I wish I could say that I was some uber-genius who spent my entire day looking at macro market trends and determining what the next big value stock pitch or internet technology trend was going to be. In fact, I am usually running around, counseling undergrads about their lives, discussing my complete clueless-ness with my own classmates and trying to keep up on homework while balancing extracurriculars and work.
And then, I think strange things that distract me sometimes. Is there a correlation between the financial markets and music? How could we measure this? What would it mean? What would I assume? How could I look for a pattern?
My hypothesis is that there is, I imagine that the easiest way to measure this is by BPM (beats per minute) and that I hypothesize that while music overall has gotten faster (higher BPM), music is slower in downturn-y times.
Let's see what happens.
So I found some background information around the economy.
Key Take-Aways: Oil usually increases in price when the economy is in a recession/about to go into a recession. During the recession, these high oil prices will begin to trend back down to more "normal" levels. Recessions in the US were in 1973-'75, 1980, 1981-1983, 1991, 2001 and 2008-2010.
And then I got a little more information and found out about bear markets...
Key Take-Aways: Bear markets! These happened in 1905-1920, 1931-1944, 1965-1980, 2000-2005 (no information is given after 2005).
Then I looked up GDP growth in the US on Google-- GOD I LOVE GOOGLE.
Key Take-Aways:GDP growth is where you would expect it to be-- with the dips and mountains in all the right places...
Then I got a little excited with the Google tool and added in Asia, Europe and Latin America (red, orange and green respectively).
So then I tried to put together my own knowledge of music history based on the interwebs research, which goes a little something like this: In the beginning, there was vaudeville and Oscar Hammerstein in the early 1920s. This was the age where blues and jazz emerged into a brand new world. By the 1930s, the party had gone into full swing (har har har) with big band swing. 1940s saw the emergence of bluegrass and country, along with the beginning of "Appalachian folk music" (seems very probable that this could be one of the muses of our current-day "indie rock". Appalachian folk music was significant because it really increased BPMs and probably heavily influenced the be-bop movement also in the 40s that held some of the records for BPMs (could hit 300). 1950s slowed things down a bit with gospel/soul music with some greats like Mahlia Jackson, but also gave us some of my favorite songs from Dinah Washington and Aretha Franklin. This age was also the emergence of Doo-wop (which was fantastic) and we saw songs like Frankie Lymon's "Why Do Fools Fall In Love". 1960s was about freedom and experimentation, where we saw a brief stint of "psychadelic" rock that transitioned into what we now refer to as "rock" (The Beatles, The Who, Rolling Stones, etc.". 1970s was about love and peace yet we got heavy metal during this time from the likes of Led Zeppelin and Black Sabbath, as well as a stronger emergence of punk rock, which began to emerge in the 1960s.
In 1980s we were introduced to Ladies Love Cool James, also known as LLCoolJ, along with NWA and the beginnings of hip-hop and "gangster rap". The 90s were filled with hair metal (a new branch of the rock family tree), so we saw Nirvana's "Nevermind' album, along with the Notorious B.I.G. The early 2000s especially were inundated with bubblegum pop with the likes of Britney Spears, Backstreet Boys and N'Sync, but it also began to lead into some more "alternative rock" with The Hives and The White Stripes, which gradually became "indie rock" with Franz Ferdinand and Modest Mouse. Starting in 2010, we've seen a heavy emphasis in dance music, particularly with a lot of latin flavors, which has emerged as a mix of "dance pop" (Cascada, Pitbull, Ke$ha), "dubstep" like Skillrex and a re-emergence of "house" or "dance" music. Although house music actually originated in Chicago (what what!) in the 1980s, it re-emerged in a strong way in the (later half of) the first decade of the 21st century. (I would say 2008-ish onward.) I think it's safe to say that the world is now a better place because of the contributions of David Guetta, Afrojack, Deadmau5 and Kaskade.
I found the average BPMs of these popular genres of each of these decades and plotted them, but I needed to account for some decades where multiple "popular genres" emerged, hence there's BPM 2s and 3s...The outliers here: 200 in 1940 was be-bop (one of the highest ever), 120 was bluegrass, whereas 75 was country music. Additionally, the 85, 90 and 120 BPM blips in 1970 were heavy metal, outlaw country and punk rock.
At first glance, it kind of makes sense. Although BPM did not tick up as quickly as I thought it would, the slowest BPMs were actually always interbellum times. The highest BPMs, similarly, always occurred right after a financial downturn, which is not to say that downturns always resulted in low BPMs. Music tended to fragment (split to have many different emerging genres) during the 1940s and 1970s-- strong bear markets. In the 1940s, we had an ending war, soldiers coming home and inflating the once-low unemployment rate, an economy under stress and a recovery from a mini recession in 1937. The 1970s was also a time where the nation was torn. Although the Paris Peace Accords stopped US participation in the Vietnam War in 1973, our society was still torn. The 70s was a time when a President and a Vice President resigned under threat of impeachment, and the US economy entered the worst recession that it had seen in 40 years in 1974.
I looked at it and wasn't satisfied so I looked at some more data....and looked at GDP vs. personal consumption expenditures to see if that would give me additional data.
And then found this research paper ("Trends in BPM in Popular Music") that had a more accurate method of determining average BPM. This paper consolidated the top songs from each decade (instead of musical genres) and allowed me to determine a more accurate BPM.(Red dots are average BPM per decade.)
And if we cut this to pair it up with the Google charts:
Looking at the average BPM per decade (green dots), it seems as though there could be an indicative story here. Although low growth rate resulted in big changes in BPM 1981, I think the jury is still out as to the amount of direct correlation here.
Regardless, interesting to look at...and this is what I do during my days when I get bored.
I know...I'm a weirdo.
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