Beatles not the architect of music revolution: Study

By NewsGram Staff Writer

In a startling discovery, which opposes a popular opinion, researchers have found out that the so called "British Invasion" of US pop music by bands like The Beatles and The Rolling Stones did not start the rock evolution.

The researchers, in the study, released by the journal Royal Society Open Science, found that the musical revolution was already underway in the US much before the arrival of The Beatles and The Rolling Stones.

The disclosure was made after studying the trends in style, the diversity of the music charts and the musical revolutions that have occurred in the last 50 years. Also, close to 17,000 songs from the US Billboard Hot 100 charts from 1960 to 2010, were analyzed.

The study found out that the greatest musical revolution in US pop history did not happen in 1964, but in 1991 when the hip-hop music arrived in the charts.

According to the findings of the study, the least diverse year was 1986, supposedly caused by the sudden popularization of drum machines and samplers at that time.

"For the first time, we can measure musical properties in recordings on a large scale. We can actually go beyond what music experts tell us by looking directly into the songs, measuring their make-up and understanding how they have changed," said Matthias Mauch from Queen Mary University of London.

"The rise of hip-hop caused the single most radical change in the US charts", Mauch added.