Are The Beatles Really Different? Commentary on North and Krause (2023)

Abstract

This article is a commentary on "Are The Beatles Different? A Computerized Psychological Analysis of Their Music," by North and Krause (2023), in which they analyze features extracted from the Spotify API and ultimately claim that The Beatles' music is statistically "innovative" compared to other music. In this commentary, I explore potential methodological issues with some of their analyses. Chiefly, I show that applying their analysis to other artists results in similar results in most cases. I conclude that The Beatles' innovativeness, whether real or imaginary, cannot be statistically determined from Spotify's acoustically derived features.

Keywords

• the beatles
• music information retrieval
• computational analysis
• methodology