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Research: 40 years of The BRIT Awards’ Song Of The Year
A team of music researchers from the UK and USA has analysed The BRIT Awards’ Song Of The Year (SOTY) across a 40-year period – a total of 40 winners and 329 nominees.
This Is Our Time – Expo 2020 anthem
As you might imagine, most of the work of a forensic musicologist takes place behind necessarily closed doors due to commercial sensitivities. Once in a while a project I'm working on makes it to a courtroom, and if the media writes about it, my involvement is out...
Olivia Rodrigo: song similarities
[JB note: I'm pleased to welcome my friend and colleague Will Bennett as a guest blogger. Will (no relation) is a PhD musicology researcher at Harvard, and also a valued member of the JBMS consultancy team. I asked him a couple of weeks ago what he thought of the...
![Have you been hearing Bohemian Rhapsody ‘wrong’ all these years? [answer: probably]](https://joebennett.net/wp-content/uploads/2021/07/Screen-Shot-2021-07-24-at-11.49.50-AM-400x250.png)
Have you been hearing Bohemian Rhapsody ‘wrong’ all these years? [answer: probably]
Which brings us to the arguably clickbait-y title of this blog post. How might we be hearing Bohemian Rhapsody incorrectly?Let's start with the received wisdom. Here's a transcription of how how I thought BR's intro was counted: Bohemian Rhapsody intro. This is how...
Writ Parade: Why American songwriters are suing each other
The case against Childish Gambino is the latest in a run of copyright claims Article + interview with Joe Bennett. Words: Tom Wainwright. Originally published in The Economist, 15 May 2021. "You motherfuckers owe me!” raps Donald Glover, better known as Childish...
Eurovision 2021 live musicology blog
[update: the next day] So, the predictions were mostly reasonably close, although I missed Switzerland completely. Italy won (I predicted 4th), I got France right at 2nd place, and Iceland came 4th (predicted as 3rd). My predicted winner (Malta) actually came in at...
Eurovision 2021 – the Americans are coming!
[looking for the live-blog and song commentary?] It's Eurovision-eve! Yes, the live musicology blog is back after it, and the contest itself, has been absent for a year. We didn't waste time though: Netflix asked us to analyse all 259 finalists 2010-2019 in...
![Did Childish Gambino plagiarize in “This Is America”? [answer: no]](https://joebennett.net/wp-content/uploads/2021/05/This-is-America-CI-865x505-1-400x250.jpg)
Did Childish Gambino plagiarize in “This Is America”? [answer: no]
Betteridge's law famously states that "Any headline that ends in a question mark can be answered by the word no". And so, in the spirit of good blogging and the avoidance of cheap clickbait, I have answered my own question in the title of this post. But the answer...
Eurovision Song Contest research
Regular readers will know that I have been live-blogging the Eurovision Song Contest final since 2011. Every year I sit down in front of the TV, metronome and guitar in hand, and write live musical analysis of the songs in real time, then attempt to predict the winner...
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