By Jim Powers

Making a career out of music has never been easy. Writing songs, putting lyrics to them, getting time in a studio, getting a label to put out your album…they’re all part of a process that is long, arduous and not for the weak-willed. With the economy in a downturn, major record companies are merging left and right (leaving established artists out in cold), and record company executives are hesitant to spend money. It’s a very difficult time for the music industry.

If a new computer application designed by a Spanish company proves itself worthy, the days of the Artist ‘ Repertoire , the record company liaison between label and band, may be numbered.

Giant conglomerates like the AOL Time Warner Group, which owns record labels Atlantic, Elektra, Warner Brothers, Atco, London-Sire, Rhino, and Reprise, are no longer willing to part with their cold, hard cash unless the artists they sign are going to be stars. How can such a thing be decided, you ask? How can someone predict something like future chart success? The major labels think they have found the answer: Hit Song Science (HSS). It sounds like something from a B-movie, but it’s real. Hit Song Science is a service of the Polyphonic HMI company from Spain. Originally created by Spanish technology company Grupo AIA, HSS, as Polyphonic HMI calls it is a computer application that compares songs to each other.

The company loaded all the songs from the last 30 years of the Billboard charts into the machine and discovered, according to the application, that they all had something in common. So if your band’s new song bears some similarity to Hootie ‘ The Blowfish’s “Let Her Cry” or The Beatles’ “Yesterday” then you’ve got a hit on your hands, according to the machine. If this thing actually flies, then a musician could tell if a new song was going to be a hit by loading into HSS, right? That’s what the majors think.

Industry giants like RCA, Universal, Sony, and the aforementioned AOL Time Warner labels have already signed on to analyze their prospective artists. It would only make economic sense to cut out the middleman and just send the demo from a new auspicious yet unsigned band to a machine to figure out whether or not they’ll hit it big. However, the system isn’t perfect. It contains some major drawbacks. It fails to take into account lyrical content, for one thing. You could take Jennifer Lopez’ “Jenny From The Block,” re-work it, use the exact same lyrics, and the HSS program would spit out a positive rating. Despite this, Tracie Reed, Polyphonic HMI’s North American Office vice president, said in the press release announcing the program that she thinks HSS will “raise the bar for music.”

Lauren Labelle, a middler journalism major, is one person who disagrees.

“I think it’s ridiculous to pre-judge something according to the trends of the past. How our tastes ever going to grow if we aren’t exposed to new things? People aren’t as predictable as we’d like to believe they are,” Labelle said.

The company originally envisioned using HSS to help consumers find songs on CDs that they might like, but then they began offering to use the system to help labels to decide on what songs should be released. Jaron Lanier, the computer science pioneer who coined the phrase “virtual reality,” is a tacit backer of the idea.

“I doubt pop music could get any worse, so a meaningless tool like this might result in some improvement,” Lanier said.

The fear is that this could all lead to even more homogenization in the music world. The Billboard charts, while recording units sold, have never been a haven for musical innovation and exploration. Hugely influential acts like Iggy ‘ The Stooges and Parliament-Funkadelic never scaled the heights of the singles charts.

“It doesn’t take into account things like a band’s live show and doesn’t show a band’s real potential. This is only going to lead to rehashing old stuff. You can’t rely on demos. Major labels suck anyway,” said Pete Sheratt, a middler and WRBB disc jockey.

So will HSS decide on whether that struggling band of your roommate’s ever appears on the main stage at Lollapalooza or headline their own world tour? That all depends on how much the labels decide to invest in the opinions of a computer program.