{"id":734,"date":"2022-12-06T16:44:02","date_gmt":"2022-12-06T22:44:02","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/nassaubaymusiclessons.com\/?p=734"},"modified":"2022-12-06T16:44:02","modified_gmt":"2022-12-06T22:44:02","slug":"where-did-all-the-key-changes-go","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/nassaubaymusiclessons.com\/?p=734","title":{"rendered":"Where did all the key changes go?"},"content":{"rendered":"
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Where did all the key changes go?<\/h1>\n<\/div>\n
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Mallika Seshadri <\/a><\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n

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The key change has been used by musicians like Beyonc\u00e9, Travis Scott, Brian Wilson of the Beach Boys and Michael Jackson for decades. Nowadays, it’s getting harder and harder to find in top songs.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n

Kevin Winter\/The Recording Academy\/Getty Images; Rick Kern\/Getty Images; Ron Galella\/Getty Images; GARCIA\/Gamma-Rapho\/Getty Images <\/span><\/div>\n<\/div>\n

Many of the biggest hits in pop music used to have something in common: a key change, like the one you hear in Whitney Houston’s “I Wanna Dance With Somebody.”<\/p>\n

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But key changes have become harder to find in top hits.<\/p>\n

Chris Dalla Riva, a musician and data analyst at Audiomack, wanted to learn more about what it takes to compose a top hit. He spent the last few years listening to every number one hit listed on the Billboard Hot 100 since 1958 \u2013 more than 1100 songs.<\/p>\n

“I just started noticing some trends, and I set down to writing about them,” says Dalla Riva, who published some of those findings in an article for the website Tedium<\/a>.<\/p>\n

He found that about a quarter of those songs from the 1960s to the 1990s included a key change.<\/p>\n

But from 2010 to 2020, there was just one top song: Travis Scott’s 2018 track, “Sicko Mode.”<\/p>\n

How the key change is used in pop music <\/strong><\/p>\n

According to Dalla Riva, changing the key \u2013 or shifting the base scale of a song \u2013 is a tool used across musical genres to “inject energy” into a pop number.<\/p>\n

There are two common ways to place a key change into a top hit, he says. The first is to take the key up toward the end of a number, like Beyonc\u00e9 does in her 2011 song “Love on Top,” which took listeners through four consecutive key changes. This placement helps a song crescendo to its climax.<\/p>\n