is maybe less surprising simply due to el bloqueo – the United States embargo against Cuba which is responsible for huge aspects of Cuban culture and products still being hard to source outside of Cuba. Given that the music industry globally is dominated by American companies, the effect on Cuban music is multi-fold as it is not only difficult to find Cuban songs and their metadata outside of Cuba but in addition the laws associated with licenses to play Cuban music publicly and use them as soundtracks for videos or even just to play them on the radio are such a legal minefield in most countries that many companies will just stay clear of the subject altogether.
However, even salsa music from other countries have not yet entered the mainstream music market to the degree that there is enough money to be made in researching and categorising salsa music and most collections that can be bought are either small or lack details that would enable them to be sorted and filtered in meaningful ways.
Many questions I hear such as “What is the longest salsa song?”, “How many salsa songs are there?”, “How fast are salsa songs on average?” are simply left unanswered as there is no database available that would allow for these statistics to be analysed. We have therefore decided to use Tiempo España Dance Academy resources to try and create a database to this effect thereby increasing the quality of our classes and resources we can offer to our students. While this is a huge undertaking and may take considerable time to reach a size that can be used as a basis for meaningful statistics, we will publish our research via this series and update each post as our population grows. To get things started we have pulled the artist, title and length of 500 songs from our collection of salsa songs into a database. This is a very small subset of the salsa songs in existence and we aim to increase the fields of metadata available in this database over time but it serves as a starting point to at least gather some information from the songs we currently play. Here are rudimentary statistics on the database in its current form:
Average length of salsa song: 4:52min
Shortest salsa song: 02:29min
Longest salsa song: 10:03min
