Going back a couple of posts to the 3rd December, I talked a little about what makes a great record. I mentioned that if there was indeed a "formula" for creating a hit record, then computers would be writing all our pop music by now. Well, funnily enough, it would seem that the technology already exists! I stumbled across this fascinating article, published in The Guardian in November 2006.
It talks all about the analysis of hit records, and there's some interesting stuff about "clusters" - apparently about 80% of hit records share a small number of underlying structures. That's probably not a massive revelation to be honest, but it's interesting that this hit analysis software groups together Norah Jones, Vanessa Carlton and Van Halen in the same cluster!
I won't ruin the article, but I will say that thankfully us songwriters won't be going out of business in the immediate future by the looks of things! While we wait for computers to write the next Hey Jude, I'll pass on this link that Jez Ashurst shared with us the other day. It seems writing a hit record is simple after all, you just need these four chords...
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