I’ve been thinking about this project a lot. It started off as my final project for a predictive analysis class, but I’m still thinking about it a fair amount. Here’s the project wiki page: http://bluwiki.com/go/Music_Analysis.
The purpose of this project is to predict, out of a set of songs, which will be successful and which will not. I think it has some pretty good implications in the music industry. A lot of people have done work in the field, but an open-sourced movement with people purely motivated by solving cool problems should yield some interesting results!
Hypothesis: There is a correlation between the contents (lyrical, sounds, cultural) and how successful a song is throughout its lifetime, and the correlation coefficient is at least .6.
I’m aware that my technical writing can be confusing sometimes. Please make edits to the page if you can think of a way to make it more clear. Don’t hesitate to post any questions, here, or on the wiki page.