How well do we remember popular music? To investigate how hit songs are recognized over time, we randomly selected number-one Billboard singles from the last 76 years and presented them to a large sample of mostly millennial participants. In response to hearing each song, participants were prompted to indicate whether they recognized it. Plotting the recognition proportion for each song as a function of the year during which it reached peak popularity resulted in three distinct phases in collective memory. The first phase is characterized by a steep linear drop-off in recognition for the music from this millennium; the second phase consists of a stable plateau during the 1960s to the 1990s; and the third phase, a further but more gradual drop-off during the 1940s and 1950s. More than half of recognition variability can be accounted for by self-selected exposure to each song as measured by its play count on Spotify. We conclude that collective memory for popular music is different from that of other historical phenomena.

Music psychology has a long history, but the question of whether brief music excerpts are representative of whole songs has been largely unaddressed. Here, we explore whether preference and familiarity ratings in response to excerpts are predictive of these ratings in response to whole songs. We asked 643 participants to judge 3,120 excerpts of varying durations taken from different sections of 260 songs from a broad range of genres and time periods in terms of preference and familiarity. We found that within the range of durations commonly used in music research, responses to excerpts are strongly predictive of whole song affect and cognition, with only minor effects of duration and location within the song. We concluded that preference and familiarity ratings in response to brief music excerpts are representative of the responses to whole songs. Even the shortest excerpt duration that is commonly used in research yields preference and familiarity ratings that are close to those for whole songs, suggesting that listeners are able to rapidly and reliably ascertain recognition as well as preference and familiarity ratings of whole songs.

In this paper, we investigated the collective memory for popular music. To assess how well number-one hits are recognized over time, we randomly selected top songs fromthe last 76 years and presented them to a large sample of mostly millennial participants. In response to hearing each selection, participants were prompted to indicate whether they recognized each song. We found three distinct phases in collective memory: a steep linear drop-off in recognition for the music from this millennium, a stable plateau from the 1960s to the 1990s, and a further but more gradual drop-off for music from the 1940s and 1950s.More than half of recognition variability between songs can be accounted for by exposure as measured by Spotify play counts. We conclude that in the musical realm, fame is fleeting - but perhaps not as fleeting as previously suggested.