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Musical trends and predictability of success in contemporary songs in and out of the top charts
We analyse more than 500 000 songs released in the UK between 1985 and 2015 to understand the dynamics of 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 ex...
Autores principales: | , , , , , |
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Formato: | Online Artículo Texto |
Lenguaje: | English |
Publicado: |
The Royal Society Publishing
2018
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Materias: | |
Acceso en línea: | https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5990848/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/29892348 http://dx.doi.org/10.1098/rsos.171274 |
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author | Interiano, Myra Kazemi, Kamyar Wang, Lijia Yang, Jienian Yu, Zhaoxia Komarova, Natalia L. |
author_facet | Interiano, Myra Kazemi, Kamyar Wang, Lijia Yang, Jienian Yu, Zhaoxia Komarova, Natalia L. |
author_sort | Interiano, Myra |
collection | PubMed |
description | We analyse more than 500 000 songs released in the UK between 1985 and 2015 to understand the dynamics of 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’. Furthermore, songs are becoming less ‘male’. Interestingly, successful songs exhibit their own distinct dynamics. In particular, they tend to be ‘happier’, more ‘party-like’, less ‘relaxed’ and more ‘female’ than most. The difference between successful and average songs is not straightforward. In the context of some features, successful songs pre-empt the dynamics of all songs, and in others they tend to reflect the past. We used random forests to predict the success of songs, first based on their acoustic features, and then adding the ‘superstar’ variable (informing us whether the song’s artist had appeared in the top charts in the near past). This allowed quantification of the contribution of purely musical characteristics in the songs’ success, and suggested the time scale of fashion dynamics in popular music. |
format | Online Article Text |
id | pubmed-5990848 |
institution | National Center for Biotechnology Information |
language | English |
publishDate | 2018 |
publisher | The Royal Society Publishing |
record_format | MEDLINE/PubMed |
spelling | pubmed-59908482018-06-11 Musical trends and predictability of success in contemporary songs in and out of the top charts Interiano, Myra Kazemi, Kamyar Wang, Lijia Yang, Jienian Yu, Zhaoxia Komarova, Natalia L. R Soc Open Sci Computer Science We analyse more than 500 000 songs released in the UK between 1985 and 2015 to understand the dynamics of 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’. Furthermore, songs are becoming less ‘male’. Interestingly, successful songs exhibit their own distinct dynamics. In particular, they tend to be ‘happier’, more ‘party-like’, less ‘relaxed’ and more ‘female’ than most. The difference between successful and average songs is not straightforward. In the context of some features, successful songs pre-empt the dynamics of all songs, and in others they tend to reflect the past. We used random forests to predict the success of songs, first based on their acoustic features, and then adding the ‘superstar’ variable (informing us whether the song’s artist had appeared in the top charts in the near past). This allowed quantification of the contribution of purely musical characteristics in the songs’ success, and suggested the time scale of fashion dynamics in popular music. The Royal Society Publishing 2018-05-16 /pmc/articles/PMC5990848/ /pubmed/29892348 http://dx.doi.org/10.1098/rsos.171274 Text en © 2018 The Authors. http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ Published by the Royal Society under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/, which permits unrestricted use, provided the original author and source are credited. |
spellingShingle | Computer Science Interiano, Myra Kazemi, Kamyar Wang, Lijia Yang, Jienian Yu, Zhaoxia Komarova, Natalia L. Musical trends and predictability of success in contemporary songs in and out of the top charts |
title | Musical trends and predictability of success in contemporary songs in and out of the top charts |
title_full | Musical trends and predictability of success in contemporary songs in and out of the top charts |
title_fullStr | Musical trends and predictability of success in contemporary songs in and out of the top charts |
title_full_unstemmed | Musical trends and predictability of success in contemporary songs in and out of the top charts |
title_short | Musical trends and predictability of success in contemporary songs in and out of the top charts |
title_sort | musical trends and predictability of success in contemporary songs in and out of the top charts |
topic | Computer Science |
url | https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5990848/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/29892348 http://dx.doi.org/10.1098/rsos.171274 |
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