Chris Dalla Riva, "Uncharted Territory: What Numbers Tell Us about the Biggest Hit Songs and Ourselves" (Bloomsbury, 2025)

Oct 11, 2025

Chris Dalla Riva, a data analyst, musician, and author, explores the intersections of music and data in his captivating discussion. He reveals why the late 1950s were dominated by teenage tragedy hits and the surprising connection to youth culture. Discover how the Beatles transformed popular music and why so many early chart-toppers were covers. Dalla Riva also dives into the impact of streaming on artist visibility and the challenges of AI-generated music. Get ready for a fresh perspective on what numbers tell us about our favorite hits!

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INSIGHT

Data-Driven Book From A Listening Ritual

Chris Dalla Riva began by listening to every Billboard Hot 100 number-one as a daily ritual and logged metadata and ratings.
That systematic hobby grew into a dataset that became the backbone of his book.

INSIGHT

Open Dataset Powers The Analysis

He tracked ratings, songwriter/producer credits, demographics and more and published the spreadsheet for others.
The dataset underpins many of the book's quantitative findings and visualizations.

INSIGHT

Why Number Ones Tell Bigger Stories

He focused on number-one hits because they represent widely shared cultural trends and are manageable to analyze.
Number ones act as useful signals of broader shifts in popular music over time.

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Popular music history collides with data analytics, charts, and numbers in this insightful and surprising look at the greatest hits and musicians, fads, forgotten artists, and much more. Data analyst and musician Chris Dalla Riva reframes everything you thought you knew about music.

Did you know that hit songs in the late 1950s were regularly about gruesome death? That a US vice president wrote a number one hit? That while TikTok has spawned countless hits, it's made artists more anonymous than ever before? That pop songs have shaped race relations in the United States? That the key change died around 2003? And that's just the beginning.

Coupling hard data with engaging anecdotes, Uncharted Territory: What Numbers Tell Us about the Biggest Hit Songs and Ourselves (Bloomsbury, 2025) is both a takedown and celebration of popular music and provides new ways to think about your favorite songs, genres, and artists from the last 6 decades using unexpected statistics and playful visualizations. This entertaining history is filled with the most popular musicians of all time from The Beatles and The Bee Gees to Michael Jackson, Mariah Carey, and beyond. Whether you danced the twist or the dougie at your senior prom, you're sure to never listen to music again in the same way.

Chris Dalla Riva lives at the intersection of music and data. Playing in bands and recording music since his teenage years, Dalla Riva is currently a Senior Product Manager at Audiomack where he focuses on data analytics and personalization.

Gregory McNiff is a Managing Director in the New York office of the Blueshirt Group, an IR firm focused on technology. Greg holds an MBA from the University of Chicago Booth School of Business, an M. Litt. in Shakespeare Studies from the University of St. Andrews and a B.A. in Classical Languages from Columbia University.

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