Anyone else mess with Uplaya, aka Magic 8 Ball of hit detection?

[Eric Day]

I stumbled across Uplaya.com. It's a website that alleges it can detect if your music has the magical elements that have also been present in past hit songs. Figured it was a joke, which it is, but tried it for fun anyways. It rates your songs on a 1-10 scale. You can do 2 for free.

I started with one of my own tracks I'm working on, this one to be exact..

http://soundcloud.com/a-guy-named-eric/moonlight-2-8/s-4CPV6

It got a whopping... 4.7

So then I decided to have some fun with my second free upload. I put up Daft Punk's Harder, Better, Faster, Stronger. They won a grammy for it, so I figured it would be considered a "hit".

The score for Daft Punk's song? A chart shattering 6.0 (keep in mind were going for a 9+ here).

If you're a real sucker you can pay $90, and they'll do the Magic 8 Ball on 15 of your tracks.

[botstein]

Is it intended for different genres of music? There site listed country, rock, pop, and r&b/hip hop.

I know that this kind of statistical analysis is possible and in use (not in beta, or called uplaya), but I don't know that Uplaya.com's service is on par with what is possible and widely used.

[Eric Day]

According to the site, it's software is designed to be multi-genre, which makes it even more sketchy. Their logic is that hit songs are timeless, and all have some mysterious "it" factor that the have developed an algorithm to figure out.. which might work for Adele, but for dance music, it will never pan out.

EDM has too many trends and evolutions over a short period for this to work. I wish I would have put in Scary Monsters and Nice Sprites. That song comes out in '07 instead of '10 = no grammy for Sonny. Timing, and staying just on the leading edge without going too far to suit peoples current tastes has a lot to do with making a "hit" imo.