A computer program is changing the face of the music business by allowing record labels to predict a hit at the click of a mouse. Is this the death of pop as we know it, asks Jo Tatchell, or a new hope for unsigned bands everywhere? (snip)


The magic ingredient set to revolutionise the pop industry is, simply, a piece of software that can "predict" the chance of a track being a hit or a miss. This computerised equivalent of the television programmer Juke Box Jury is known as Hit Song Science (HSS). It has been developed by a Spanish company, Polyphonic HMI, which used decades of experience developing artificial intelligence technology for the banking and telecoms industries to create a program that analysed the underlying mathematical patterns in music. It isolated and separated 20 aspects of song construction including melody, harmony, chord progression, beat, tempo and pitch and identifies and maps recurrent patterns in a song, before matching it against a database containing 30 years' worth of Billboard hit singles - 3.5m tunes in all. The program then accords the song a score, which registers, in effect, the likelihood of it being a chart success.

Full article at:

http://www.guardian.co.uk/arts/features ... 51,00.html

You know, this'll be one of those self-justifying things, where the program is no better at picking good music than those infamous A&R/record executive types are.

But they'll put the appropriate promotion behind it, so it will succeed.

Like a prophecy fulfilled.

I think someone needs to hack this bad boy, so that good music actually becomes popular.