Predicting hit music

Sounds weirdly fantastic, but Hit Song Science (HSS) from Polyphonic aims to automate the process of finding which CD has the potential to be the next big hit by comparing the principal components of a song against a database of 3.5 million hit singles. Apparently the music industry is already using this software (which doesn't come cheap at €4,000 per CD) and the HSS score of a song is on its way to being a generic term denoting a band's potential for success.

Since HSS tries to fit the features of a song into an (already clustered) database of previous hits, the apparent intention is to find out if the song has the stuff that people have liked previously. Wouldn't this system lead to bands creating more music of the same type since anything innovative would probably end up having a low HSS score? (Or as this article claims, would it give label execs more freedom to try exotic stuff since they have more hits on their hands?)

Tags: hss, music, hit, polyphonic, hit song science, record