Music really is catchy – and it can spread like a virus too

It was the great John Peel who once reviewed a new pop single with the most damming of faint praise. “It’s catchy for sure,” he said. “But then so is the clap.”

Now it turns out that the man who also once described the Undertones’ Teenage Kicks as the ultimate perfect pop song might have been onto something with his musings on catchy music.

Because a team from McMaster University in Ontario has come to the conclusion that pop songs – rather like pandemics have ‘R’ numbers and spread like diseases.

The researchers used the same sort of epidemiological modelling usually reserved for monitoring the spread of diseases like Covid-19 to analyse how ‘catchy’ songs – those earworms that you can’t get out of your head – can be infectious and end up being transmitted across large populations like viruses.

They analysed more than 60 million downloads by more than 500,000 people in the UK between 2007 and 2014, using Nokia’s MixRadio service.

They took the 1,000 most downloaded songs, which spanned eleven genres as classified by the MixRadio service, then analysed the speed with which the songs spread and the length of time that they remained popular.

The rate of infection in this instance was how quickly it spread and for how long – determined by the time fans spent talking about the song, playing it, sharing it on social media or requesting it on the radio.

And it turns out that electronica is the genre that leads to the ‘fastest epidemics’ among its fans; its reproduction number of 3,430, which was more than ten times higher than for the next most contagious genre, rap and hip-hop, which had an R0 number of just 310.

For more, read this week’s Connacht Tribune.

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