What's the Most Underappreciated Album? Mailbag
This month we dive into questions about boy bands, musical threesomes, unused chord progressions, and growing your audience in the digital age.
The mailbag got so heavy this month that I felt like Santa Claus hauling around a sack of toys on Christmas Eve. I’m not complaining, though. I love answering your questions. Here’s what we’ve got this week.
Questions for All Subscribers
Who’s your favorite boy band?
Are there any chord progressions that have not been used yet?
Is everything going to be okay?
Have there been more female artists on the charts recently?
Questions for Paid Subscribers
What is the most underappreciated album?
Are there any pop songs about love triangles?
Do award shows still matter?
What the deal with all the recent song titles with informal spelling and weird typography?
How will the next generation of artists build community?
Do you want to see the answer to one of the questions for paid subscribers? Click here to up your subscription. Do you still have a nagging question that you need answered? Click the button below to send it along to me.
Who’s your favorite boy band? - Kate
Before answering this question, I feel the need to point to two of my favorite data-driven explorations of boy bands. First, The Pudding assembled an interactive boy band database a few years ago. It’s a fun way to take a trip down memory lane.
Second, Walt Hickey — the proprietor of the newsletter Numlock News — wrote a series of pieces about boy bands for FiveThirtyEight. My favorite in that series has the chuckle-worthy title “Boy Bands: More Like Man Bands.” In that piece, Hickey shows that the median age for a boy band member when their band is founded is 19.
Nevertheless, if I use Wikipedia’s definition that a boy band is “a vocal group consisting of young male singers, usually in their teenage years or in their twenties at the time of formation,” then my favorite boy band is The Beatles. If you think that’s a cop out, or at least a different thing than the post-1990 boy band phenomenon, then I guess I don’t have a favorite boy band. And I’m not saying that out of embarrassment. I was just never super into Backstreet Boys, One Direction, or any other acts in that universe. At the very least, I’ll tell you some boy band songs that I like:
“I Want It That Way” by Backstreet Boys: Many of the boy band hits of the late-1990s and early-2000s were co-written by the Swedish songwriting savant Max Martin. Though Martin has gone on to write hits with Katy Perry, Taylor Swift, and The Weeknd, some of his tightest writing might be on this Backstreet Boys classic. I swear the opening guitar arpeggio could easily be repurposed for a Metallica song.
“Summer Girls” by LFO: The management equivalent to Max Martin in the boy band world was Lou Pearlman. Though he eventually went to jail for running a huge Ponzi scheme, Pearlman launched the careers of NSYNC, Backstreet Boys, and a slew of other lesser-known bands. One of those lesser-known bands was LFO, a pop rap group best known for their 1999 hit “Summer Girls”. Though this song is filled with inane lines (e.g., “You're the best girl that I ever did see / The great Larry Bird, jersey 33”), it is etched in my brain because I feel like it played on the radio every day my dad drove me to pre-school.
“History” by One Direction: If a song has a nice chord progression, I don’t care who is singing on top of it. It will probably catch my ear. And “History” by One Direction is built around a very rich chord progression. “Night Changes” and “Story of My Life” by One Direction also sort of bop.
Are there any chord progressions that have not been used yet? - Gogz
My initial reaction to this question was that of course there are progressions that have never been used. But let’s do the math to make sure. First, let’s define a chord as any combination of three or more notes. Second, let’s count all voicings, or inversions, of a chord as the same. If you’re not aware, an inversion is taking the same notes and rearranging them. This rearrangement can create a different feel despite the fact that it is fundamentally the same chord. Below I display a few inversions of the C major chord on the piano. As you can see, they all use the same notes: C, E, and G.
With those assumptions in mind, how many chords are there? There are 220 three-note chords, 495 four-note chords, 795 five-note chords, 924 six-note chords, 792 seven-note chords, 495 eight-note chords, 220 nine-note chords, 66 ten-note chords, 12 eleven-note chords, and 1 twelve-note chord. Add all of those together and you get 4017 possible chords. And that’s just chords. If you want to know how many chord progressions there, you’ve got to do some multiplication. These numbers get big fast. In fact, if you wanted to play every four-chord progression, playing each chord for only one second, it would take over 8 million years to get through them all.
That said, most of those chords are not something you’d hear in a song. Almost no one is writing a song where one of the chords involves smashing all 12 keys on the piano at one time. To simplify things, let just look at progressions that use major chords and minor chords, the most common chords in the pop world. There are 12 major chords and 12 minor chords, giving us 24 total chords to choose from. Those 24 chords still give us over 300,000 four-chord progressions. Many of those progressions will sound odd, but that’s still a good deal of choice. If we use longer progressions, the choices quickly become almost endless.
Is everything going to be okay? - Ken
I feel like there's been a rise in female artists in the charts. Is that really the case? - Matthew
There’s been a ton of press over the last few years about women making strides in the music industry. Stuff about how women dominated the Grammys in 2024. Or how women are more prevalent on Billboard’s year end charts. All of that stuff is great. But usually these analyses look over a short time frame. To investigate your question, I aggregated weekly Billboard Hot 100 data from 1958 to 2022. The results aren’t horrible, but they also aren’t particularly rosy.
The largest gains women made in representation near the top of the Billboard Hot 100 were in the 1980s and 1990s. Things are still pretty good at this point. In 2022 — the last year of data I was able to aggregate — 31% of top 5 hits were by women performers and 45% were by women soloists or groups with at least one woman. In an ideal world, the former percentage is closer to 50%.
What do you think is the most underappreciated album? - Matt
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