Data analysts love music, don't they?

Does the line shoot upwards during the time period that "O Superman" was in the top ten?

also, if he's that concerned about city names skewing his data, why didn't he just set his calculations to exclude proper nouns? i mean, seriously, who taught this guy how to analyze data, martin rimm?

Seems to me that a very general problem in data-analysis is that if you analyze data you don't know that much about, any results seem as reasonable as any other results.

would love to do a geir hongro inspired "# of chord changes per song" time series

i think there was a thing a short while ago like that.

yep http://matthiasmauch.de/_pdf/MauchEtAl_EvolutionPopUSA1960-2010.pdf

I am sympathetic to the idea of playing with data and seeing what falls out but I can confidently say that almost all studies purporting to rely on deep linguistic analysis of lyrics are going to be nonsense.

this is kinda cool http://j.mp/1LfobQG

also kinda 'thx for the email dad'

What drives me crazy about things like the Mauch study is that there is plenty of equally-sophisticated analytical work on popular music that is done by people who actually have expertise in the subject, that deals with much better questions than "whether pop musical evolution has been gradual or punctuated", none of which ever gets written up in The Guardian.