Uncharted Territory
What Numbers Tell Us about the Biggest Hit Songs and Ourselves
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- $43.99
Publisher Description
Popular music history collides with data analytics, charts, and numbers in this insightful and surprising look at the greatest hits and musicians, fads, forgotten artists, and much more. Data analyst and musician Chris Dalla Riva reframes everything you thought you knew about music.
Did you know that hit songs in the late 1950s were regularly about gruesome death? That a US vice president wrote a number one hit? That while TikTok has spawned countless hits, it's made artists more anonymous than ever before? That pop songs have shaped race relations in the United States? That the key change died around 2003? And that's just the beginning.
Coupling hard data with engaging anecdotes, Uncharted Territory is both a takedown and celebration of popular music and provides new ways to think about your favorite songs, genres, and artists from the last 6 decades using unexpected statistics and playful visualizations. This entertaining history is filled with the most popular musicians of all time from The Beatles and The Bee Gees to Michael Jackson, Mariah Carey, and beyond. Whether you danced the twist or the dougie at your senior prom, you're sure to never listen to music again in the same way.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Dalla Riva, a senior product manager at Audiomack, mixes data analysis with music criticism in this scrupulous debut analysis of popular music trends from the 1950s to the present. The book moves chronologically, exploring technological, cultural, and societal shifts that shaped the music of each era. For example, the popularization of digital recording in the 1990s paved the way for chart-toppers longer than four minutes and saw Napster fuel debates about copyright. Dalla Riva also rates the number one hits of each era (the "trance-inducing" ABBA hit "Dancing Queen" and Earth, Wind, and Fire's "Shining Star" fare favorably; lowlights include "The Streak" by Ray Stevens), while ample graphs and charts bring the statistical research to life. Throughout, Riva answers questions that will fascinate data nerds ("When a number one hit loses the top spot, how far does it fall?") while taking a broader look at the forces that have influenced the music industry. He notes, for instance, that the category Billboard now calls R&B was originally labeled "race records" and intended specifically for Black artists, a bias that persists today—"If you're a singer and you're Black," Frank Ocean once explained, "you're an R&B artist. Period." Data-minded music fans will relish this deep dive.
