Hit Song Science

12 April 2004

If a computer program could help make your next new product successful, wouldn’t you want to use it?

Not if you’re an artist in the music business. The American singer Anastacia has a hit in Europe called "Left Outside Alone." A Barcelona-based artificial intelligence company, PolyphonicHMI, claims that Anastacia’s producer used its Hit Song Science software to shape the song and improve its chances for success.

Anastacia

Anastacia denies that the program had anything to do with her song. Her publicists told The New York Times in an e-mail message that:

Anastacia "does not use, support, rely or believe that this is a technology that should figure into any type of creative process now or in the future."

From a product development perspective, it’s hard to understand the motivation for this kind of strong rejection. As the product’s name implies, Hit Song Science is simply bringing science, in the form of sophisticated data analysis, to help in the creation of commercial popular music.

The software takes 50 years of music released in the United States – 3.5 million songs -- and categorizes them across a set of 20 quantifiable components (like tempo and rhythm). The company matches the resulting profile against each songs’ commercial success to develop approximately 55 "hit song clusters."

With this kind of information, Hit Song Science provides two kinds of services to the music industry:

It can compare the attributes of a new song to historic profiles to determine whether the new song has high potential to be a hit. Last year, for example, the software predicted the success of Nora Jones’ album Come Away with Me.

One of the most difficult decisions that record executives make concerns which songs to promote from an album. This is where Hit Song Science’s approach can be especially useful.

For example, here’s the program’s analysis of 13 tracks from a new CD (the red dots), compared with historic hit song clusters.

Matching new songs against historic hits, from Hit Song Science

From the analysis, it’s clear which songs should be promoted as singles off the album – the two red dots nestled in hit clusters 13 and 17. The software provides analysis that can help record companies make more effective marketing investment decisions.

The same process can be used to "tune" a song before its release in order to increase its chance of becoming a hit. This is the application that is causing the current conflict in the industry.

Anastacia’s producer acknowledges that he has used the software in the past, but had no comment when asked whether it played any role in the creation of "Left Outside Alone."

Most companies that develop new products and services would benefit from tools and approaches that can help them adjust their new offerings so that they are more successful.

In the case of music or other forms of entertainment, some artists see a clash between creativity and calculated commercial success. Hit Song Science allows an artist to use a database of past successes to tailor her new products along very specific dimensions.

But creativity has never existed in a vacuum. In the music industry, commercial artists and their producers have been bringing their judgment and experience to bear in shaping new hit music ever since Edison invented the phonograph in 1877.

Hit Song Science makes this knowledge explicit and easily accessible. Record companies can use this program to determine what songs should be promoted, rather than relying solely on the judgment of the A&R men and producers who have historically made these decisions.

Framed this way, the innovation that is Hit Song Science resembles many of the other productivity-enhancing innovations that sophisticated information technology has created over the past several decades. It replaces human judgment with systematic, data driven analysis by machine. Rather than John Henry competing against the steam drill, picture Tommy Mottola going up against the computer.

From computer-aided design to tax preparation to music production, information technology is making tacit knowledge explicit and thus more broadly accessible. Anastacia may not like expert systems messing with her music, but the commercial benefits are hard to resist.

More Information

The New York Times ran a story on Hit Song Science on 21 March, 2004. Here’s a link to that: http://msl1.mit.edu/furdlog/docs/nytimes/2004-03-21_nytimes_hit_song_science.pdf

Here’s the website for Hit Song Science: http://www.hitsongscience.com/index.php?p=h

Click here to hear a clip of the Anastacia song "Left Outside Alone" (it’s pretty catchy): http://bigpondmusic.com/searchResults.asp?keyword=anastacia

Richard Weddle and I wrote a piece about the music industry about a year ago, in April 2003. It’s archived here: www.biz-architect.com/weddle_on_music.htm

Plunkett Research has lots of interesting entertainment stats, with sources. http://www.plunkettresearch.com/entertainment/entertainment_statistics_1.htm

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