Urban Rhythms: Pop Music and Popular Culture.

A Research on the Fragmented Culture of Iran’s Youth in the Content of Pop Music Lyrics

This research was done in order to describe the content of proposed lyrics’ concepts in permissible pop music based on published audio works’ list of music publication office in 2009 among 200 albums of music office published audio works,  the 10 number of pop singers were randomly selected and the lyrics’ concept of 70 music were also investigated. In the process of data analysis in the first ...

Pop Stars and Idolatry: an Investigation of the Worship of Popular Music Icons, and the Music and Cult of Prince

Prince is an artist who integrates elements from the sacred into his work. He uses popular iconography to present himself as an icon of consumer culture, as a deified ‘rock god’ worshipped by his fans, and as a preacher leading his audience like a congregation. His personality cult mixes spirituality and sexuality, and deals with issues of ecstasy and liberation, a transgressional approach that...

What Makes Popular Culture Popular?: Product Features and Optimal Differentiation in Music

In this paper, we propose a new explanation for why certain cultural products outperform their peers to achieve widespread success. We argue that products’ positioning within feature space significantly predicts their popular success. Using tools from computer science, we construct a novel data set that allows us to test how the musical features of nearly 27,000 songs from Billboard’s Hot 100 c...

Christianity and Popular Culture

Popular music access: The Sony music browser

The intentionally ambiguous expression “Popular Music Browser” reflects the two main goals of this project, which started in 1998, at Sony CSL laboratory. First, we are interested in human-centered issues related to browsing “Popular Music”. Popular here means that the music accessed to is widely distributed, and known to many listeners. Second, we consider “popular browsing” of music, i.e. mak...