Using absolute chord analysis instead of relative chords (i.e. roman numeral analysis) doesn't make sense. As others have noted, the original dataset is flawed because the structure of a song is critical, you cannot omit repeating chords. Programmers/analysts should take more care to understand music theory or the underlying field at hand, before compiling datasets or doing analysis.

"Most common chord" is mildly interesting, but not really that useful. The most common key, and the most commonly used chords relative to that key (i.e. with roman numeral analysis) would be much more useful and interesting. This would help paint a clearer distinction between e.g. country and jazz, not that "jazz uses Bb major more". Also, anyone with general instrument knowledge would surmise that since Bb and Eb instruments are much more prevalent.

"If you’re sitting down to write a song, throw a 7th chord in. The ghost of a jazz great will smile on you."

7ths don't belong to jazz only, and the average songwriter isn't making data-driven decisions on how to settle on the chord structure for their song.

Agreed on chord numbers and progression being the analysis that should have been done. For example, blues is mostly defined by a 1-4-5 progression and the ol 2-5-1 is pretty ubiquitous across time and genre.

Also, I think disappearance of 7th chords - major, minor, or dominant - is vastly overstated. Keep in mind that these are from guitar tabs so likely ignoring chord inversion / voicing / substitution taking placw to simplify notation. For example a B minor triad can be substituted for a Gmaj7.

Bm triad = B,D,F#

Gmaj7 = G,B,D,F#

Or if you want to be fancy a Bb/Gm can work as either Bbmaj7 or C7 depending on where you put it in a progression.

Agree completely. I assume OP means major or minor 7th chord - they can't possibly mean dominant 7th, because...does there even exist a single blues song which doesn't have that chord?

And let's say you take maj7 chords - "you and me song", "you are so beautiful", "sing sang sung", "1975" - just off the top of my head. Pretty much any pop song which is melancholic sounding.

For min7, choose virtually any Santana song.

Even if you said maj9 or min9 it still wouldn't be remotely true. Otoh 13th chords....I think you'd have to reach to find a non-jazz occurrence of that chord. And it happens in jazz all the time.

Unfortunately this work is now cited by Wikipedia, so expect the confusion to spread.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chord_(music)#Usage_and_trends

I think most musicians know that I-IV-V-I is the zero thought default for in key chord progression, it's so overused you don't need fancy analysis to figure it out.

For me, I'm more interested in the intervals and voicing pairs, because those tell you something deeper about the music that you don't get from the chord progression.

Wouldn't using relative chords simply show that 99% of songs use the I chord? :)

To further this, my trio is down a half step because we’re older now and it’s easier to sing at a lower register. This is pretty common for a lot of over 40 artists as well.

Also, as you know, blues has dominant 7ths all over.

> average songwriter isn't making data-driven decisions on how to settle on the chord structure for their song

Depends on what do you call data-driven. A songwriter most likely knows that a lot of fifth chords to gives power-metal vibes, and diminished and out-of-key songs do give these ghosts of jazz.

The parallels between your critique of music analysis, and linguists' critique of LLMs, bear remarkable similarities. "Language/thought is more than sequences of tokens" will still be true no matter how much data we throw at the problem to smooth the rough edges.

> and the average songwriter isn't making data-driven decisions on how to settle on the chord structure for their song

aren't decisions like that implicit to the source of learning/inspiration? it's not data-driven on the surface of the writers awareness, and maybe not data-driven in the statistical sense, but "intuitively", "that which sounds good successively", is based on what one heard so far within the context of the song ... so it's one hundred percent data-driven, just not data that one has consciously quantified.

IMO: average songwriters and musicians and producers are the top exactly because they hit exactly that big fat belly of the bell curve/ G distribution ... I'd say you have it backwards... there's much more experimentation and less data-stuff going on left and right of the average

Why is there currently so much low quality low IQ content on hn that gets up voted?