https://doi.org/10.1140/epjds/s13688-023-00377-7
Regular Article
Novelty and cultural evolution in modern popular music
Northwestern University, 2240 Campus Drive, 60208, Evanston, USA
Received:
15
June
2022
Accepted:
27
January
2023
Published online:
10
February
2023
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.
Key words: Cultural novelty / Computational methods / Quantitative analysis / Computational social science
© The Author(s) 2023
Open Access This article is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License, which permits use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons licence, and indicate if changes were made. The images or other third party material in this article are included in the article’s Creative Commons licence, unless indicated otherwise in a credit line to the material. If material is not included in the article’s Creative Commons licence and your intended use is not permitted by statutory regulation or exceeds the permitted use, you will need to obtain permission directly from the copyright holder. To view a copy of this licence, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/.
