Chris Dalla Riva, an indie rocker and senior product manager at Audiomack, has brought his dual passions for music and data analysis to bear on one of rock’s perennial debates: Beatles or Stones?
“The Beatles and the Rolling Stones both made fantastic music,” Dalla Riva begins, diplomatically. “And luckily you don’t have to choose between the two. You can enjoy both Beggars Banquet and Abbey Road without paying anyone much mind. Nevertheless, there is a debate that we might be able to solve, namely, which band is more influential.”
Dalla Riva’s ideal methodology? Survey every professional rock musician alive and ask which band inspired them to pick up their instrument. But as he admits, “While this approach is somewhere between impossible and infeasible, there might be a tool that can help us get at the idea: Wikipedia.”
Using Wikipedia’s API, Dalla Riva pulled data from the site’s List of Mainstream Rock Performers. “I grabbed all 479 artists found on the site,” he explains. “Then for each of those performers, I aggregated a list of every musical artist their page linked to. I then cross-referenced that list of artists to the initial list of rock performers. Then voila, we had a way to try to answer our debate.”
The results? The Beatles led the pack with 210 “influence points,” a metric derived from the number of times they were linked to other rock performers on Wikipedia.
“If you’ve read anything about rock music in the last six decades, this shouldn’t come as a shock,” Dalla Riva notes. “The Beatles are probably the most popular and critically acclaimed act to ever record a song.”
He adds that validating preconceived notions isn’t inherently a waste of time: “If you crunch some numbers and they reinforce your gut feeling, that’s not a bad thing. It means your gut was onto something. Additionally, there have been many times in my career where I’ve run an analysis I thought would be a waste of time, only to find the results went against everything I thought. As long as your process is sound, the exercise is worthwhile, irrespective of the results.”
While the Beatles claimed the top spot, the Rolling Stones came in third with 129 influence points. Led Zeppelin landed in second with 151 points, while U2 (139) and David Bowie (127) rounded out the Top 5.
So, while the Beatles’ crown remains firmly in place, the Stones, alongside their peers, still wield considerable influence in the annals of rock. And if this analysis proves anything, it’s that the enduring debate over these titans of music will likely rage on, no matter how much data is crunched.
