Musical Numbers

Shortly after graduating from BC with degrees in economics and mathematics, Chris Dalla Riva ’17 gave himself a massive homework assignment: to listen to every number-one song in the history of the Billboard Hot 100 chart, the music industry’s main weekly tracker of pop hits. Why? “I was just looking to engage the musical side of my brain,” said Dalla Riva, a guitarist and songwriter who had his own radio show on WZBC. Dalla Riva created a spreadsheet of metrics and characteristics associated with each tune—from song length to beats per minute to lyrical themes—and started looking for patterns. 

Eight years and 1,100 songs later, Dalla Riva has shared his findings in a new book, Uncharted Territory: What Numbers Tell Us about the Biggest Hit Songs and Ourselves. He surveys every chart-topper from 1958’s “Poor Little Fool” by Ricky Nelson to 2025’s “Die with a Smile” by Lady Gaga and Bruno Mars, offering musical and cultural insights buttressed by statistics. Among other things, he details the preponderance of big hits about death during the Eisenhower era (e.g. “Teen Angel” by Mark Dinning), the explosion of explicit lyrics starting in the 1990s (2Pac’s “How Do U Want It” was the first number-one song to use the f-word), and, more recently, songs that spawned “viral” dances (like Drake’s “Toosie Slide” in 2020). Along the way, Dalla Riva tries to explain these trends by pointing to evolutions in society and technology, including the radical changes in how music is produced, consumed, and sold. 

This result is a chronicle of music as well as American culture. “Music is representative of larger trends in society,” said Dalla Riva, who works as a data analyst for the music streaming service Audiomack. “Even when they seem like silly little pop songs.”