New study analyzes how songs become hits
A team of USC researchers has released a study analyzing the science behind what makes a particular song a hit.
Joseph Nunes, a marketing professor at the Marshall School of Business, along with Andrea Ordanini, a marketing professor at Bocconi University in Italy, analyzed Billboard magazine’s Hot 100 list to determine what makes a song a No. 1 hit and what prevents another from ever climbing above No. 90.
“There is research on music preferences, but there really [isn’t] a lot that [is] empirical in the sense of going out and getting secondary data, or big data sets and thinking about what became popular and what didn’t based on people’s perceptions of the song,” Nunes said.
The goal of the study was to take a consumerist perspective and study what and why certain songs become popular.
Nunes enlisted a team of graduate students from the Thornton School of Music to help with the study. The team was led by Brad Sroka, a doctoral candidate studying historical musicology. Together, the research team analyzed all 1,029 songs that took the No. 1 spot on the Hot 100 list between 1958 and 2012, as well as the 1,451 songs that made the list but never climbed above the No. 90 spot. Using the audio recordings of as many of those songs as possible, they coded the types of instruments and vocals audible in each hit.
Two different methods were used in analyzing the songs. The first, Qualitative Comparative Analysis, involved comparing the set of songs that reached No. 1 with the set of songs that never surpassed No. 90 to determine which combinations of instruments were most common in each set.
The second method utilized logistic regression analysis to examine the relationship between the number of different audible instrument types and the popularity of the song.
The study found that the main instrument combinations in top songs were background vocals, synthesizers and either clean guitar or distorted electric guitar.
Nunes indicated that the success of a song could partially be determined scientifically.
“I do think that like most things in life, there is a little bit of science and a little bit of art, and to be truly successful, you have to mix the two,” he said.
If you want a formula for writing hit songs, just look at the masters of song writing like Lennon and McCartney, and other songwriters from the 60’s, 70’s, etc…. You need a hook line, that is repeated throughout the song. Song cannot be too long, and it usually flows like this: Intro, verse1, hook line, verse2, hook line, chorus, hook line, verse1, hook line, hook line….