When science uncovered the catchiest song in history: “They don’t just pop up for nothing”
The most important asset behind any big hit in music is: money. Forget diminished riffs, syncopated me
In the battle for a big hit, the most important factor in music is: money.
Forget diminished riffs, syncopated melodies or singalong choruses. These facets might render a song memorable and catchy, but the main thing you need to take over the minds of the world is exposure. And a hell of a lot of it.
Ask any marketing exec and they’ll tell you with a shit-eating grin, to achieve ubiquity, you need a whole host of fat cash. You always have, and you always will. For better or worse, the public applies meaning to popularity. This was proven by a crooked musical scam.
Payola truly came to public attention in 1959. A congressional investigation found that record labels were paying hefty sums to DJs to ensure that certain songs got plenty of airplay. This might have been deemed illegal, but it has never really stopped. Even in the 2000s, leaked emails subpoenaed by then-New York District Attorney Eliot Spitzer uncovered labels that would hire people to call radio stations and request certain tracks.
This was just one of many similar sinister tactics. This is often far more effective promotion than earnestly suggesting that something is a potential masterpiece. Hear a song once and it is just a song. Hear a song a hundred times and it must be a hit worth listening to. And when you hear a hit, you start to hear it everywhere – even when it isn’t playing.
In other words, how many times have you had a song stuck in your head, not because you like it, but because it is presently being played to death? Sideways glances towards TikTok, therefore, must surely follow. The wheel is almost certainly still in spin in one form or another because the truth is: you can’t have a great big stinking money-making hit without people hearing it. It’s as simple as that: the more people hear a song, the more it gets stuck in their heads, and the more it gets stuck in their heads, the more they want to listen to it.
A track lodged in your synapses becomes a scratch you want to itch. In a way, you become addicted to it, particularly if it is catchy and you liked it in the first place. Just ask a toddler with a penchant for ‘Baby Shark’.
But what is the catchiest pop song of them all?
Brainworms are strange, nuanced beasts, but nobody has ever had one weave its way into their cranium from just a single listen. That much is clear from the fact that science decreed that the catchiest track of all time is one that has been played on a proverbial loop. Taking the top spot for the catchiest song of all time following a year-long study by the Museum of Science and Industry (MOSI) is ‘Wannabe’ by The Spice Girls.
This song was everywhere in the mid-1990s. After its release in the summer of 1996, it quickly shot to number one in 22 countries. The Spice Girls were a sensation, and this was their best-selling hit. From the outside looking in, this ubiquity has just as much to do with its scientific recognisability as anything musical. In the UK, it spent 18 weeks in the top 40, and it remains the biggest-selling single by a female group.
“Songs that come to mind spontaneously usually pop up because there is either an emotional or some other significance to them.”
Dr Concetta Tomaino
Alongside an undeniably catchy musical composition, this meant that the MOSI study found that participants were able to identify the track within 2.29 seconds, and it remained ringing in their brains thereafter. You retain the hook through prolonged exposure. And boy, has the world been exposed to ‘Wannabe’. But that also leads to a certain emotional relationship with the song.
This sense of rapid recall is linked to how our brains work. As Dr Concetta Tomaino, the executive director of the Institute for Music and Neurologic Function, explained during one of my own investigations into the science of brainworms: “You know how the images in dreams are really metaphors for something else? These songs that come to mind spontaneously usually pop up because there is either an emotional or some other significance to them.“
She continued: “They don’t just pop up for nothing. Something in your brain in the back of your mind is processing something, and it goes, ‘Boom, there’s an association with that song’. Otherwise, it wouldn’t have a reason for popping up.”
Well, when you hear a song a couple of thousand times, inadvertently or otherwise, there are plenty of connections to be made between the track and any other impetus that coincided. So, if ‘Wannabe’ pops up in your mind from time to time, it might not be because you’re a closet Spice Girls fan, but simply because your brain has heard it so much, it is quite literally lodged in there.
