<story><title>Analyzing the chords of 1300 popular songs for patterns</title><url>http://www.hooktheory.com/blog/i-analyzed-the-chords-of-1300-popular-songs-for-patterns-this-is-what-i-found/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>rumcajz</author><text>OTOH, I was quite surprised that E minor is used more (17%) than E major (10%) in popular music. In classical music the latter is quite common and the former is very rare.</text></item><item><author>SomeHacker44</author><text>I came to say basically the same thing.&lt;p&gt;Seems like a basic statistical analysis of songs. Anyone who has composed or even played music will find no surprises here (unless you solely loved on atonal 20th century stuff).&lt;p&gt;However, the author clearly has knowledge of music theory, so I fully fail to appreciate the purpose of the article.</text></item><item><author>bencollier49</author><text>The feels like it was written by someone who didn&amp;#x27;t understand music theory, but the author does discuss the 4th and 5th chords. And yet the story is written as if he didn&amp;#x27;t expect to find that they show up everywhere.&lt;p&gt;Still, don&amp;#x27;t want to be too negative, it&amp;#x27;s very interesting that he used data from guitar chord websites, that&amp;#x27;s a clever data source.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>chrisweekly</author><text>On a guitar in standard tuning (EADGBE), the Em chord can be played by fretting only two strings (the A and D), both on the 2nd fret. It&amp;#x27;s basically the easiest chord to learn to play. And if you start in Em, it pairs with G, Am, C and D -- all of which are also very simple fingerings. Correlation isn&amp;#x27;t causation, but I&amp;#x27;d bet dollars to doughnuts this is a factor, given the absolute dominance of the guitar in popular music songwriting.</text></comment>
<story><title>Analyzing the chords of 1300 popular songs for patterns</title><url>http://www.hooktheory.com/blog/i-analyzed-the-chords-of-1300-popular-songs-for-patterns-this-is-what-i-found/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>rumcajz</author><text>OTOH, I was quite surprised that E minor is used more (17%) than E major (10%) in popular music. In classical music the latter is quite common and the former is very rare.</text></item><item><author>SomeHacker44</author><text>I came to say basically the same thing.&lt;p&gt;Seems like a basic statistical analysis of songs. Anyone who has composed or even played music will find no surprises here (unless you solely loved on atonal 20th century stuff).&lt;p&gt;However, the author clearly has knowledge of music theory, so I fully fail to appreciate the purpose of the article.</text></item><item><author>bencollier49</author><text>The feels like it was written by someone who didn&amp;#x27;t understand music theory, but the author does discuss the 4th and 5th chords. And yet the story is written as if he didn&amp;#x27;t expect to find that they show up everywhere.&lt;p&gt;Still, don&amp;#x27;t want to be too negative, it&amp;#x27;s very interesting that he used data from guitar chord websites, that&amp;#x27;s a clever data source.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>bambax</author><text>They transposed all songs in C in order to be able to compare chords by name (which is a weird methodology but whatever).&lt;p&gt;By that measure it&amp;#x27;s only natural that Em (iii) is more common than E (which is non-diatonic to C).</text></comment>