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Is There a Formula For a Hit Song?
moveoverrover writes "What happens when two Rutgers grad students analyze 50 years of Billboard Top 10 hits with MIT offshoot Echo Nest's API and turn the data into visualizations for an assignment? Great looking visualizations for one, and a fascinating look at 50 years of Pop music at the data level. Posing the question, 'Is there a formula for a hit song?' the students write, 'What if we knew, for example, that 80% of the Billboard Hot 100 number one singles from 1960-2010 are sung in a major key with an average of 135 beats per minute, that they all follow a I-III-IV chord progression in 4/4 time signature, and that they all follow a "verse-verse-chorus-verse-chorus-bridge-chorus" sequence structure?' Using data extracted by Echo Nest on tempo, duration, time signature, musical key, as well as subjective criteria like "energy" and "danceability," the pair generated a number of visualizations with Google Motion Charts (warning: slow) and '(some) Tableau Results' for everyone to see and investigate. Curious about tempo and song duration trends in Pop music over 50 years? Correlation between record label and song tempo? Download the core data, the Tableau reader and look at it any way you want."
I remember reading about similar analysis long ago. Done in the 1970s IIRC. The programme that analysed also made a song from what I can remember and it was a hit of some sort (not sure which song that was, instrumental probably), but the article I read (1980s) noted that a second attempt didn't produce a hit song. So some variation is always needed beyond mere making a similar song. Does anyone remember/know which was that computer generated hit song?
R&B has a clearly worked out hit formula:
http://img8.imageshack.us/img8/4185/rnbcreator2tf9.jpg
Might be applicable to other styles such as pop, trance, rock...
Hit Song Science has been around since 2003. See previous Slashdot story.
There are 2 ways to look at these results. One is that out of all the music produced this formula is what the majority of people want to listen to, or it could be that this is what the record companies flog us because it's what they think we want to hear. Either way this is all that bands will be producing from now on, meaning less variety in music. It's a case of data driven choices gone mad.
My next album title's going to be I-III-IV, should make me a million.
Here is the entertaining version of this important discovery:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5pidokakU4I
bad spellers of the world UNTIE
Did they only look at the hits or also at the misses? There are bound to be enough songs that abide the "formula" but lack enough musicality to become a hit.
Nae king! Nae laird! Nae yurrupiean pressedent! We willna be fooled again!
... and it was written ages ago
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Manual
Pretty much any genre of creation based upon personal taste is going to have some sort of a formula that's pure lowest common denominator. The more likely explanation is that it's what record execs think will sell and consequently it's what they push. Way too often the songs that get popular get popular because they're frequently played, not because they're good.
It used to be extremely unusual for songs on the radio to break out of a standard format and going beyond 2 minutes wasn't typically done.
Axis of Awesome, NSFW if on speakers
http://youtu.be/5pidokakU4I
* Winners compare their achievements to their goals, losers compare theirs to that of others.
All music currently in the hit parades are (at least partially) copied from songs popular years ago.
If so many songs are being copied, why aren't there more plagiarism* lawsuits like the one over "My Sweet Lord"?
* Plagiarism here means infringement with unattribution.
We've known this for some time, but it is nice to see it confirmed mathematically. Pop "music" is indeed getting louder over time. I suspect based on the loudness graph that the song they used for 2010 was that "you're beautiful" song that is practically whispered in comparison to other recent pieces.
Now get off my lawn.
Damn_registrars has no butt-hole. Damn_registrars has no use for a butt-hole.
You've been able to generate music based on algorithms with affordable software since the 1980's. A company called Dr T's produced sequencer software for the Atari ST that included sophisticated algorithmic generators - great fun to mess around with. Before that, analogue sequencers could be used to make music based on tweaking knobs or sliders, and the legendary Roland TB-303 bass sequencer also had a pattern based interface. Analogue sequencers are enjoying something of a resurgence in interest at the moment, with the web making it easy to market what are very niche machines. I'm saving up for one at the moment, having always wanted one since I first heard them used by a band called DAF.
Hey everyone, just want to clear up a few things. First, we never claimed to have discovered a "hit formula". The media glommed onto our hypothetical opening paragraph and apparently didn't pay too much attention to our results. Please read the study observations, not the articles, for the full story. This was for a data visualization class and we thought it would be cool to mash up the Billboard data with the EchoNest data. There is no "control group" as we were only observing descriptive metadata from "hit songs". We are working on doing some statistical analysis to look at correlations. However, the data is available and we encourage others to play with it as well. Cheers, Shaun and Thomas
What if I told you that 90% of movements written in sonata form had the sequence structure 'Exposition-Development-Recapitulation'? What if I told you that blues used a lot of ii-V-I progressions? Nothing interesting in this study, move along.
No mention to Knuth's work of art?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Complexity_of_Songs
Isn't this slashdot?
It's not exactly formulaic when you invent the formula.
Give me Classic Slashdot or give me death!
"The KLF" already wrote a manual (which is really called "The Manual" :-) ) on how to make a #1 hitsong. I think it was written in the late nineties.
:-)
They more or less mention the same things. If you want to read it, google is your friend
...You are over-qualified and under-paid. If we give you a raise, we will break the cosmic balance of the universe.
Something from the summary really irked me: I doubt they'd find that the best songs use a I-III-IV progression. Pop songs practically all start with a I-IV-V progression. (Remember the lyrics to Hallelujah? "It goes like this, the fourth, the fifth...")
When the III is used, it's usually minor, though the minor vi is more common ("The minor fall.."). The I-vi-IV-V sequence has been the basis of rock and pop since the 50s. Learn those four chords, and you can play practically any top 40 hit. (You know the guy complaining about Pachelbel's Canon? Most of them are really just using the I-vi-IV-V, which happens to mesh nicely with Pachelbel's real progression: I-V-vi-iii-IV-I-IV-V.)
So I checked their data and discovered... nothing. Nowhere in their data do they talk about chord progressions. That's not really surprising, since figuring out the chord progressions is much trickier than figuring out the tempo. But they mention it in the summary. Why?
Because that progression is so universal, of course you'd see it in the top 40 hits. You're also going to see it in the songs you've never heard of. If they really had found that I-III-IV was a frequent hit, they'd actually have learned something.
This wasn't really intended as news. It's old stuff with new visualization applied. It's a student exercise passed off as research by people who don't actually know the state of the art, like the stories about "Students build 9,000 mpg car; why can't Detroit do that?"
It just irks me that they're talking a little music theory and betraying their lack of understanding of music theory in the process. What I've just talked about is something every, EVERY musician knows.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Manual