Electronic engineer’s study of pop music proves The Beatles and The Rolling Stones did not start the rock revolution

A team of computer scientists and evolutionary biologists have published a fascinating study into the evolution of pop music over the last 50 years. 

The group, which was led by Matthias Mauch, from the School of Electronic Engineering and Computer Science at Queen Mary University of London, used the latest methods from signal processing and text-mining software to analyze the musical properties of 17,000 songs from the US Billboard Hot 100 charts. Their program grouped these songs by patterns of chord changes and tone to allow the researchers to statistically identify trends with a never-before-seen degree of consistency. 

“For the first time we can measure musical properties in recordings on a large scale. We can actually go beyond what music experts tell us, or what we know ourselves about them, by looking directly into the songs, measuring their makeup, and understanding how they have changed,” explained Mauch, who was the lead author of the paper.

“No doubt some will disagree with our scientific approach and think it's too limited for such an emotional subject but I think we can add to the wonder of music by learning more about it. We want to analyze more music from more periods in more countries and build a comprehensive picture of how music evolves.”

Among some of their findings: contrary to popular belief, the “British Invasion” of US pop music by groups like The Beatles and The Rolling Stones did not herald a rock revolution in the country; rather, these bands’ rise in popularity followed existing trends of the time. Also, the greatest musical revolution in US pop history was not in 1964 when rock became mainstream — it was in 1991, when hip-hop broke onto the charts.

Also worth noting: 1986 was the least diverse year for the charts. The team attributed this to the sudden popularization of drum machines and samplers. Diversity recovered pretty quickly after that year, and while it was beginning to decline again in 2010, the group made it a point to outright reject pessimistic views of chart diversity, saying there’s no evidence for a general trend towards homogenization in the charts.

“It's exciting to be able to study the evolution of popular music scientifically,” said Professor Armand Leroi of Imperial College, senior author on the paper. “But now we want to go further, and find out not just how the music has changed, but why.”

'The Evolution of Popular Music: USA 1960-2010' was published in the Royal Society, Open Science. You can read it for free here.