Is Taylor Swift leading a new Pop revolution? A cross-generation analysis of Pop/Rock cover songs

Abstract

Background: The aim of this paper is to find evidence of a changing pattern in cover songs by 21st-century artists. To this end, over 76,000 covers performed by artists who grew up in the 2000s were quantitatively analyzed. Methods: SecondHandSongs.com was crawled to extract the cover relationships, and Allmusic.com to obtain the genre and starting decade of each performer. Results: The results show that the current music panorama is dominated by Pop/Rock music and, for the first time since the 1960s, artists from the 2010s generation prefer to cover more songs by contemporary artists than by classic figures from the 1960s. Pop and Dance are the emerging sub-genres with the largest proportion of covered musicians, while Taylor Swift, Justin Bieber and Ed Sheeran are responsible for this changing trend. Conclusions: These results provide an interesting opportunity to introduce quantitative studies in cultural studies about music, cinema and arts.