Fancy being No 1 in the charts? There’s a magic formula for that

Research indicates secret to pop success is to be a female with upbeat song that gets people dancing

IN THE fickle, ever-changing world of pop music it may seem impossible to predict exactly what the next big hit will look or sound like.

However, scientists at the University of California claim that they have come up with an algorithm capable of doing just that.

After studying 500,000 songs from the UK top 100 singles charts between January 1985 and July 2015, researchers used machine learning to tease out the key components for creating a No1.

And the secret appears to lie in having a female singer and a song with an upbeat, relaxed feeling and a rhythm that listeners can take to the dance floor.

Electronic songs also do much better than acoustic.

Their formula explains the success of huge chart hits such as Kylie Minogue’s Can’t Get You Out of My Head, Cher’s Believe and Madonna’s Like A Prayer.

“By comparing acoustic characteristics of songs we have shown that successful songs are quite different compared to the majority,” said Dr Natalia Komarova who led the researchers at the mathematics department of the University of California, Irvine. “We observed that successful songs are happier, brighter, more danceable and less sad.

“In the past, some researchers assumed that success was determined by socio-economic factors such as how much money is spent, what label is producing. Our research suggests that music matters.”

The research team claims the programme can predict the success of songs with 86 per cent accuracy, even though Britain’s pop charts can be notoriously hard to call. In 1967, Engelbert Humperdinck’s Please Release Me prevented The Beatles reaching the top spot with Penny Lane and Strawberry Fields Forever while Jimmy Osmond’s Long Haired lover From Liverpool kept David Bowie’s Jean Genie off the top spot in 1972.

Likewise in 1997, Robbie Williams’ Angels lost out to the Teletubbies’ Say Eh-oh while two years earlier Robson and Jerome stopped both Oasis’s Wonderwall and Pulp’s Common People from topping the charts.

The new study ran from January 1985 when Band Aid topped the charts with Do They Know It’s Christmas? to Little Mix’s Black Magic in July 2015. The researchers then gathered the meta-data from songs recorded on the Musicbrainz and Acousticbrainz databases to classify each into categories by genre and style, such as “happy”, “sad”, “male”, “acoustic” and “bright”. They discovered that happy songs have become more rare, but those that make it to the top slot bucked the trend, tending to be more upbeat and generally sung by women.

It explains the success of girl groups such as Spice Girls, Girls Aloud, All Saints and Destiny’s Child, who all tended to keep songs light and bright.

The advice to budding artists would be – keep it happy to achieve success. “Other researchers who analysed songs’ texts have also found that the lyrics are becoming darker, with more ‘I’ than ‘we’ (hinting at loneliness), and with increased usage of anti-social words such as ‘kill’ and ‘hate’,” added Dr Komarova. “The public seems to prefer happier songs, even though more and more unhappy songs are being released each year. I have to warn, however, that things are not so simple. While these features may increase the probability of making it into the charts, they do not guarantee it. Many other factors contribute to success.

“I hope some of them are something that’s beyond mathematics.” The research was published in Royal Society Open Science journal.