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With all the doom and gloom endlessly churning in the economy as of late, sometimes all we want is a bouncy, dependable pop song to distract us from the skyrocketing price of Frosted Flakes. So when Beyonce released "Single Ladies" last fall we were quick to latch on and crank it up to take our minds off our anemic bank accounts.
Now, from the department of cruel, cruel irony, it seems a new study shows that the song... well... basically confirms exactly how horrible the market is and may be a harbinger of worse things to come. The Guardian reports Phil Maymin, professor of finance and risk engineering at New York University, has been studying decades worth of hits from the Billboard Hot 100 and learned that "songs with low 'beat variance' had an inverse correlation with market turbulence. Which is to say, the more regular the song, the crazier the stock market."
And it turns out "Single Ladies" is more regular than your grandmother after glugging down a gallon of prune juice.
Even stranger -- the regularity of songs seems to predict the markets
-- not the other way around. According to Maymin "the market
becomes unstable only after the charts are full of steady tunes --
almost as if certain hits can cause market shake-ups."
Which means we need to find a way to make Sonic Youth #1 on the charts STAT.
Previously > Cazwell's "I Seen Beyonce At Burger King"
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