Pop Music Evolution

Interesting:

Another biologically inspired question the team asked was whether music styles evolved slowly or in large leaps. By calculating rates of change between songs over time, the researchers pinpointed three periods of rapid evolution: 1964, 1982 and 1991.

By far, the largest and most important of the three was the explosion of hip-hop in 1991.

“That surprised me,” Leroi said. “Being a victim of boomer ideology, I would have guessed it was 1964,” the year of the British invasion.

Looking more closely at the works of the Beatles and the Rolling Stones, the researchers discovered that those pivotal bands didn’t initiate the widespread changes associated with the music of their era. Rather, they accelerated those musical changes by popularizing new trends.

Leroi said it was exciting to get a glimpse of music history that didn’t depend on subjective recollections and storytelling.