Novelty and Cultural Evolution in Modern Popular Music

TL;DR

This study analyzes how novelty in musical style and lyrics influences popularity and influence in modern music, using large-scale MIR data and Billboard charts from 1974-2013.

Contribution

It introduces a method to quantify musical and lyrical novelty and links it to commercial success and influence over four decades.

Findings

Higher novelty correlates with increased popularity in some periods.

Novelty scores predict a song's influence within musical trends.

Patterns of novelty vary across different musical eras.

Abstract

The ubiquity of digital music consumption has made it possible to extract information about modern music that allows us to perform large scale analysis of stylistic change over time. In order to uncover underlying patterns in cultural evolution, we examine the relationship between the established characteristics of different genres and styles, and the introduction of novel ideas that fuel this ongoing creative evolution. To understand how this dynamic plays out and shapes the cultural ecosystem, we compare musical artifacts to their contemporaries to identify novel artifacts, study the relationship between novelty and commercial success, and connect this to the changes in musical content that we can observe over time. Using Music Information Retrieval (MIR) data and lyrics from Billboard Hot 100 songs between 1974-2013, we calculate a novelty score for each song's aural attributes and lyrics. Comparing both scores to the popularity of the song following its release, we uncover key patterns in the relationship between novelty and audience reception. Additionally, we look at the link between novelty and the likelihood that a song was influential given where its MIR and lyrical features fit within the larger trends we observed.