Can Science Predict a Hit Song?

This article is a little controversial. Are musical preferences able to be worked down to an algorithm? Studies certainly think so. New research has looked at whether a song can be predicted to be a 'hit'. The researchers used musical features such as, tempo, time signature, song duration and loudness. They also computed more detailed summaries of the songs such as harmonic simplicity, how simple the chord sequence is, and non-harmonicity, how 'noisy' the song is. Based on songs which had become 'hits' in the past, research suggests that similar songs are destined to be hits as well. So, do people really follow the same trend over and over?

Article Source: http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2011/12/111216234655.htm