Extra: Also, thanks to Alice Nadeau. Alice brought to my attention that some artists have recently been arguing that it is getting harder to make a hit (see e.g., www.bbc.com/news/enterta...). Our conversations sparked the idea for this project.

7/7
This was a fun project to work on and write up. Thanks to the great Marta Ewa Lech and the always-wonderful @sunelehmann.com .

6/7
Our results are especially interesting in the context of collective attention: Whereas books, news stories, movies, etc. get popular, then lose popularity at a higher and higher pace (see www.nature.com/articles/s41...), the most-popular hit songs now stay popular for longer.

4/7
On today’s chart, there are

- Fewer songs by new artists
- More songs performed by established ‘hitmakers’ (but these songs reach lower positions on average than used to be the case for hitmakers)
- Many, many more collaborations than previously.

3/7

- Song chart lifetimes peaked in the 2000s, then dropped.
- In the past two decades, lifetime inequality has surged (gini >0.6), because
- Mega hits are now staying on the chart for months, even years;
- Churn in the bottom is huge.
(tales of both the winner-takes-all and long tail theories)

2/7

The Billboard Hot 100 has tracked US music consumption since 1958.

In her master’s thesis, the awesome Marta Ewa Lech studied all chart entries to understand how song and artist success has evolved since the chart’s creation.

3 relevant papers:
- www.nature.com/articles/s41...
- www.nature.com/articles/s41...
- journals.aps.org/pre/abstract...