A system and method for estimating the popularity of song by calculating the (absolute and/or contrastive) harmonic surprise of each song in a corpus of music data, determining the popularity of each song in the corpus (e.g., based on a music chart, downloads, online streams), determining correlations between harmonic surprise and popularity, and estimating the popularity of an individual song based on the (absolute and/or contrastive) harmonic surprise of the individual song and the correlations between harmonic surprise and popularity.
Predicting the popularity of a song based on harmonic surprise