And her success, in turn, is spawning legions of hip-hop pop imitators whom labels will choose to blast out because their chance at success has been proven. This undoubtedly helped launch Iggy Azalea to incredible new heights of success, which she may not have otherwise earned with her talent alone. When a song is dubbed "On the Verge," every station in the Clear Channel network has to play it at least 150 times - blasting it to a potential network of about 245 million listeners. Clear Channel's " On the Verge" program is one of the most talked about. Once a worthy song or artist emerges from the data, radio conglomerates have mechanisms in place to ensure that music will connect with an audience. According to Derek Thompson at the Atlantic, executives can use services like Shazam and HitPredictor to see which songs will break out next with surprising accuracy. Record labels are pouring resources into data analysis tools, using them to predict which songs will be the next breakout hit. But the science is only proving the now-dominant truth of pop music: Record companies are only comfortable promoting things they already know will sell. The findings are somewhat intuitive. Of course a genre will sell more once it forms an established sound that listeners can identify with. Unless, of course, they fit into the Mumford & Sons/Lumineers pop-folk mold. And ones that have - folk, folk rock and experimental music - aren't exactly big earners.
Startlingly few genres have retained high levels of musical complexity over their histories, according to the researchers. Alternative rock, experimental and hip-hop music are all more complex now than when they began, and each has seen their sales plummet. Not only that, but complexity actually starts turning people off of musical styles. So music all starts simplifying and sounding similar. "This can be interpreted," the researchers write, "as music becoming increasingly formulaic in terms of instrumentation under increasing sales numbers due to a tendency to popularize music styles with low variety and musicians with similar skills." They found that in nearly every case, as genres increase in popularity, they also become more generic. They rated the genre's complexity over time - measured by researchers in purely quantitative aspects, such as timbre and acoustical variations - and compared that to the genre's sales.
The study: In a recent study, researchers from the Medical University of Vienna in Austria studied 15 genres and 374 subgenres.
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