On the latest episode of our podcast, we take a fascinating journey into the world of music trends and data with Chris Dalla Riva, author of “Uncharted Territory: What Numbers Tell Us About the Biggest Hit Songs and Ourselves.” This episode is a must-listen for anyone who has ever been curious about the stories behind the hit songs and the charts that track their popularity.
This episode is a treasure trove of insights for music lovers and anyone interested in the intricate relationship between data and pop culture. Chris Dala Riva’s “Uncharted Territory” serves as a compelling guide to understanding the numbers behind the music we love. Tune in now to discover what the charts reveal about ourselves and the biggest hits!
GET YOUR COPY OF THE BOOK HERE (Highly Recommended!):
https://www.amazon.com/Uncharted-Territory-Numbers-Biggest-Ourselves/dp/B0F78P8RZN/
Chris Dalla Riva’s newsletter “Can’t Get Much Higher” can be found here:
https://www.cantgetmuchhigher.com/
Take advantage of our discount code lovethatsong and save 15% off t-shirts & merch from your favorite bands at OldGlory.com!
TRANSCRIPT:
Welcome back to the “I’m In Love with That Song” podcast on the Pantheon Podcast Network. I’m your host, Brad Page, and this time we’re going to take a step back from looking at an individual song and take a look at the charts, and the data behind them, and what that tells us about ourselves.
On this episode, I’m joined by Chris Dalla Riva. He’s a musician, he works for the streaming service Audiomack, and he is an author with a brand new book– it’s out right now– called “Uncharted Territory”. This is a nice, long conversation, so let’s jump right into my discussion with Chris about his new book.
Brad Page: Well, Chris Dalla Riva, thanks for joining me here on the “I’m In Love with That Song” podcast. Your new book is called “Uncharted Territory: What the Numbers Tell Us About the Biggest Hit Songs and Ourselves”. And it’s really kind of using data to understand pop songs.
I will say at the outset, I am not a chart person; the charts rarely reflect what I’m listening to. But that being said, I found the book really fun and pretty fascinating, and a great read. So it’s a pleasure to have you on the show and to talk about these particular songs– which your book focuses on all of the songs that hit number one on the Billboard Hot 100, right?
Chris Dalla Riva: Yep. Yeah, that’s Billboard’s pop chart, effectively.
Brad Page: Right. The overall “master of all charts”, right, for Billboard beginning from the very first official chart in 1958, correct?
Chris Dalla Riva: Yep. The Hot 100 started in August 1958.
Brad Page: And you go up until almost ‘til today. I mean, obviously, you have to stop writing the book at some point. And the book is available on November 13th, you said hitting the streets November 13th, 2025?
Chris Dalla Riva: Yes, November 13th. I’m excited to get it out there.
Brad Page: Yeah, well, congratulations on getting the book published. I recommend it to everyone who listens to the podcast.
So, starting in 1958, what was the first song to top the Billboard charts in 1958?
Chris Dalla Riva: The first was Ricky Nelson’s “Poor Little Fool”, which I always sort of joke is it sounds like a song from 1958; you know, it has a little jangling guitar and it’s a short little love song, but at the same time I feel like it’s indicative of many other things that were to come. You know, songs about lost love is probably the top topic for any number one song in the history of the charts, still common today. And Ricky Nelson himself was a television star on his family’s television show. And many pop stars today, from Sabrina Carpenter to Olivia Rodrigo, also started on television. So it’s cool that it was the first number one hit for those reasons.
Brad Page: Yeah. And it’s kind of interesting how that trend continues through the years, right?
Chris Dalla Riva: Yeah. And that’s the stuff that, I love tracing trends that are just weird things that happen in a particular moment. But I also love the stuff that weaves through time and can connect people of today to the stars of 60 years ago. Because in one sense, so much has changed; in another, sort of the same thing over and over again.
Brad Page: Right. Tthat’s so interesting. Getting back to the earliest days of the charts, one of the things that we see a lot in those days is the teen tragedy songs.
Chris Dalla Riva: Yes.
Brad Page: And probably “Leader of The Pack” is, that would be my pick, is probably the greatest of the teen tragedy songs. Let’s talk about that one for a little bit.
Chris Dalla Riva: Yeah, I think, I say in the book that I think “Leader of The Pack” is the teenage tragedy song to end all teenage tragedy songs.
Chris Dalla Riva: It’s like a movie playing out in your ears. And by the Shangri La’s, who I also think are just a tremendously underrated girl group from the 60s. Actually, the motivating factor for writing this book was me starting to listen to all these number one hits and hearing teenage tragedy songs come up sort of again and again in those early years, which for those who don’t know this was a sort of strange trend in the late 50s, early 60s where the topic of the song was two teenagers in love. Typically there’s an accident where one of them dies, usually involving a car. And then, you know, the other one says they’ll reunite again someday. And everything from Mark Denning’s “Teen Angel” to The Shangri La’s to Pat Boone’s “Moody River”. And that trend did die out right around the mid-60s. In a way, the Shangri La’s “Leader of The Pack” was the apex of the genre and also like the end of the genre popularly.
Brad Page: Yeah. I always kind of wonder, when you have a song like that, that like you said, it’s the ultimate teen tragedy song… like, where do you go after that? Everything else after that kind of becomes a pale imitation. Can’t top that one.
Chris Dalla Riva: Yeah, the only, the only more grandiose take I think is “Bat Out of Hell” by Meatloaf, which was like Jim Steinman’s ode to the teenage tragedy song. And as with all Meatloaf songs, it’s 10 minutes long and completely over the top. Yeah, there’s really nothing much more to say after “Leader of The Pack”.
Brad Page: Some of the other trends that we see, that you kind of trace through the book, just interesting things like fade-outs– songs that fade out.
Chris Dalla Riva: Yeah. I also write a newsletter, and once a month people write in questions and I answer them. And someone literally just yesterday wrote in and said when they listened to oldies radio, a lot of the songs fade out. And he was like, “I feel like I almost never hear a pop song on the radio these days that has a fade-out”. And this is an absolutely correct observation. It’s not like there’s no fade-outs anymore. But in the 50s, 60s and 70s, the fade-out was the top way to end a song.
Brad Page: Right.
Chris Dalla Riva: And what I discuss in the book is with a lot of these things, it’s connected to the technology at the time. There are limits to how much sound can be held without degrading on, um, a 45 or a vinyl single.
Brad Page: Mhm.
Chris Dalla Riva: So if you, if your song was running too long, you could put the longer version on the album, but on the single you would just fade it out. So that’s really connected to the technology at the time. And at the same time, radio was very, very focused on short three-minute song. So same deal. If you’re the Animals and you have a five-minute version of “House of the Rising Sun”, sure, put it on the full length. But for the single, for the radio, you faded out during the solo at like 3 minutes and 5 seconds. So I love that trend, because as you point out, it seems sort of like a silly observation like, “Oh, that’s funny, there used to be more fade-outs”, but it’s really indicative of the technology we were using to record at that time and the way we were listening to music at that time. We sort of see that again and again throughout the book, Right?
Brad Page: Yeah. Those are the kind of things that really interest me. There’s the statistic about it, but then there’s the “why” behind it. One of the first things like that, that really jumped out at me, is one of the things that I love in any great song– are hand claps.
Chris Dalla Riva: Oh, yeah.
Brad Page: And just how something so simple as the sound of humans clapping along to a beat can really add an element of joy to a song. You know, you don’t typically do it on a sad song or a slow song, but you get some of the greatest pop songs in history, particularly Motown, and they’re riddled with these wonderful hand claps that just make you want to join in, right?
Chris Dalla Riva: Totally. And that’s what I found interesting is, you know, the Motown sound and all of the imitators that Motown inspired loved hand claps. And it does make a lot of the 60s pop feel incredibly joyful. But what’s interesting was that some of those Motown songs are. They’re upbeat, but they’re sort of sad. You know, “Where Did Our Love Go” by the Supremes or “Baby Love”.
Chris Dalla Riva: These songs, the lyrical topics aren’t upbeat, but the hand claps and the arrangement really make them feel like, you know, you should be smiling while you’re singing along. And I think hand claps are a way, as you said, feel like the audience can or the listeners are part of the song. You know, anyone can clap for the most part.
Brad Page: Right. It’s the simplest way to encourage any kind of audience participation because you don’t have to know the lyrics, you don’t have to have heard the song before. You just have to have some basic sense of rhythm to be able to clap in time. And you can become part of the song, and you can join in, and you can participate.
Chris Dalla Riva: Yeah, I mean, once Barry Gordy and the people at Motown got going, they really. They really figured out the formula for what makes an enjoyable three minutes of popular music. And hand claps definitely seem to be part of that formula. And like I said, that’s. There are charts and graphs in the book, and I use numbers in a certain way. But the thing that always motivates me is I– as the name of your podcast– I love falling in love with a song, and I love just feeling it course through my veins. And “Where Did Our Love Go” is a perfect example of a song like that. It’s just so fresh.
Brad Page: One of the other things that you kind of explore in the book is, I guess what I would call the Kennedy-Beatles effect. Let’s talk a little bit about that, and kind of your take on that– the idea that partly why the Beatles captured America, the youth of America, was the assassination of President Kennedy just shortly before they broke in America. But you’re kind of skeptical of that.
Chris Dalla Riva: Yeah, this is something that I’d heard. You know, there are so many stories and myths about the Beatles that you hear when you’re growing up and you’re learning the Beatles story. And this was one that I had come across. And the timeline sort of lines up. Kennedy’s assassinated, November 22, 1963, I believe “I Want To Hold Your Hand” is released in the US Just after that. The Beatles end up on the Ed Sullivan show in 2-6-64. And then that’s, that’s Beatlemania. That’s the beginning of the British Invasion.
And you’ll read passages that basically say, America was very sad, of course, after the assassination of JFK. And then suddenly, these four smiling British boys show up with really peppy pop music. And it lifted America from this societal depression.
It’s a good story, but it doesn’t exactly line up. Like I said, the timeline sort of works. But there was already growing interest in the Beatles before Kennedy was assassinated. You start seeing news reports on major news networks covering them at, like, the beginning of November. And there had been Beatles records released in the US at small. On small labels previously, but they really did not have that marketing push that a new act needs. And “I Want To Hold Your Hand”, released by Capitol Records, finally had much more money behind it. And again, it came out right after Kennedy was assassinated. So of course there was a bit more interest. But like I said, at the same time, even newspapers and television networks started covering the Beatles in early November 1963. So it just sort of happens that Kennedy is assassinated in the middle of that and makes it look like it’s a perfect connection between Kennedy’s assassination and the Beatles rise. But really it’s just, it sort of just happened at the same time. I’m sure there was some sort of connection there, but it’s not as strong.
Brad Page: I don’t think it’s entirely a coincidence, but it’s like so many things– rarely in life is there one thing, one cause of something. There’s usually a bunch of other things in the stew that are all interacting and affecting things. And I think the general mood of the culture, post Kennedy assassination is part of it, but it’s… it’s certainly not like, “Well, if Kennedy hadn’t been assassinated, the Beatles never would have been big”. You know, I think that’s completely, you know what I mean?
Chris Dalla Riva: And that’s, that’s sort of the point that I try to get across is that, like, the Beatles were going to come to America whether Kennedy was killed or not. It’s possible that his assassination maybe gave them some sort of boost in popularity that set off the whole chain of dominoes that led to, you know, Beatlemania and whatnot. But the Beatles I don’t think would have been some obscure British band had Kennedy served out his term.
Brad Page: Another area that you explore a little bit in the book is, I guess what we’d call “literary lyrics”, and a song that you call out is “Ode To Billy Joe” by Bobby Gentry.
Chris Dalla Riva: There’s this idea that I would always come across is that the late 60s, something was going on in general, just in the music space, but specifically with lyrics. I mean, you get songs like “Mr. Tambourine Man” and “The Sound of Silence” that clearly have a more literary feel than your pop songs at the beginning of the decade. At the same time, you get a bunch of pop songs that are responding to external events. “Eve of Destruction” by Barry Maguire comes to mind. Or “People Got to Be Free” by the Rascals, “Respect” by Aretha Franklin, even something like “Harper Valley PTA”. So something was clearly in the air. And “Ode To Billy Joe”, for me, is the perfect representation of a song that I think only could have topped the charts in the late 1960s, when there was clearly this literary flavor to some popular lyrics. As I point out, of course, not every song. You know, Herb Alpert was still incredibly popular at the time– no disrespect to him, but, you know, those aren’t lyrics you’re picking apart in your English class. But “Ode To Billy Joe” is like this very complicated narrative that you would almost think could not work in a popular song. And at the same time, it has a perfect string arrangement. It’s an incredible vocal by Bobby Gentry, and it just illustrates, again, just lyrical trends that I don’t think could have happened at any other time. It’s a. It’s a perfect song in my opinion, another song I would say that I love.
Brad Page: I think one of the things that we forget is that at that time in the 60s, you know, the Beatles were big, but they weren’t necessarily big with everybody initially, right? You had the college crowd, which is not an insignificant purchasing audience. There was much, you know, folk music was kind of the hip thing to that crowd. And pop music. And what we would think of rock and roll as kind of, you know, more of sort of the Chuck Berry kind of thing was not what a lot of those college kids were listening to. They were getting into, it’s the scene that Dylan, of course, would come out of. But all of those acts, from Joan Baez on, that was what was cool if you were listening, if you were a college kid in those days listening to music, you weren’t probably listening to the Beatles so much until things started crossfeeding each other, right?
And then Dylan gets inspired by the Beatles, the Beatles get inspired by Dylan. They’re writing better lyrics. You’ve got a band like the Byrds that meld the two things together. And then you start seeing that these things can be hit records. Peter, Paul and Mary take kind of a more pop approach to Dylan, and have a big hit with “Blowing in the Wind”. But initially, I think– at least my take on it– when I look back, kind of what I see is there’s always kind of a division in a way; of like, if you are a freshman in college, sophomore in college in that era, you probably were looking a little askance at Herman’s Hermits and the British Invasion stuff, and kind of lumping the Beatles in with that, in a way.
Chris Dalla Riva: Yeah. And one thing I really liked about listening to every number one hit is that you get a taste for all of these different things that were popular at the same time. Because it’s really easy to look at the 60s. And to your point, just think that, oh, everyone was listening to this very highbrow, popular, folksy music. When at the same time, you have other British Invasion bands. Herman’s Hermits is a perfect example. That’s not the most sophisticated music, which was also popular at the time. But I think you’re totally right that by the end of the decade, you really have a crossover between a lot of these different crowds into the mainstream. And it leads to, I think, some of the most interesting popular lyrics that you hear in the 20th century.
Brad Page: Absolutely. And the kind of lyrics that you never heard seven, eight, ten years before that.
I mean, I think Chuck Berry– there’s a lot of things you can say about Chuck Berry, but I think as a lyricist, I think he’s one of the great rock and roll lyricists. But it’s a completely different thing than what you would later see, you know, Lennon writing or of course Dylan. The lyrics really changed a lot once you get into the 60s and, you know, pop music got smarter.
Chris Dalla Riva: Yeah. I mean, there’s… I don’t know if this is an apocryphal story, but apparently when Chuck Berry wrote Johnny B. Goode, one of the opening lines is, “There lived a country boy”, supposedly was supposed to be “There lived a colored boy named Johnny B. Goode”. And the record label was like, “Nah, that’s not gonna work”. I feel like if that song were released at the end of the 60s, you would probably have had that more socially aware lyric. Because there were so many popular songs that were clearly socially conscious in a way that they weren’t, like you said, not just in the 50s, I mean, four or five years earlier. It’s a rapid change.
Brad Page: Yeah. Yeah. Just the difference between, say, 1964 and 1967.
Chris Dalla Riva: Yes.
Brad Page: You know, just a few years difference. But you just listen to the music from on either side of those dates, and it’s very, very different. Yeah. And you know, Chuck Berry songs like “Brown Eyed Handsome Man” are very coded in their racial references, but you don’t have to scratch too deep to kind of see what he’s, what he’s saying there. But it wouldn’t be too much longer than you could say what you actually wanted to say– You could be Curtis Mayfield in writing those kind of songs.
Chris Dalla Riva: Yeah.
Brad Page: Just a few years later.
Chris Dalla Riva: Exactly.
Brad Page: And another thing that you highlight in the book that I really found interesting, something that I kind of mulled over but I never really put my finger on it quite the way you did, is something you call “multiple discovery”. Can you talk about that for a bit?
Chris Dalla Riva: Yeah, this is, I think, another thread that sort of runs through the book. And this is not a, it’s not a musical idea, it’s just this idea that we often think of invention as the brilliant man or woman shows up and they discover gravity, like Sir Isaac Newton or what have you… or the law of gravity– I don’t know, I’m not a physicist.
Brad Page: Yeah.
Chris Dalla Riva: But there’s this alternate idea that usually ideas are sort of bubbling at the time, and we see people come up with the same thing sort of right around the same time in similar places. One of the example, really famous examples of this that I mentioned in the book is again, Sir Isaac Newton and this guy Leibniz both happen to create calculus, like, literally right around the same time. And you would think calculus is a really complicated math. How did two people stumble into this at the same time?
And this is something you sort of see over and over again, is that the time was ripe for a discovery. There were all those things that led up to it, and there were people, of course, looking into the same thing. There are occasionally times when something is invented or discovered and it’s just pulled out of thin air and nobody was close to it. But I try to apply this idea to music, and I don’t say it to, like, disparage artists that we give tons of credit, like Dylan or the Beatles, but it creates a much simpler story when you can be like, The Beatles showed up and suddenly everyone was doing more stuff in the studio, or artists started writing their own songs. When history is usually more complicated than that. There’s usually a bunch of people who are starting to explore these ideas at the same time. So I try to frame it as artists writing and producing their own songs was a multiple discovery of sorts. You know, I’m applying a scientific idea to an artistic area, but I think it sort of applies.
Brad Page: Yeah, for sure. And there’s a podcaster named Andrew Hickey who does a show called “The History of Rock Music In 500 Songs”– fantastic podcast…
Chris Dalla Riva: Yeah, that’s tremendous.
Brad Page: …and he’s great, and one thing he always says– it comes up on almost every episode– is “There is no first anything”, meaning that, like, something simple, like “what was the first song to have a distorted guitar on it?” Well, there’s dozens of examples because, like you say, there’s always things bubbling up at the same time, and somebody in New York could be applying the same record technique as someone in LA, completely unknown to each other. It just sort of happens, it’s something strangely in the air, in the ether at the time, and things just kind of come up.
So really identifying the first of anything is virtually impossible, because there’s always something that’s, well, almost the same thing, or very close to it, that was happening around the same time. And it’s usually the one who gets the hit record is the one who gets to write history, so to speak. You know what I mean?
And it’s no diss on Dylan or the Beatles to say that they weren’t exactly the first… You know, the Beatles didn’t really invent those haircuts.
Chris Dalla Riva: No.
Brad Page: But they were able to take that look and present it in a way that worked. I mean, to me, the person who’s, I always think, is kind of the greatest at that kind of thing, was Bowie. Because a lot of the things that Bowie became famous for, and the changes that he went through… like, he was not the first glam artist. He was not the first artist to go to Germany and do the “Low”/”Heroes”, period kind of music. You know what I mean? He wasn’t the first guy to do that white soul singer kind of thing. But he was always able to take that inspiration and figure out, “how do I make that work for me?” And many times did it better than anyone else.
But he didn’t necessarily create out of thin air any of those trends. But somehow, he was able to take those trends and master them in a way and present them to an audience in a successful way to make him— and not just once, but to do it multiple times over his lifetime. To me, that’s the genius of Bowie: Not that he invented glam, but that he was able to take it and make it work in such a successful way.
Chris Dalla Riva: There are so many artists like that, they can take a sound and distill it in a way that nobody else can, even if they didn’t create it. I think that’s also an example of genius, which, you know, part f genius is inventing something, part of it is perfecting it.
Brad Page: Right. Let’s jump ahead a little bit into the 70s and talk about Disco. And one of the songs that you called out to me to kind of highlight is “Hot Stuff” by Donna Summer. So let’s talk about that.
Chris Dalla Riva: Yeah, When I talk about the book, people are always like, “Oh, did you discover any music that you didn’t think you’d like that you did?” My go-to answer is always disco. Because I had the perception of disco as being this silly, you know, Dance music from the 70s, almost cartoonish. And there are some disco songs that are like that. But there’s really a lot of great stuff that came out of the disco movement. And “Hot Stuff” is a great song. Donna Summer.
Donna Summer and Giorgio Moroder made a ton of great music during the mid to late 70s. And part of the way I talk about, or the reason I bring up “Hot Stuff” is in a discussion around genre. There is a long history of genre being tied to race. Genre is very tied up with race. And I feel like when you look at, say, classic rock radio today, it’s heavily dominated by white artists of that era. Even though there are black stars from that time who were making music with guitars that could very easily fit on classic rock radio. And I point to “Hot Stuff” by Donna Summer because it has a searing guitar solo… yes, you know, it’s got that disco beat, but they’re really rocking that song in the same way that the Stones were rocking the disco beat on like, “Miss You”, and “Miss You” is something you’ll hear on every classic rock station.
I’ve suggested this online that “Hot Stuff” could be heard on a classic rock station, and the reactions I get are always crazy. But it’s just a good illustration of how our perception of genre is not always tied to what the music sounds like. It’s tied to who the artist is, what they look like, who is typically thought of as listening to that music. And there’s a lot of stuff, I think in the disco world, a lot of women who made music around that time who were making rock or rock adjacent music, but we don’t think of it that way.
Brad Page: You could take that song and take the disco beat out of it, put a little bit of heavier drums in it… You wouldn’t have to change it that much to, like you say, make it a straight on classic rock song. It’s. It’s got that riff, you know, that works on heavy guitar.
At the same time, you’ve got a song like “Another Brick in the Wall” by Pink Floyd, which has a disco beat, right? “Miss You” by the Stones… Had those artists been black and played those exact same songs, they wouldn’t have gotten played on rock radio, simply because of this artificial racial thing that we layer on top of the music. Right?
Chris Dalla Riva: Yeah. That has always fascinated me, and I feel like another good example, And this isn’t, this is less about race, but I’ve always thought that the song “Tragedy” by the Bee Gees, which was a number one in the late 70s, has like a metal riff, but it’s obviously performed as a disco song, and I’m always looking for someone to cover it as a metal song!
Brad Page: You called out one song as having predicted the future, and that was “Set Adrift On Memory Bliss” by PM Dawn. So talk about that one.
Chris Dalla Riva: Yeah, bold claim from me here. I write about this in Chapter Nine of the book. I wasn’t familiar with this song before I heard it. It’s an interesting hip hop song from the early 90s, but it’s more in the alternative hip hop space. If you’re familiar with A Tribe Called Quest, I feel like it’s a little bit closer to that than something like NWA or even MC Hammer, some other artists that were popular at that time. And I say it predicted the future for two reasons: One, because it was the first number one hit under Billboard’s new system called SoundScan. Previously, Billboard tracked their charts just by calling up record stores and being like, “Hey, what’s selling?” Which was obviously a valid way to create a chart, but not the most accurate way.
Brad Page: Yeah, and lent itself to a lot of… maybe corruption is too strong a word, but certainly manipulation.
Chris Dalla Riva: Yes. And even if you’re not actually, even if no one’s actively trying to manipulate things, there’s still just biases that are going to creep in because, you know, humans make mistakes. But under this new system, it was an accurate reading of what were people actually purchasing when they scanned a barcode. That data was sent to Nielsen, who ran SoundScan and ultimately trickled into Billboard. So “Set Adrift On Memory Bliss” was the first number one under this new paradigm. And what was really interesting was when Billboard flipped the switch, the charts sort of changed overnight. A lot of pop stars and rock stars from the late 80s were no longer on the charts, and it was more dominated by hip hop, country music, and alternative rock. So it seemed like the charts were being manipulated in a certain way. And I say this song predicted the future because it was symbolic of how hip hop was going to be the dominant cultural force for the next few decades. But at the same time, there are things about the song that I think predict the future too, in the sense that, again, it’s a hip hop song. Hip hop’s about to become much more popular.
PM Dawn’s a black duo. And what we also see after the SoundScan change is that there are many more black artists on the charts. And of course, there were black stars before 1991, but again, it was the same thing. And black artists in the past had complained about this, that Billboard wasn’t surveying the record stores where black listeners would go purchase music. So symbolic of that shift too.
And I sort of joke that “Set Adrift On Memory Bliss” has the word “damn” in it. You know, not the most explicit of explicit words. But with the rise of hip hop, we see more explicit content in lyrics because hip hop is a much more lyrical genre than anything that had come before it.
So I say that it predicts the future because of just the happenstance that it was the first number one under this new paradigm, but also because of who the artists were, what kind of music they were making, what they looked like, what they were saying. It was an early example of many things that were to come throughout the 90s and 2000s. And plus, like I said, it’s more of a melodic hip hop style. And that would become popular in like the 2010s. So it was sort of a precursor to that too.
Brad Page: You mention, and this is another thing that kind of really interests me in the book, it’s something I’ve thought about a lot too, is the role of context in how you absorb a song. You know, is it a song that’s suited for a bar or an arena? Is it a song you associate with being in your car, or listening to in your living room, and how that affects how you take in a song?
Chris Dalla Riva: Yeah, I mean, if you listen to house music while you’re sitting in your house, it’s probably not going to sound good, as if you went out to some dark club and we’re listening to it with a bunch of other bodies packed next to you. So context is very important if you are going to enjoy certain music. David Byrne talks about this in his book “How Music Works”. And he positions it as, like a very radical idea, that we really write music to fit where it’s going to be heard. And I think it’s logical when you think about it.
And now sometimes if there’s a song I don’t like, I’m like, “oh, uh, you know, maybe I’m not hearing it in the right situation”. I think about that with a lot of dance music and I’m just sitting at home working my job listening to dance music. Yeah. Maybe I’ll enjoy it as I’m punching around in Excel, but I’m sure I enjoy it a little bit more if I was out at a club.
Brad Page: Yeah. There’s a thing I always find– and a lot of it’s generational…. I’m an old fart at this point, and there’s a lot of modern music that I don’t, it just doesn’t resonate with me. I got nothing against it, it’s just, it’s not written for me.
Chris Dalla Riva: Yeah.
Brad Page: But I find that a lot of stuff, hip hop or hip hop adjacent stuff, that sounds great on record but like if you, if you see the acts perform live, it’s just, It kind of falls flat. I think because it’s music that’s designed in the studio, for earbuds, and not really designed for live in concert type performance.
Chris Dalla Riva: I don’t even think that’s a– as someone who likes a lot of hip hop music, I don’t think that’s a particularly hot take. Not a knock on the genre. I think you can go see hip hop artists in concert, but it’s very different than if you were to go see a rock artist in concert.
Brad Page: Yeah. And I think that’s evolved over time because, you know, hip hop was originally music literally from the streets, right? Yes. Guys plugging turntables into lamp posts on the street in New York.
Chris Dalla Riva: Right.
Brad Page: And from that, you got acts like Public Enemy, that I think are incredible and that music is so intense and I think works really well live because there’s so much energy and power to it. But as things evolved over time to be more produced with loops and samples and got further and further away from a live setting. Yeah, I just, I don’t feel like it works nearly as well live as it does on record.
Chris Dalla Riva: I mean there are, there are literally even people today who will get signed to a big record contract because they’ve built up a big audience online, and they have never performed live one time. And then suddenly, you know, the label’s got to stick them out there because you do have to perform live eventually and it’s horrible. Some of them, some of these people become good live performers. But we live in a very strange time where you can build a huge audience without ever stepping foot on a stage.
Brad Page: Yeah. It is a very, very interesting time that we’re in for music now, and we’ll get there, as we go through this conversation.
But as we kind of work our way forward, you spend some good detail talking about Milli Vanilli– an act that, you know, I’m not particularly fond of, but I do think got a bum deal compared to where we are today. And this idea of what was once controversial eventually becomes commonplace. And today we see all kinds of acts, including mainstream classic rock acts, performing with backing tracks and vocals that aren’t live.
Chris Dalla Riva: Yeah.
Brad Page: And it cost these guys their career and, you know, at least one of them their lives, I think. And yet today, turn on most TV, whether it’s the Grammys or Saturday Night Live or whatever… go see a concert, and there’s a damn good chance that the performance you’re seeing, a chunk of it is not live. It’s acts performing to backing tracks, maybe not even singing their actual vocals.
Chris Dalla Riva: It’s fascinating. A sort of sad thing to think about. And I agree with you– You know, if I was on a podcast called “I’m NOT in Love With That Song”, I would pick basically anything from the Milli Vanilli catalog. I’m not here defending the music. But it does seem like they got… Like, they got the Grammy stripped from them. I mean, I understand why people were upset.
Brad Page: It’s just when you look at it in the context of today, like, literally hundreds of artists are doing today what they did then, and nobody bats an eye about it.
Chris Dalla Riva: No. And I think they did get a raw deal in that sense. And I sort of mentioned that in the book, and I’m actually glad you mentioned, you bring up how it’s not just, like, young pop stars– it’s like classic rock artists who are touring now. So I do think it’s become something that people expect.
And something that the one guy who’s still living from Milli Vanilli said, in a book called “I Want My MTV”, which is a great oral history of MTV, he’s trying to defend himself, and he’s like, you know what popular entertainment is just about, “if the audience is entertained, nothing else matters”. I don’t know if I agree with that completely, but in terms of just the music business, it’s clear that people agree with that. And it’s clear in this day and age, fans don’t really care– like, they’re not going to shows to hear a live performance, people are going to just party. So Milli Vanilli, in a way, predicted the future, too.
Brad Page: Another area that you delve into in the book that I always find fascinating is everything revolving around copyright.
Chris Dalla Riva: Oh yeah. One of my pet peeve topics. Yeah, yeah, copyright. I mean, incredibly vital to making it possible for the music industry to exist. If you look at like early songwriters in the 1800s, I mean, these guys would die penniless, and they would write really popular songs, because there’s really no copyright protection. Copyright’s a vital, vital tool.
People have gotten crazy with it over the last couple of decades. First, copyright terms are really, really long. Now they last for the life of the creator plus 70 years. The idea that your copyright would outlive you is like, who is that benefiting? Eventually your works belong to the people to some degree.
And we’ve seen this over the last few years, where financial firms have gotten involved in the music industry. They’re buying up tons and tons of copyrights. And I think copyright lasting that long really does a disservice to younger artists, because it makes it more attractive to invest in music of the past than to spend money trying to develop new talent.
Like I said, if you know The Beatles’ music is going to be generating royalties until 2100, why not spend money acquiring that catalog rather than spending it developing up-and-coming talent?
Brad Page: Mhm.
Chris Dalla Riva: I just think the tremendously long copyright terms create a lot of distortions that are actually bad for artists. Unless you are the most successful artists of all time. And because of that, those people who are making all that money, they have a tremendous amount of power to prevent people from using their work in any way possible. I just think there are a lot of bad incentives around copyright terms that last that long.
Brad Page: Yeah, I have mixed feelings about it and I’ve… and honestly, I don’t really know exactly where I come down on certain things, because on one hand, I do feel like nobody wants to see an artist that you love die penniless in their 80s in some terrible nursing home because they got screwed out of their royalties or whatever. And the idea that if you’re an artist with some integrity, that you don’t necessarily want your songs to be selling tires or cans of soup or whatever it is, you know, or to be used as the theme song on “The Apprentice” or something.
Chris Dalla Riva: Yeah.
Brad Page: But at the same time, like you said, you don’t want things that are going to shut out new artists from being successful. So I just, it’s just something that I wrestle with and it’s not a clear-cut way to come down on it. And I just, I don’t really know what the answer is.
Chris Dalla Riva: I’m not copyright lawyer so I don’t have all the answers. But I do just like to wrestle with the complexities of…
Brad Page: Well, I think as serious listeners, that we have to wrestle with these kind of things. Everything from the inherent racism in the industry to issues like this, and copyright, and kind of everything in between. Because we as listeners are fueling this with our purchasing dollars and our continued support of the music and the artists, so we have a responsibility as listeners, I think, to at least engage with these kind of deeper pieces of the business and think about what are we supporting.
Chris Dalla Riva: Yeah, I totally agree.
Brad Page: Later in the book, as time marches on, you talk a lot about the emergence of the Swedish songwriters and we start to get the Britney Spears era. They’re masterful in a way, and yet, at the same, time often feel to me like they’re stamped out of a machine. Like there’s kind of like an assembly line of making pop songs. When it works it’s, you know, you can’t really argue with it. But there is also, I don’t know, I kind of feel like a assembly line structure to some of that stuff.
Chris Dalla Riva: Yeah, the short story there is that in the 90s, this Swedish studio called, I think it’s Cheiron Studios, was created in Sweden by this guy named Denniz Pop. Denniz Pop ends up tragically dying from stomach cancer very young. But his proteges, the most successful of which is a guy named Max Martin, start producing all of the big boy and girl groups of the late 90s. Think Britney Spears, NSync, Backstreet Boys. And then Max Martin just goes on to become arguably the most successful songwriter of all time. To the point I’m talking, like, more successful than Paul McCartney in terms of charting songs.
Brad Page: Right.
Chris Dalla Riva: He’s worked with everyone. He’s worked “Since You’ve Been Gone”, Kelly Clarkson, all the big Katy Perry hits.
Chris Dalla Riva: Big Weeknd hits, Taylor Swift hits. It goes on and on and on. I mean, the man is tremendously talented and successful. And the controversy is, you’re sort of getting at is that, but there are a lot of good pop songs, but it does come across as formulaic. And this idea that, if I want to hit, I’ll just go see what some middle-aged Swedish man is thinking and all American teenagers will gobble it up.
The counterpoint that I always try to, I actually don’t bring this up in the book, but sometimes when I talk about this I do, is how different is it from what we were talking about earlier? Like the Motown machine. Motown clearly had a formula and a sound. And I don’t know. I don’t know if it’s that much different. I understand when it doesn’t work, it doesn’t work. But when it works, it can be quite good.
Brad Page: Yeah. And again, these are the kind of things that I wrestle with, because I love so much of Motown. And yet at the same time, I get annoyed by some of the Max Martin stuff. And you’re right, there’s not a huge difference in the general sense of, like, you go to these producers for a sound, they’re creating a sound. Motown is a sound. And it is one of the most production line sounds in rock history. You know a Motown song before you hit the first verse, right? You can identify it by the sound and the style and the vibe of it. And that doesn’t bother me. Why does that not bother me and yet I get annoyed by some ancillary Max Martin production? You know, I don’t know. It’s just, these are the things that make us human beings, I think– we’re just, just inherently contradictory and hypocritical. There’s never been a person born who wasn’t hypocritical on something.
Chris Dalla Riva: I think the one thing, like, I mean, you could even point to, like, songs from Tin Pan Alley, sort of. They were trying to write hit songs.
Brad Page: Sure.
Chris Dalla Riva: I think the one thing with Max Martin that I find fascinating, Max Martin, like all of his acolytes, is that they’ve had success for such a long time. Whereas, I mean, the the height. Motown was successful technically for decades, but the height of its power, where they have like a very specific sound, I mean, that’s only a couple of years, right? Whereas the Max Martin domination, I mean, it’s been… I was born in the 90s. I mean, it’s been literally my whole life that his specific brand of pop music has been popular.
And the other thing is he hops around styles. It’s like in the early 2000s, say pop punk is popular. You know he’s going to write “Since You’ve Been Gone” for Kelly Clarkson. But then in the same breath, you know, that style goes out of favor and he’ll jump on whatever the next popular trend is. He’s great at writing melodies and great melodies can live in any genre. But he’s not like inventing new styles and stuff. And I feel like I could understand people getting fed up with that. And I say that as I like a lot of his songs, but I don’t like all of them. Yeah, I need a break from every songwriter every once in a while.
Brad Page: Sure. And that kind of brings us into the modern era, and how things have been changed so much– I feel like now maybe more than ever– by social media and things like TikTok, and how just the length of songs are affected by what you can get on TikTok.
Chris Dalla Riva: Yeah, I mean, same thing, I always like to compare things across time. In the 80s people were certainly making music to fit the MTV format or to make great music videos, because they knew it would sell records. People today definitely write to TikTok. I think the problems with TikTok are that you are getting bite-sized pieces of content. So you could have a song that is actually really horrible and it could have a 15-second moment that is just perfect for a TikTok trend. And artists definitely try to write to this.
Brad Page: Yeah.
Chris Dalla Riva: And then the song itself does not have legs. Whereas that was really not exactly possible in the past where you could have like one little 15-second tidbit that was gonna work and then the rest of the song didn’t. I’m sure there are some examples you could point to, but I don’t know if it’s a problem for music specifically but just the Internet in general. It’s just like the TikTok-ification of everything, where we’re supposed to consume content in tiny little bite-sized pieces that mess with our ability to consume longer-form, more serious, longer form content. I think that’s a problem.
There have been great songs that I found on TikTok. There have been horrible songs that I found on TikTok. But I think the music is just dealing with a larger societal issue about how we consume media. Just this unfettered slop of content that– how long does it take to watch a movie? Two hours? In two hours, I could go through literally thousands of TikToks. It certainly doesn’t feel healthy.
Brad Page: Yeah. And everything from, nowadays you have songs that become hits, whatever a hit even means on something like TikTok, that has virtually nothing to do with the participation of the actual creator of the music. And you talk about this in the book, about how somebody can put a piece of music out there in the world and it doesn’t really go anywhere until somebody else, completely unrelated, picks it up and does a dance video to it. And then that’s what catches on. But the artist is almost forgotten in that process, right? Because it’s not the artist’s participation that made it a hit, it was the fact that, oh, now everybody’s making a dance video to this song, that they probably don’t even know who the actual creator of the song is.
Chris Dalla Riva: Yeah, I write about this sort of frequently. I call it “the anonymization of the pop star”. Whereas, you know, I was comparing this to MTV before, but one of the key differences is when you tuned in to watch the video for “Like A Virgin”, like it was clearly Madonna made that video and you were associating the song with Madonna. Whereas if “Like a Virgin” came out today, exactly to your point, it’s possible that some kid starts dancing to it, it goes viral and people become very familiar with the sound, but they don’t associate it with the artist specifically.
Brad Page: They associate it with the dance or whatever. But, but like “Madonna, who’s she? Uh, never heard of her”. Hard to believe, but that kind of thing is happening today.
Chris Dalla Riva: Like I said, that’s what I sort of started at the beginning of this, with this idea, there are some ideas that you see while listening to thousands of popular songs over the decades that are really of a specific moment. And there are certain things that come up again and again and again, and it speaks to human psychology and speaks to the technology that we’re using. And there’s always, there’s usually pros and cons. With a lot of this stuff streaming, it’s incredible. I can go on and listen to quite literally any piece of recorded music ever. I mean, that’s still eye-popping to think about.
Brad Page: It’s incredible. But at the same time, you have to.. you don’t know what you don’t know. So if you don’t know to ask for it, and if it’s just going to deliver the same slop that was being delivered to you on the radio, that frustrates me a little bit– that all the music in the world is available to us, but you have to know where to start to look.
Chris Dalla Riva: No, that’s, that’s a totally fair criticism of the system.
Brad Page: Well, this is as good a place as any to wrap up our conversation. So, thanks for coming on the podcast, Chris. I hope you enjoyed it.
Chris Dalla Riva: This was, this was unbelievable. This was the most in-depth conversation I think I’ve had about music in promotion of this book. So thank you so much.
Brad Page: Well, thanks for that. And before we go, tell everyone one more time about the book.
Chris Dalla Riva: Yeah, I mean, if you enjoyed our conversation, definitely check out my book, “Uncharted Territory: What Numbers Tell Us About The Biggest Hit Songs And Ourselves”. My name is Chris Dalla Riva, you can find me all over the internet very easily. I’m on most social media platforms, and I have a newsletter called “Can’t Get Much Higher”. But definitely go check out the book. It’ll be available wherever you purchase books online. Amazon, Barnes and Noble, Walmart, Books A Million, all that jazz. So if you like the conversation, check it out. And thanks for having me, Brad.
Brad Page: Oh, it’s been my pleasure, Chris.
Chris Dalla Riva, everyone. I highly recommend this book. I had a great time reading it, I know you will too. Go get it.
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