The Top 50 Most Iconic Songs of all Time - According to Science

Boy, how's that lockdown going for you? In continued efforts to provide distraction and entertainment/talking points, let's take a quick look at something a little different this week. You know me and my list of greatest ever this or that, most specifically as it pertains to Effervescence, the best song/record of all time. Well, what do those figures come out like when analyzed scientifically?

Dr Mick Grierson examined a whole host of songs that appeared in ‘greatest songs of all-time’ lists in newspapers, on music stations like VH1, and in iconic music publications such as Q, NME, and Rolling Stone.

That involved taking into account factors such as beats per minute, chord variety, lyrical content, and, well, timbral variety and sonic variance before arriving at the list you can see below.