Off the Charts With Chris Dalla Riva

Chris mapped every #1 hit since 1958... but that means he missed the counterculture. On the final New Music DNA, I make him a mix that pairs '90s classics he missed with new artists they inspired.

Chris Dalla Riva listened to every single number one hit from the last 67 years.

I bolded that sentence very dramatically as if it’s supposed to be the impressive thing about what Chris did, but anybody can listen to a bunch of music, really. So let me try that again.

Chris Dalla Riva listened to every single number one hit, and then turned those songs into a dataset that he analyzed for patterns that mirrored the shifting American cultural landscape of the last seven decades.

This week, he’ll be publishing the fruits of that labor in his book, Uncharted Territory.

I wondered how and when it clicked for Chris that analyzing music statistically could actually deepen his appreciation of it emotionally.

He admits that although “there are many cases where using data to understand music makes no sense,” it still felt natural to combine the two. “Now that I work on data analytics for the music streaming service Audiomack, music and data are basically all that I think about.”