Automatically predicting hit songs

Automatically predicting hit songs: "An article in the Digital Music Weblog describes the Platinum Blue Music Intelligence system that claims to provide a crystal ball for the music industry . According to Platinum Blue they can


'detect and analyze the underlying mathematical patterns contained in a song. This knowledge, encompassing 30+ parameters including, pitch, melody and cadence, allows a song to be easily compared to other songs. In this way, the music market, which has often seemed the purview of the alchemist, is now open to rational analysis.'

Platinum Blue is not the first company to make a system that tries to predict hit songs. Hit Song Science also has a system that can tell you whether a song 'sounds like' a hit song.

Similarly, in the academic world, there have been some investigations along these lines. ISMIR 2005 published 'Automatic Prediction of Hit Songs' by Beth Logan. In this paper, Beth describes using Support Vector Machines and boosting classifiers to explore if there is some distinguisable thread connecting hit songs. "