I love this version of Drop the Lime’s Hear Me by Portuguese Buraka som Sistema. I like their use of the ride and snare heavy drum loop from the original, taking it out and bringing it back every 2 bars. A simple and small part of the track, but that alone makes it the best remix of the bunch for me.
Drop the Lime – Hear Me (Buraka som Sistema Remix) [zippyshare 128kbps]
Here’s a quite bizarre research paper by Philip Maymin on how the beat variance (not the average beats per minute) of US Billboard top 100 songs for any given year relates to the US stock market. Even though he doesn’t establish if the mood of the public affects the type of songs they purchase or if the mood of the public comes from the music, I can make an estimated guess that people buy the music they feel like listening to.
I compare the annual average beat variance of the songs in the US Billboard Top 100 since its inception in 1958 through 2007 to the standard deviation of returns of the S&P 500 for the same year and find that they are significantly negatively correlated. With the recent high stock volatility, people should now prefer less volatile music. Furthermore, the beat variance appears able to predict future market volatility, producing 2.5 volatility points of profit per year on average.
Philip predicts the songs on the US charts for 2008 and 2009:
With the current high volatility environment, we should expect the 2008
year-end popular songs to be less musically volatile than prior years. Given the
average beat variance of the year-end chart-toppers to be released soon, we will
also be able to predict the market volatility for 2009.
I’d be more interested in a research paper on the emergence of new musical genres and how the sound of those genres are linked to the financial climate of that period. Surely someone must have writtensomething about that already?