Are The Beatles Different? A Computerized Psychological Analysis of Their Music

Abstract

There has been little quantitative research by psychologists concerning the music of The Beatles. The present research compared their music against a database of 169,909 songs for which data was obtained via the Spotify application programming interface concerning acousticness, danceability, duration, energy, key, loudness, mode, popularity, tempo, and valence. The Beatles' music differed from the overall dataset by being more positively-valenced, more energetic, faster, louder, less acoustic, and shorter; and differed from their 1960s contemporaries by being more danceable, energetic, faster, louder, less acoustic, and shorter. Of these, only the loudness and valence of The Beatles' music was related positively to its popularity. The Beatles were able to avoid the overall trend for distinctive music to be less commercially successful, suggesting that they were able to innovate without sacrificing popularity. However, on further analysis, The Beatles' music was no more innovative (defined in terms of musical differences from other music) than that of their contemporaries for each year of the 1960s except 1969. The ongoing public acclaim of The Beatles can therefore be attributed to their music being louder and more emotionally positive, being no more musically-innovative than their peers, but when they did innovate, being relatively successful compared to their peers.