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Popular music stats: chords, two-hit wonders, and more [1]
['Rob Beschizza']
Date: 2025-04-18
Chris Dalla Riva analyzed Chord Progressions in 680k Songs. You may not be surprised to learn that popular music deploys a lot of major triads. His newsletter, Can't Get Much Higher, is all about data and music.
Chordonomicon. I couldn't get the word out of my head. Every syllable was just as beautiful as the last. Try saying it. Kord-oh-nom-i-con. It sounds like a mystical word. And, for me, it is. But it's a term that didn't exist last year. "Chordonomicon" was coined by 5 researches last October when they needed a name for a new project that they'd just completed. This project pulled together chord progressions and genres for nearly 680,000 songs from the popular music learning website Ultimate-Guitar. I knew I had to do something with the data. But what?
I also liked his analysis of two-hit wonders. An interesting snag is that a simple collection of bands with two hit singles in the U.S. results in inappropriate picks such as Pink Floyd, Enya and Beastie Boys, whose success selling millions of albums surely excludes them from the frame of interest here—they didn't need to release singles for their songs to become famous. Excluding bands with hit albums, then, gets us where we want to be: Gerardo Mejía, a-Ha, Crowded House, SNAP!…
As I was digging deep in these two-hit wonders, I naturally had the number "two" banging around in my brain. This got me thinking about artists that had the most number two hits. But I had a stipulation. Many number one hits sit at number two before they reach the top. I wanted songs that peaked at number two and never made it to number one. And I'm sad to report that a legendary artist wears this silver crown: Creedence Clearwater Revival.
The one that always sticks in my mind is Right Said Fred—a one-hit wonder in the U.S., but which had a successful follow-up in the U.K., "Deeply Dippy." There's something quintessentially "two hit wonder" about it, I think: a proof of talent and timeliness that confirms the relevance and quality of the first hit while making very clear the creative limitations at hand. It's embedded below for Americans to wonder at what could have been. I was suprised not to find The Proclaimers or The KLF on Dalla Riva's list, as they are both somewhat famous for having two hits in the U.S. (albeit more in the U.K.)—presumably hit albums sneak them into Floyd-space.
Previously: Canadian music industry's fake stats shredded
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