Very good analysis. I wasn't even going to comment, since my reaction (personal impression) to the article was "too bad there might be 2 of the 1300 songs that have chords that don't sound like crap" - since they all do, there might be a couple of dozen well-orchestrated popular songs over the last several decades. (I should add that, despite this fact, I do avidly listen to popular songs and don't have a problem. I wouldn't try to reverse engineer their chord patterns though...)
At least your response tells me why this is the case. Thanks!
That is a fair critique of the article. The vast majority of the songs that came into the analysis were in fact billboard top 100 so that naturally filters out songs with chords that might sound bad (chords that as a rule are not built off of the major scale the song uses). What we found most interesting, however, was that there are certain patterns that really do show up. The one that was most striking, and that we pointed out in the article, is that the iii chord is almost always followed by IV or vi in pop music. There were similar trends for other some of the other chords that we'll be posting in a later article.
At least your response tells me why this is the case. Thanks!