Secret of chart success? Keep repeating the lyrics
SOME musicians spend an entire career trying to dream up a beautiful melody or an unforgettable riff.
But the secret to a hit single, it seems, is repetition.
Psychologists who analysed five decades of chart- toppers f ound that songs which repeated entire phrases and individual words more often were likely to be commercially successful, regardless of the tune, the tempo, or how attractive the musician was.
Researchers from the University of Southern California looked at the lyrics of more than 1,000 No 1 songs in the US Billboard’s Hot 100 chart between 1958 and 2012 and compared them with tunes that never climbed above No 90.
Examples of repetitive hits identified by the team include Madonna’s 1986 song Papa Don’t Preach, and Taylor Swift’s Shake It Off, which includes the line ‘Cause the player’s gonna play, play, play, play, play. And the hater’s gonna hate, hate, hate, hate, hate.’
They suggested that repeating a phrase makes it easier to understand quickly, requiring little input from the listener. And the easier it is to process, the more pleasurable it is.
‘Fluency is characterised by processing being faster, more accurate and requiring fewer cognitive resources,’ the team wrote in the Journal of Consumer Psychology.
Study author Professor Joseph Nunes also found that repeated lyrical phrases were often accompanied by the same melody and rhythm – and that more successful songs tended to be slightly longer.
Professor Nunes, a musician in his teenage years, said: ‘Unfortunately we have not uncovered the formula for a future hit, otherwise I would be a producer, not an academic.
‘We can describe what succeeded in the past, however we can’t necessarily predict it will succeed in the future.’