The Surprising and Scientific Reason Why Songs Become Popular
Published in
3 min readSep 25, 2018
Jonah Berger is a marketing professor at the Wharton School (UPenn), and a world-renowned authority on virality.
In a recent research paper, he tries to identify the important factors that make a song popular.
The experiment is brilliant yet simple.
The Method (simplified):
- They chose 1,879 unique songs.
- They used Billboard’s digital download rankings to measure popularity.
- They used the rankings for each of these music genres: Christian, Country, Dance, Pop, Rap, Rock and R&B.
Then, they pulled out all the songs’ lyrics and categorized them into 10 different lyrical topics:
As you’d expect, each genre tends to use more of a lyrical topic.
For example, R&B music tends to use more of the “Street Cred” lyrical topic.
They mapped out the relative lyrical topic usage by genre in Fig. 2 below:
