The Mathematics Of Hit Songs?

Ringtonia: A service called HitSongScience claims to be able to identify the "hit potential" of a song based on its mathematic capabilities, and apparently there are labels making use of the service.

"Historically, what is pleasing to the human ear has not changed since man began writing music. What has changed are styles, performances, the instruments used and the way music is produced and recorded, but a compelling melody is still compelling and a series of random notes still sounds random to us. That is not to say everything has been invented, however so far, every new style of music that has come into being: country, rock, punk, grunge etc. have all had similar mathematical patterns and the hits in those genres have all come from the same hit clusters that exist today and anything that has fallen outside of those clusters has rarely been successful for it's musical qualities."

The site compares the service to that of the telescope -- it simply makes clearer things which already exist. In addition to having the right mathematical properties a song must "be good from an A&R perspective" (it must sound like a song) and it must be promoted well. The site also points out that its databases are set up for the UK and US, so songs that score low can still be successful in a different market or within a certain genre. The program is also geared to the current music market, so a song could just be out of its time, or exactly at the right time. It sounds like the program measures how well a particular song fits into the current music zeitgeist, but I'm in no position to analyze the theory or application of it...