Who remembers the Beatles? The collective memory for popular music
Bibliographic record
Abstract
How well do we remember popular music? To investigate how hit songs are recognized over time, we randomly selected number-one Billboard singles from the last 76 years and presented them to a large sample of mostly millennial participants. In response to hearing each song, participants were prompted to indicate whether they recognized it. Plotting the recognition proportion for each song as a function of the year during which it reached peak popularity resulted in three distinct phases in collective memory. The first phase is characterized by a steep linear drop-off in recognition for the music from this millennium; the second phase consists of a stable plateau during the 1960s to the 1990s; and the third phase, a further but more gradual drop-off during the 1940s and 1950s. More than half of recognition variability can be accounted for by self-selected exposure to each song as measured by its play count on Spotify. We conclude that collective memory for popular music is different from that of other historical phenomena.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.009 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.003 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".