If you thought the success of Adele’s platinum single Someone Like You was all down to its raw emotion or soaring vocals, you would be wrong, according to researchers, who found that it was popular because it was less “danceable” and more “acoustic” than tracks in the charts in previous weeks.
Analysts studied how 25,000 songs that made the Billboard Hot 100 Chart between 1958 and 2013 compared with other songs from the same era.
Debunking the view that all chart-topping songs sound the same, researchers found that the key to writing a top ten hit was to be unconventional — but only a little. It found that songs that stuck closely to generic formulae lingered in the middle reaches of the top 100, while outlandish songs did not to make the charts at all.
Songs that reach the top ten are those that differ most from other contemporary tracks, but not by enough to alienate listeners.
Michael Mauskapf, a musicologist at Northwestern University’s Kellogg School of Management, and Noah Askin, a behavioural expert at Insead business school in Paris, analysed thousands of songs using Echo Nest, an audio analysis tool owned by Spotify, the music streaming site.
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It examined 11 audio attributes for each song and compared them with the average attributes of songs that had been in the charts the week before.
The attributes include objective factors such as tempo, key, duration, mode and time signature, but also “danceability”, an analysis of beat and rhythm; “valence”, an analysis of the song’s positivity; and “speechiness”, the presence of the spoken word.
The study also examined “acousticness”, a measure of how acoustic or electronic a track is; “energy”, an analysis of a song’s intensity; and “liveness”, which looks for the presence of a live audience.
Professor Askin highlighted four No 1 songs, including Adele’s hit, that broke the mould of contemporary tracks.
Someone Like You was found to be more acoustic, less danceable and less high-intensity than other chart-topping songs at the time, while Runaround Sue, Dion’s 1961 hit, was more intense and less acoustic than contemporaries.
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Bridge Over Troubled Water by Simon and Garfunkel, and I Will Always Love You by Whitney Houston stood out because they were more acoustic and less high-intensity than other songs of the era.
Mr Mauskapf said that it was important to consider that all the songs in the study, by virtue of their presence as singles in the top 100, were, by definition, relatively conventional, but added that “being relatively unconventional and having more novelty makes you more likely to rise up the charts”.
The songs between No 20 and No 80 were the most conventional.