Data From 680K Songs: A Gigantic Step Backwards
- Jay EuDaly
- 1 hour ago
- 5 min read
Chris Dalla Riva is an author I follow on Substack. His Substack account is called "Can't Get Much Higher: The Intersection of Music and Data."
He recently published,
He references CHORDONOMICON: A Dataset of 666,000 Songs and their Chord Progressions as his source.
Caveat: I have serious questions about the methodology of how the CHORDONOMICON study was conducted; for one thing, it pulled the data from the popular music learning website Ultimate-Guitar.com. Seeing as how Pop Music was guitar-centric for only about 40 years - the mid-1950's through the mid-'90's - it seems that data on a guitar website from before and after that time-frame might be questionable.
For another thing, Ultimate-Guitar illustrates one of the things I wrote about in Inbred Guitar Culture; over-reliance on TAB. In this case, it appears to be 100%.
Trust me, TAB is not reliable especially when it comes to modern guitar players transcribing popular music from the 1920's through the 1940's - what we now call, "Jazz." That music is NOT guitar-centric and I would be skeptical of guitar TAB transcriptions of the music from that era.
That's as far as I'm going to go into a critique of what I see as the problems - it's beside the point I want to make. I think what Chris Dalla Riva has done with the data from CHORDONOMICON is very interesting and I respect him for even trying to do this. It seems an overwhelming undertaking. But then, among other things, he's a data scientist so it's probably a typical thing for him.
He goes about parsing the data from 680K songs in different ways:
20 Most Common Chords Across 680k Songs
Comparing the Frequency of Chords Across Jazz and Country
A Comparison of Chords Used in 680k Songs Across 8 Genres
Are Songs Getting Less Complex?
...and so on, complete with charts and graphs.
The one I was most interested in was, "Chords Used in 680k Songs released between 1930 and 2025."
Here's an overview:
Back in 2018, I wrote, Listen With Your Eyes? A Gigantic Step Backwards!
In that post, I queued off something my teacher once said to me,
"Popular music consistently progressed for 900 years and then in the 1950's it took a gigantic step backwards from which it has never recovered." (John Elliott).
I did an analytical comparison of "All the Things You Are" (1939) and "Hound Dog" (1956) in which I illustrated the "gigantic step backwards." I also talked about WHY I thought the de-evolution of popular music happened - you can read it if you're interested.
In Chris Dalla Rivas' data I was interested in focusing on 7th chords. The reason for that is 7th chords are the basic default harmony for the pop music of the 1920's through the 40's. If pop music did indeed take a "gigantic step backwards" then that should show most clearly in the 7th chord category. Sure enough:
Apparently, and surprisingly to me, the decline began before 1930, but the most precipitous drop happened in the '50's - just as John said.
Other observations:
Take a look at the graph for the Power Chord:
I associate this bump in the mid-to-late sixties with the Kinks, Cream, Mountain and on into 70's-80's Punk and Rock, then in 1990 with Nirvana and the ascension of Grunge through the nineties. In the 2,000's Rap, Hip-Hop and other forms of electronica moved Grunge, Punk and Alternative Rock off the pop charts. So this graph makes sense to me.
I talk more about the rise of non-guitar-centric pop music in The Decline of the Guitar God.
The Major Triad graph also makes sense to me:
I associate the rise indicated by the first arrow with 50's Doo-Wop music; major triads were all over that style, which was very popular.
The second rise I associate with 80's Rock, in which major triads were a huge component. Notice the drop-off starting in 1990. One word: Nirvana.
The graph for 9ths, 11ths, and 13ths doesn't make sense to me. This is one place where I question the source; ultimateguitar.com. Assuming the TAB charts for pre-1950’s music are accurate (big assumption!), what were the sources the TAB charts were created from? Sheet music? Fake sheet compilations like the Real Book? Recordings? If recordings, which version? Maybe ultimateguitar.com answers those questions but I haven't delved deep enough into that website to see if they give their sources.
If the source was sheet music or fake sheet compilations (which is my suspicion), then that would not be an accurate reflection of what was going on in the 1920's through the 1940's. The charts and published sheet music would be written in terms of basic 7th chords, but the musicians and arrangers of that era commonly voiced chords in all kinds of ways. Plus they constantly added substitutions, extensions and alterations when they played - even as Jazz musicians do today.
So given that, I would expect the “9ths, 11ths, 13ths” graph to parallel the 7ths Chords graph relative to a dramatic decline in the 50's, not this relatively flat graph we see from Chris Dalla Riva - although there is a downward trend in the 50's, after an upward trend in the forties. However, it is my opinion that extensions (9ths, 11ths, 13ths) were waaay more common than this graph indicates.
The data on Diminished and Augmented chords:
Again, that drop in the 1950's! It's the same scenario as the 7th chords, and for the same reasons that I outlined in Listen With Your Eyes? A Gigantic Step Backwards!
I also have the same issue with this category as I do with 9ths, 11ths & 13ths; musicians pre-fifties liberally used Diminished chords in many ways - for example, as passing chords - or inversions of Dominant Flat 9 chords - even though those chords weren’t written in the sheet music or fake sheet of the song!
So I think Diminished and Augmented chords were way more common pre-50’s than the single digit percentage indicated by the graph.
I sure am curious about "Other."
What kinds of chords dropped precipitously in the 1930's but surged back in the 1960's? I have no clue.
Anyway, the data supports at least the latter half of the thesis, "Popular music consistently progressed for 900 years and then in the 1950's it took a gigantic step backwards from which it has never recovered" - about which I expanded on in Listen With Your Eyes? A Gigantic Step Backwards!
It's nice to be affirmed…statistically!
Ok...that "Other" category is starting to bug me!
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