Last month, AI researchers claimed an impressive breakthrough.

They published a paper showing that AI can predict with 97% accuracy if any song will

be a hit, and it does this by measuring how the listener's body responds to the music.

But it might be too soon to anoint AI as the next big talent scout for the music industry.

I'm Lucy too, the 2023 AAAS Mass Media Fellow for Scientific American.

And I'm Sophie Bushwick, tech editor at Scientific American.

You're listening to Tech Quickly, the All Things Tech part of Scientific American's

Science Quickly Podcast.

I thought that the music industry had been using AI to create songs and analyze them

for a while now.

So what's so special about this new approach?

Great question, streaming services and music industry companies have been relying heavily

already on algorithms to try and predict hit songs.

But they've focused primarily on characteristics like a song's artist and genre, as well as

the music itself, so aspects like the lyrics or the tempo.

But even with all of that data, the existing AI algorithms have only been able to correctly

predict whether a song will be a hit or not, less than 50% of the time.

So you're honestly better off flipping a coin.

Yeah, very random chance odds.

And so this new approach, it's different for a few reasons.

One being its near perfect accuracy, a 97% success rate is much, much higher than any

approach we've seen before.

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