Almost every song in the pop charts is built around the same four chords. And it’s nothing new – they’re the same three chords that Pachelbel used in his famous Canon. But why do we keep coming back to this exact structure? We’ve all heard them – those people who complain that ‘all modern music sounds…

Apple has launched a new internal division dedicated to music publishing and music publishers, MBW understands, led by respected exec Elena Segal. Segal, who was previously Legal Director of iTunes International, is stepping up to become Apple Music’s Global Director of Music Publishing. The legal & business affairs specialist (pictured), who is well-known amongst the…

According to a new study, musicians and people who are bilingual have trained their brains into being more efficient. Researchers at Baycrest’s Rotman Research Institute found musicians and bilingual people used fewer brain resources when carrying out a memory test. The study, published in the journal Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences, found…

Resident DJ and disco legend Nicky Siano tells Oli Warwick what really went on in the booth. In the history of DJ culture, Nicky Siano’s presence looms large. His club The Gallery was instrumental in forging the disco culture of the 1970s in New York, while his technique on the decks helped further the art…

A standard piano has 88 keys: 52 white and 36 black. But who decided this number would be the norm, and why? Before the piano was invented, composers wrote a lot of music for the harpsichord, which has just 60 keys. This meant that everything they wrote was limited to the harpsichord’s five-octave range. Then,…

More than half a billion videos on YouTube will, from today, carry credits covering songwriter, label and publisher data – and that’s just the start. The Google/Alphabet platform has just announced that it is adding ‘credits and music discovery information’ to both premium music videos and – for the first time ever – to fan-uploaded…

In 2015, the journal Royal Society Open Science published a witty evolutionary history of pop music, based on the Billboard Hot 100 chart from 1960 to 2010, in which the authors treated elements like timbre, chord, and speech as if they were impressions on a fossil, and genre as if it were a living, evolving…

YouTube has announced its new music streaming service—a revamped version of YouTube Music that will compete with subscription platforms like Spotify, Apple Music, and Tidal. It’s out Tuesday, May 22. There’s a free, ad-supported tier as well as YouTube Music Premium, which will be available at $9.99 per month. It launches initially in the U.S.,…

The Royal Wedding cellist Sheku Kanneh-Mason has shot to the top of the US iTunes pop chart with his album ‘Inspiration’. This is an incredible moment in classical and pop music. Saturday’s wedding of the Duke and Duchess of Sussex St George’s Chapel in Windsor was watched by millions around the world, and while all…

As much as we might tell ourselves our experience of the world is the truth, our reality will always be an interpretation. Light enters our eyes, sound waves enter our ears, chemicals waft into our noses, and it’s up to our brains to make a guess about what it all is. And I think that’s…