After years of crunching data, [two MIT PhD grads] have devised a computer program that listens to a song, then predicts how humans will react to it. As much as I don’t want it to be true, of course it is.

But is it becoming a self-perpetuating phenomenon? If record companies are releasing songs according to this software, and we all know that for the most part people will listen to what’s popular rather than what’s necessarily “good” (by which I mean it should show actual musical ability and hopefully some degree of innovation), so will customers react well to the MIT-predicted music simply because it was predicted (and therefore popularized)?