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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."
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.
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.
The copied songs might be owned by the same uber holding company that owns the original.
Or the new artists got permission, but the original artist didn't want to be associated with that crap, but needed to get paid.
Or the "original" and the copy both are using a well known ancient riff. (See Red Hot Chili Peppers' "Dani California" and Tom Petty's "Mary Jane's Last Dance"
Robert Heinlein said, "Steal from the best, and file off the serial numbers".
All ideas^H^H^H^H^Hprocesses in this post are Patent Pending. (as well as the process of patenting all postings)
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.
I heard a similar account from a buddy of mine who was in the recording industry back in the mid 70's. Someone did a bunch of metrics to determine the characteristics of a hit song and came up with some average: x% singing, y% cellos, z% electric guitars, a tempo between t1 and t2, etc. And then they made a song that had exactly all of that stuff.... and it sucked.
A brief skim of TFA leads me to conclude that it's rife with half-thought-out research. The question they pose, "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..." is completely meaningless if 80% of the entire population of songs, hits and non-hits alike, are in a major key... with a 4/4 time signature, etc. It's like determining that 100% of all coffee drinkers have faces. 100% of people have faces, so you haven't discovered anything different about the coffee-drinking subset.
What you're looking for is what sets the "hit" population apart from the "non-hit" population. And, from what little I looked at, they don't address that at all.
They also try to slap a linear regression onto everything. They assert that song duration is increasing. Umm, no... it was increasing during the 70's, and then it stabilized. And that probably had a bit to do with the formats that the music was available in (ie, 78-rpm records vs. 33.3-rpm...). But, again, we would only know that if these jokers looked at the average duration of *non*-hit songs.
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