Hip-Hop Changed US Pop Music More Than The Beatles, Study Claims

The Beatles are considered by many to be one of the best and most influential rock bands ever. They helped revive rock n' roll, revolutionized modern songwriting and turned fans onto psychedelic rhythms. However, those claims may not be as true as they seem. According to new study by a group of London academics focusing on musical patterns in the US pop charts from 1960 to 2010 the foursome were not as influential as many have thought. According to the researches, The Beatles did not create a musical revolution in the charts, but rather their styles were already established before the artists from the British Invasion, including the Rolling Stones arrived. The real revolution arrived 30 years later when hip-hop became mainstream on the charts.

The study, conducted by researchers at Queen Mary and Imperial College London used data from Last.fm and other methods including signal processing and text-mining to analyze music properties of songs.

"For the first time we can measure musical properties in recordings on a large scale. We can actually go beyond what music experts tell us, or what we know ourselves about them, by looking directly into the songs, measuring their makeup, and understanding how they have changed,"

The moment when everything changes was when hip-hop burst onto the charts in 1991, reinvented the musical landscape more than anything else in the study's time period, claim the researchers.

Despite what many may think, the study suggests that there is no overriding trend that charts today are becoming homogeneous.

Not everyone is convinced by this study. Mike Broken a senior lecturer in music at Liverpool Hope University and director of the world's first Beatles masters degree refuted many of the points made about The Beatles in the study.

"Most decent popular music researchers would probably agree that the Beatles were not so much innovators as musical magpies - and that's not a criticism. They, like all of us, listened to all sorts of stuff and were duly inspired."

So does this mean that Migos are better than The Beatles?

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