Figures In Music: Chris Dalla Riva on What Data Reveals About Popular Music

Chris Dalla Riva is a singer, songwriter, and guitarist, but he is also an authority in the world of music and data. He works at the streaming platform Audiomack as Senior Product Manager, Data & Personalization, and he helms the newsletter Can’t Get Much Higher. Through this platform, he explores various data-driven topics in music, like tracking superstars from the 1960s who have fallen off or measuring just how underrated some songs are. 

But a major feat for Dalla Riva’s data expertise is his upcoming book, Uncharted Territory: What Numbers Tell Us about the Biggest Hit Songs and Ourselves. The book is available for preorder now and will be widely available on November 13. After taking the time to listen to every number one hit in history, he found numerous intriguing insights into popular music over the last few decades. All the way back to the Beatles and up through The Weeknd and Morgan Wallen.

Read on to learn how Dalla Riva processed all the data for his book and what that data says about the music industry in 2025.

How did listening to every #1 lead to this book?

I didn't start out with a grand plan. I write songs, so it was more of a musical exercise. I told a friend about it, and we both started rating songs out of 10. I tracked our ratings in a spreadsheet, but because I've always worked with data, I started to expand beyond our subjective ratings. 

I tracked a bunch of facts and figures about the song. How many weeks was the song at number one? What label put it out? Who wrote it? Who were the producers? When I decided to write about this journey, I started to have various theories, and I would then expand the data I was collecting to test them.

It was a very organic process. It was also a very slow, manual process, which allowed me to collect data on certain things that would have been hard, if not impossible, to collect if I were trying to automate it. I only used publicly available data. The entire history of the Billboard Hot 100 and the Billboard 200 was my arsenal.

How would you say music taste is intertwined with data in 2025?

Music and data have always been tied together. There's been an obsession with the Billboard charts going back to at least the late 50s. People have this concept of “Oh, this is the most popular record, and it's being tracked in some mysterious way.”

Data is even more intertwined in how we listen now, because so much of it is public. Chartmetric tracks all of this for all of us data folks out there. On Spotify, I can, for example, see the exact number of times each Beatles song has been played. 

At the end of every year, Spotify and basically every streaming service spits back your year-end wrap-up, which is basically just packaging up your listening habits. It infects how we consume music. If I go to somebody's Spotify page, am I gonna be influenced to click play on something because it has a lot of plays, or doesn't have a lot of plays? 

Previously, if I bought a CD, I didn't know immediately which tracks on that album people were listening to the most. But now that's all at our fingertips, and I think even in ways we don't realize, it changes how we interact with music. 

I've actually toyed with writing a piece about how most of those stats shouldn't be public because I think it changed how A&R works. A&Rs won't interact with artists unless they hit certain play thresholds or have a certain number of followers on TikTok. 

What is the most exciting data trend that you discovered while you were writing your book?

There's this idea that after the Beatles, to be taken seriously, you had to write your own music. [Before] there was a different system where writing, production, and performance were all done by different people.

Then the Beatles started writing their own songs. They were very successful, and at the same time, others are experimenting with this. Brian Wilson of the Beach Boys. Bob Dylan. Auteurist producers like Phil Spector or Lieber and Stoller. So, I decided to track how often the performing artist wrote their own song.

What's interesting is that in the decade leading up to the Beatles coming to America, you see a huge increase in artists writing their own songs. This includes early rock and roll artists, like Little Richard, Chuck Berry, and Buddy Holly.

I don't think this really turns the narrative on its head that the Beatles influenced other artists to write their own songs. But really, the Beatles are also part of this longer tradition where artists had started experimenting with writing their own work. 

There are a lot of songwriting trends that I think are really interesting. These days, if you look at a number one hit, it usually is at least double the songwriters you would see on a number one hit in the 1960s. Back then, it was usually two. Now it's normal to see eight credited songwriters.

In the description of your book, the first line is, “Did you know that hit songs in the late 50s were regularly about gruesome death?” What sort of lyrical patterns do you see in modern hit songs?

There was a whole genre of songs called “teenage tragedy songs.” These songs usually featured a young high school couple dating, and one of them died tragically. The quintessential examples are “Teen Angel” by Mark Dinning and “Leader of the Pack” by the Shangri-Las.

But in the last 10-15 years, sadness has pervaded popular music. As trap became popular music, Emo rap, sad rap, or whatever term you choose to define it with, also became popular. [In the book] while I'm talking about the teenage tragedy song trend, I make the connection to some songs of the mid to late 2010s. One of them I chose is Billie Eilish's “bury a friend,” which clearly has that grim imagery baked into not just the song itself, but the title.

What sort of actionable value can an artist get by reading your book?

Well, something I joke about is that people would ask me, ‘Did you discover some secret to writing a hit song?’ If I did, I wouldn't be writing the book. I would have written the song.

There are some things that I noticed. Throughout history, it has helped if a song is paired with another form of non-musical media. In the 80s, that was MTV. Getting songs in movies or television shows is super helpful. 

And things often move in clusters. If a specific sound or song structure is popular, other popular things at the time are usually similar in that regard. So, if you were gunning for a chart-topping hit, you would need some creative inspiration, but if you were looking for which song structures or styles you should be working in, that's definitely in the book. 

You can also flip that on its head and say, ‘Oh, actually, no one's doing this, maybe I should try it.’ One of the trends I highlight in the book is how there are no key changes in popular songs anymore. From 1960 to 1990, 25% of number one hits had a key change. Now, it's literally close to, if not 0%. You can challenge yourself to try things that people are doing or aren't doing.