Musical Trends and Predictability of Success in Contemporary Songs in and out of the Top Charts
Musical trends and predictability of success in rsos.royalsocietypublishing.org contemporary songs in and Research out of the top charts Cite this article: Interiano M, Kazemi K, Myra Interiano1,†, Kamyar Kazemi1,†, Lijia Wang1,†, Wang L, Yang J, Yu Z, Komarova NL. 2018 1 2 1,3 Musical trends and predictability of success in Jienian Yang , Zhaoxia Yu and Natalia L. Komarova contemporary songs in and out of the top 1Department of Mathematics, 2Department of Statistics, and 3Department of Ecology charts. R. Soc. open sci. 5:171274. and Evolutionary Biology, University of California Irvine, Irvine, CA 92697, USA http://dx.doi.org/10.1098/rsos.171274 NLK, 0000-0003-4876-0343 We analyse more than 500 000 songs released in the UK Received: 30 August 2017 between 1985 and 2015 to understand the dynamics of Accepted: 11 April 2018 success (defined as ‘making it’ into the top charts), correlate success with acoustic features and explore the predictability of success. Several multi-decadal trends have been uncovered. For example, there is a clear downward trend in ‘happiness’ and ‘brightness’, as well as a slight upward trend in ‘sadness’. Subject Category: Furthermore, songs are becoming less ‘male’. Interestingly, Computer science successful songs exhibit their own distinct dynamics. In particular, they tend to be ‘happier’, more ‘party-like’, less Subject Areas: ‘relaxed’ and more ‘female’ than most. The difference between behaviour/cognition/evolution successful and average songs is not straightforward. In the context of some features, successful songs pre-empt the Keywords: dynamics of all songs, and in others they tend to reflect music evolution, complex social dynamics, the past.
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