Can we use neuroscience and AI to predict hit songs? Maybe.

The Holy Grail for the recorded music industry has always been a method of creating a surefire, can't-miss way of predicting which songs will be hits. We might be a step closer.

There’s a scene in the biopic Creation Stories where Ewan Brenner, channelling Creation Records founder Alan McGee in a scene with his therapist, rants about the demands of finding The Next Big Thing in music. “I’m spending millions on noises that I have no idea if anyone will like!” Welcome to the record business.

What makes a song a hit? No one knows. It’s a mysterious organic process that no one has been able to unlock.

One record company president described things like this: “Running a record label is based on risk. We rely on creative types — musicians — to eventually supply us with songs that we hope the public will like. A song can be objectively great but if the public doesn’t bite, there’s no amount of money we can throw at marketing and promotion to make them like it.”

This hasn’t stopped people from trying to come up with a way to accurately predict hits.

When rock’n’roll was still young, a couple of promoters got it in their heads that the process of writing hit songs could be distilled down to a formulaic process. In 1959, Joe Mulhall and Paul Neff sent out a questionnaire to 3,000 girls about their likes and dislikes when it came to music. Their thinking was that if they could incorporate as many positive data points as they could into a song, then they’d be guaranteed to have a hit for their wannabe pop star, a 15-year-old American weightlifter named Johnny Restivo. When all the responses were collated, this song was the result.

The approach didn’t work. The Shape I’m In only managed to reach number 80 on the pop charts.

There have been many attempts at finding ways to predict hits, most often looking for people with “golden ears,” that amazing innate gut instinct possessed by certain people to hear success in something the public didn’t know it wanted. For example, in the early 1960s, the head of an American indie label started playing songs for his teenage daughter. She displayed a real talent for predicting which of them would do well — she had something like an 80 per cent success rate — but that turned out to be beginner’s luck and her prognostications faltered after about 20 attempts.

Meanwhile, the record and radio industries built businesses around golden-eared people like Clive Davis (discoverer of Janis Joplin, Barry Manilow, Patti Smith, Whitney Houston, and many others); Mo Oistin (Fleetwood Mac, Prince, Red Hot Chili Peppers); Seymour Stein (The Ramones, Talking Heads, Madonna). Rosalie Trombley rose from a receptionist at CKLW/Windsor (The Big 8) to someone who had an uncanny ability to pick hits. Not only did she convince Elton John to release Benny and the Jets as a single against all his reservations, but she picked hits from The Guess Who, Bob Seger, KISS, and many others.