Songs that soar vs songs that struggle
Top repeat song ~9.78/10; lowest qualifying song 5.00; 157 songs with n≥3.
Ballroom Data · Artometrics-style report · Nov 3, 2026 (America/Los_Angeles)
Headline
Among songs danced at least three times, “Assassin’s Tango” (John Powell) and “The Dirty Boogie” tie near the top at 9.778/10. At the other end, “Never Too Much” averages just 5.000. 157 songs qualify.
Findings
- High averages often reflect strong couples choosing the track late — song effects are entangled with dancer quality.
- Low averages include repeatedly attempted party tracks that landed early-season or with struggling couples.
- Treat rankings as descriptive, not causal.
Top 8 (min n=3)
| Song | Artist | Mean | n |
|---|---|---|---|
| Assassin’s Tango | John Powell | 9.778 | 3 |
| The Dirty Boogie | The Brian Setzer Orchestra | 9.778 | 3 |
| Wake Me Up Before You Go-Go | Wham! | 9.600 | 5 |
| Hip Hip Chin Chin | Club des Belugas | 9.583 | 4 |
| Proud Mary | Tina Turner | 9.500 | 4 |
| Tutti Frutti | Little Richard | 9.500 | 4 |
| Shake Your Bon-Bon | Ricky Martin | 9.479 | 4 |
| Conga | Gloria Estefan | 9.444 | 3 |
Bottom 8
| Song | Artist | Mean | n |
|---|---|---|---|
| Never Too Much | Luther Vandross | 5.000 | 3 |
| Treasure | Bruno Mars | 5.444 | 3 |
| Old Time Rock and Roll | Bob Seger | 5.556 | 3 |
| Hot Stuff | Donna Summer | 5.833 | 4 |
| Sweet Home Alabama | Lynyrd Skynyrd | 5.889 | 3 |
| Eye of the Tiger | Survivor | 6.000 | 4 |
| Higher | Gloria Estefan | 6.222 | 3 |
| Let’s Groove | Earth, Wind & Fire | 6.250 | 3 |
Methods & caveats
Grouped by song title + artist string as stored. Minimum 3 scored performances. No Spotify audio features in this build.
Coverage: seasons 1–35; 3,602 performances; 11,027 individual judge marks in the cleaned Ballroom Data SQLite build (Nov 3, 2026, America/Los_Angeles).
Known gaps: Season 31 Mirrorball winner is not tagged as Winners in the performance table (Charli D’Amelio / Mark Ballas is missing from our winners extract). Seasons 33–35 largely lack Kaggle ages/hometowns. Season 35 celebrity names in the wiki scrape are often first-name-only or garbled. Dance-style strings still include some unclean variants. We never impute missing values.
Sources: howisonlab/dwts_dataset (GitHub); Kaggle brupley/dancing-with-the-stars-dataset (CC BY-SA 4.0); Wikipedia DWTS season pages for seasons 32–35 (CC BY-SA 4.0). Scores are per-judge means on a 0–10 scale so 3-judge and 4-judge weeks are comparable. Marathons/relays/megamixes are excluded from style averages unless noted.
Disclaimer: Unofficial fan analysis. Not affiliated with BBC Worldwide, Disney, or ABC.
Downloads
Quarto source, rendered report, chart exports (PNG/SVG), and the analysis CSV.
