[joanofarf]

Further down in the Scientific American piece, one of the researchers does respond to this:

>Serrà acknowledged in an email that a bias due to the “test of time” effect is possible but argued that its influence should be small. For instance, he noted, the long-term patterns and trends that he and his colleagues identified also hold over relatively short—and relatively recent—time periods (say, 1997 to 2007), where the “test of time” effect should be minimal. “The same happens with close and not-so-recent time periods (e.g., 1960 and 1968), where both years could partly incorporate such an effect,” he wrote. “Since the trend is consistent in short time spans where you assume the ‘test of time’ bias is minimal and, furthermore, the trend is also consistent for longer time spans, we can assume it is a general trend and, thus, that the ‘test of time’ effect is really small.”

[drb91]

Well, if the effect is there, it should be visible after incorporating the rest of the pop corpus. Straightforward to test; easy to reproduce.

[joanofarf]

True. I wonder if now, six years later, more older music, not just the biggest hits, has been digitized as well, so that the sample does not skew so heavily.

[drb91]

Sadly, this makes “pop” an inherently political thing to judge.