How many chords is enough?
Let’s get on with looking at real chord progressions. The good folks at Soundfly did us a favour, analysing Every Dang Song That Cracked the Billboard Top 5 in 2018. There’s a lot of good stuff in this post but for the purpose of looking at progressions, I focused on chords – how many chords you’d find in the average hit and what those chords might be. Soundfly’s analysis of the number of chords found in 40 top 5 hits, found that 10 had four chords in them and 37 had somewhere between 2 and 6.
That’s not a lot. But does it matter how many chords there are? Well, it doesn’t seem like it given that these are all big hits. Let’s be honest, listeners don’t care how many chords there are and probably have very little idea what a chord is anyway. They do know, however, when something sounds right or not.