Photo illustration by Juliana Jiménez Jaramillo. Bieber photo by Frazer Harrison/Getty Images. Beatles photo by Peter Skingley/AFP/Getty Images. 
 
 What do Justin Bieber and the Beatles have in common? Not much, you might think, other than the ability to inspire frenzied adoration in their young fans. But Bieber and the Fab Four share something else as well. Consider Bieber’s 2013 song “All Bad,” which many believe alludes to his relationship with Selena Gomez in the following verse: 
 
 Envy, envy 
 
 Same thing as jealousy 
 
 Jealous of you 
 
 That’s what they do 
 
 The stanza, you’ll note, ends with a couplet rhyming do and you. That turns out to be Bieber’s favorite pair of words to rhyme: In his still-young career, he’s used the pair in 12 different songs. It’s also the Beatles’ favorite rhyme—and the favorite rhyme of Prince, Whitney Houston, Adele, the Rolling Stones, Madonna, Elton John, Bob Dylan, and Kanye West. 
 
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 In fact, an analysis of every song on Billboard’s Year End Hot 100 between 1960 and 2013 suggests that the do/you rhyme might be the most popular in pop music history. Below is an interactive graph showing the most common 20 rhymes on the Billboard list over this time period, as well as their change in popularity over the years; half rhymes, such as enough/love, were counted, and each rhyme was only counted once per song, so as not to put too much weight on repetitive choruses: 
 
 Simple rhymes, as might be expected, are the most common: Words like be and me or to and you are both organic to the subject matter of most pop songs (love, relationships) and can be paired without grinding a tune to a halt. Only one pair of words in the top 100 most common rhymes is more than one syllable: forever/together. When we expand the search to include the top 200 rhymes, the only polysyllabic rhymes we add are away/today, better/together, and sorrow/tomorrow. 
 
 Almost half of the 20 most popular rhymes contain either me or you. It’s tempting to look at these results and conclude that pop lyricists aren’t all that inventive or ambitious when it comes to rhyming. But the centrality of me and you rhymes is hardly limited to pop. The most common rhyming pair in Shakespeare’s 154 sonnets is me/thee. (Shakespeare, of course, was lucky enough to live in a time when me and you rhymed with each other.) 
 
 There is no single rhyme that Queen used in more than five different songs. 
 
 Over time, certain rhyming pairs rise and fall in frequency in pop music. Though it is still used frequently, do/you appears to have peaked around 1998–99, when it was used in 15 percent of all Billboard Year-End Hot 100 songs, including hits like Aerosmith’s “I Don’t Want to Miss a Thing” and Britney Spears’ “…Baby One More Time.” In the 1960s, cry/goodbye was used roughly eight times more often then it is today, in such songs as Marty Robbins’ “Don’t Worry About Me” and Elvis Presley’s “Marie’s the Name.” 
 
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 I asked Walter Everett, a professor of music at the University of Michigan who has studied popular music, what he thought attracted artists to the do/you rhyme. His hypothesis is that its frequency has less to do with do and everything to do with you. He noted that when a singer uses melisma (singing different pitches on the same syllable), it can “work to create a strong perceived bond between singer and listener, especially in romantic songs.” Such an effect, he says, can be particularly pronounced when the melisma is applied to the word you at the end of a line or verse. He points to the Beatles’ appearances on the Ed Sullivan Show as evidence of “what the word you does to the female fans.” 
 
 Naturally, you rhymes appear most frequently in love songs. Looking at VH1’s list of top 100 love songs, which includes artists from Frank Sinatra to ’N Sync, reveals that 71 of these songs have at least one verse ending with you, and 15 contain the do/you rhyme. Less romantic songs are far less likely to contain either a you or a do/you. VH1’s ranking of top 100 dance songs and top 100 rock songs contain, respectively, nine and four songs with a do/you rhyme. The network’s ranking of the top 40 metal songs contains only one, Anthrax’s “Caught in a Mosh”: “Learn to give respect/ that others, give to you/ AAAAAAAAAAAH, the best you can do.” 
 
 While most artists draw from a common bank of rhymes and use the same rhymes frequently, there are some artists who appear to go out of the way to avoid common couplets or rhyming in general. Queen only used do/you as an end rhyme once in its 15 albums, and there is no single rhyme that Queen used in more than five different songs. By contrast, in seven albums and roughly 40 singles, there are seven rhymes (do/you, be/me, baby/me, go/know, enough/love, above/love, fear/here) that Justin Bieber has used in at least five songs. 
 
 Below is an interactive that allows you to pick an artist and reveal that artist’s favorite and most distinctive rhymes. Only artists whose all-time total record sales have surpassed 75 million or have had one of the 10 best-selling albums of the year within the past 10 years were included. Artists who otherwise fit the criteria for inclusion but didn’t have enough songs with lyrics were excluded. Sorry, Kenny G. 
 
 Here, too, a rhyme was only counted once per song. An artist’s most distinctive rhyme is the one used most frequently compared to the average across all acts (to qualify, a rhyme must appear in more than one song). For example, while the Beach Boys used the universally popular be/me rhyme in 15 songs, their songbook is unique for featuring four different songs with a hand/sand rhyme. Similarly, Lil’ Wayne specializes in me/money, Reba McEntire favors hand/man, and Madonna likes girl/world. ||||| Image copyright PA Image caption The Spice Girls' Wannabe topped the charts as the study's most recognisable pop song 
 
 The Spice Girls' debut hit, Wannabe, is the catchiest UK hit single, an online experiment has suggested. 
 
 Participants recognised the song in 2.3 seconds, compared with an average of five seconds for other popular hits. 
 
 Researchers developed the interactive game, called Hooked on Music, as part of a scientific study to unlock the secrets of what makes music memorable. 
 
 The initial results from the study will be unveiled at the Manchester Science Festival on Saturday evening. 
 
 Data from more than 12,000 participants was collected from the online experiment, which was developed by the Museum of Science and Industry (Mosi). 
 
 People who played the game were asked if they recognised a song, which was randomly selected from more than 1,000 clips of best-selling songs, dating from the 1940s until the present day. 
 
 The Spice Girls' debut single, which spent seven weeks at number one during 1996, was the most quickly recognised song by participants, taking an average of 2.29 seconds. 
 
 Second was Lou Bega's Mambo No 5, which was identified in an average of 2.48 seconds. 
 
 Survivor's Eye of the Tiger was third, with an average time of 2.62 seconds. 
 
 Image caption Just Dance by Lady Gaga was the fourth most catchy song 
 
 Overall, it took people an average of five seconds to recognise a clip from one of the UK's best-selling records. 
 
 The Hooked on Music concept was designed by Ashley Burgoyne, a computational musicologist from the University of Amsterdam, Netherlands, and colleagues. 
 
 "I work within a group that studies music cognition in general - any way in which the brain processes music - and we were particularly interested in music and memory and why exactly it is that certain pieces of music stay in your memory for such a long time," he told BBC News. 
 
 "You may only hear something a couple of times yet 10 years later you immediately realise that you have heard it before. 
 
 The UK's top 10 catchiest songs 1. Spice Girls - Wannabe 2. Lou Bega - Mambo No 5 3. Survivor - Eye Of The Tiger 4. Lady Gaga - Just Dance 5. ABBA - SOS 6. Roy Orbison - Pretty Woman 7. Michael Jackson - Beat It 8. Whitney Houston - I Will Always Love You 9. The Human League - Don't You Want Me 10. Aerosmith - I Don't Want To Miss A Thing (Source: Hooked on Music experiment/Mosi) 
 
 "Yet other songs, even if you have heard them a lot, do not have this effect." 
 
 Dr Burgoyne said that his team wanted to see if it was possible to identify whether the most memorable pieces of music shared particular characteristics. 
 
 "When we went to look at this, you would have thought that it would have been studied to death yet, in fact, it has not - there is very little scientific literature," he said. 
 
 "There are lots of ideas [about] why this is the case but very, very little empirical research." 
 
 Manchester Science Festival director, Dr Marieke Navin, said people's appetite to participate in real scientific research and the experiment's need for a large, diverse group of participants made it an ideal addition to the festival's programme. 
 
 "It does not matter whether or not people want to do the science per se; they can just play an online game for fun," she told BBC News. 
 
 "It has a wide appeal for gamers, or for people who just like music and want to test their knowledge and how good they are at recognising hooks. 
 
 "While people are playing, it is actually an experiment and scientists are collecting data. This allows the scientist to test different hypotheses about the musical hook." 
 
 Image caption SOS by ABBA was fifth in the list 
 
 Dr Burgoyne added: "The most important aspect of this stage of the experiment was getting this very precise measurement of exactly how memorable segments of the songs are. 
 
 "What I am going to focus on for the next year is asking what explains this; what are the musical features that makes something catchy? 
 
 "Although this is just a casual observation on my part, very strong melodic hooks seem to be the most memorable for people." 
 
 The game will remain online until at least the end of the year, and Dr Burgoyne explained how the experiment fed into his team's wider research. 
 
 "While it is fun to know this - because people love music but in the long run - if we have a better understanding of how the musical memory works, we are hopeful that we can move into research on people with dementia," he explained. 
 
 "There has already been some research that shows that if you can find the right piece of music, something that had a very strong meaning, playing that piece of music can be very therapeutic. 
 
 "But the challenge is figuring out what is the best piece of music."
– Think the Beatles and Justin Bieber have nothing in common? Not so: They each used do/you more than any other rhyme, which isn't so odd considering that Madonna, Prince, Kanye West, Bob Dylan, and most other top-selling pop musicians between 1960 and 2013 favored it too, reports Slate. According to an in-depth analysis of rhymes in Billboard's Top 100 Songs for that period, simple rhymes with words like be, me, to, and you are the most common, and half of the top 20 rhymes include either you or me (before you cringe, Shakespeare favored it in his sonnets with me/thee). It's fascinating to click on Slate's graph and see how certain rhymes have risen and fallen in popularity. Do/you topped out in 1998-99 with songs like Aerosmith's "I Don't Want to Miss a Thing" and Britney Spears' "...Baby One More Time," while cry/goodbye was more popular in the 1960s with Elvis Presley's "Marie's the Name" and Marty Robbins' "Don't Worry About Me." Occasionally an artist or group comes along (like Queen) that rarely re-uses a rhyme, while most (like Bieber) keep drawing on the most popular ones. The Beatles may be rhyme repeaters, but Fox News argues that they'll remain popular in 50 years because of their enormous effect on pop music styles.