ArticleRoyal Society open science2015
The evolution of popular music: USA 1960-2010.
Article in Royal Society open science, 2015. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 35 papers.
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Who cites it
35 citing papers in PubMed.
- Effects of live music during chemotherapy in lymphoma patients: a randomized, controlled, multi-center trial.Supportive care in cancer : official journal of the Multinational Association of Supportive Care in Cancer · 2019Trial
- Evolution of moral expression in song lyrics.Scientific reports · 2026Article
- Decoding the evolution of melodic and harmonic structure of Western music through the lens of network science.Scientific reports · 2026Article
- Listeners' baseline autonomic states associated with distinct music-physiology response patterns.European heart journal. Imaging methods and practice · 2026Article
- Recording artist career comparison through audio content analysis.Royal Society open science · 2025Article
- Trajectories and revolutions in popular melody based on U.S. charts from 1950 to 2023.Scientific reports · 2024Article
- Latent evolutionary signatures: a general framework for analysing music and cultural evolution.Journal of the Royal Society, Interface · 2024Article
- Songs tell a story: The Arc of narrative for music.PloS one · 2024Article
- What are patterns of rise and decline?Royal Society open science · 2023Review
- The end of the line: competitive exclusion and the extinction of historical entities.Royal Society open science · 2023Article
- Dynamic cluster structure and predictive modelling of music creation style distributions.Royal Society open science · 2022Article
- A cultural evolutionary theory that explains both gradual and punctuated change.Journal of the Royal Society, Interface · 2022Article
- Article
- Does Amount of Information Support Aesthetic Values?Frontiers in neuroscience · 2022Review
- Modelling song popularity as a contagious process.Proceedings. Mathematical, physical, and engineering sciences · 2021Article
- Cultural differences in music features across Taiwanese, Japanese and American markets.PeerJ. Computer science · 2021Article
- Cover versions as an impact indicator in popular music: A quantitative network analysis.PloS one · 2021Article
- What to Expect When the Unexpected Becomes Expected: Harmonic Surprise and Preference Over Time in Popular Music.Frontiers in human neuroscience · 2021Article
- Registerial Adaptation vs. Innovation Across Situational Contexts: 18th Century Women in Transition.Frontiers in artificial intelligence · 2021Article
- From Beethoven to Beyoncé: Do Changing Aesthetic Cultures Amount to "Cumulative Cultural Evolution?"Frontiers in psychology · 2021Review
Corrections and comments
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Authors and funding
4 authors.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
In modern societies, cultural change seems ceaseless. The flux of fashion is especially obvious for popular music. While much has been written about the origin and evolution of pop, most claims about its history are anecdotal rather than scientific in nature. To rectify this, we investigate the US Billboard Hot 100 between 1960 and 2010. Using music information retrieval and text-mining tools, we analyse the musical properties of approximately 17 000 recordings that appeared in the charts and demonstrate quantitative trends in their harmonic and timbral properties. We then use these properties to produce an audio-based classification of musical styles and study the evolution of musical diversity and disparity, testing, and rejecting, several classical theories of cultural change. Finally, we investigate whether pop musical evolution has been gradual or punctuated. We show that, although pop music has evolved continuously, it did so with particular rapidity during three stylistic 'revolutions' around 1964, 1983 and 1991. We conclude by discussing how our study points the way to a quantitative science of cultural change.
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Read under generation 80e0d062 · epoch 390. Bibliography from PubMed, PubMed Central and OpenAlex; grants from NIH RePORTER; trial links from ClinicalTrials.gov; estimates, votes and beliefs from the OpenQuestion graph.