Can Hit Music Predict the Markets?

You already knew that the stock market was in the dumps, but did you know that today's most popular songs have a particularly low beat variance (meaning a song maintains the same pace throughout)? Phil Maymin did. A professor at the Polytechnic Institute of New York University, Maymin's research shows that it's no coincidence either. When the market is highly volatile, beat variance is minimal and when the market is healthy, beat variance speeds up and "people have more of an appetite for something like Alice Cooper," Maymin says. But he doesn't know which is the cause and which the effect. Maymin's research included the study of 50 years worth of stock market data and more than 5,000 hit songs.