Beatles or Rolling Stones? Here’s What Science Says

Chris Dalla Riva is an indie rocker whose most recent single “Overloving” arrived last October. His day job is as a senior product manager with the online Audiomack streaming service.

He combined those two passions in a new online investigation into the impact made by two of classic rock’s biggest bands.

“The Beatles and the Rolling Stones both made fantastic music. And luckily you don’t have to choose between the two,” Dalla Riva said. “You can enjoy both Beggars Banquet and Abbey Road without paying anyone much mind. Nevertheless, there is a debate that we might be able to solve, namely which band is more influential.”

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Ideally, he said the process would involve contacting “every professional rock musician” to find out “who inspired them to pick up their instrument. Then we’d count each time either the Rolling Stones or the Beatles were listed and see who got mentioned more often. While this approach is somewhere between impossible and infeasible, there might be a tool that can help us get at the idea: Wikipedia.”

Dalla Riva performed an in-depth wiki search looking for mentions of the Beatles or Rolling Stones by other musicians to determine the results.

“Using Wikipedia’s API, I grabbed all 479 artists found on the site’s ‘list of mainstream rock performers.’ Then for each of those performers, I aggregated a list of every musical artist their page linked to,” Dalla Riva said. “I then cross-referenced that list of artists to the initial list of rock performers. Then voila, we had a way to try to answer our debate.”

The most influential rock band, in terms of Wikipedia links, was the Beatles with 210 “influence points.”

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“If you’ve read anything about rock music in the last six decades, this shouldn’t come as a shock,” Dalla Riva concluded. “The Beatles are probably the most popular and critically acclaimed act to ever record a song. If that’s the case, then was this entire exercise a waste of time? No. If you crunch some numbers and they reinforce your preconceived notions, that’s not a bad thing. It means that your gut was onto something.”

He added: “Additionally, there have been many times in my career where I’ve run an analysis that I think is a waste of time and find that the results go against everything I thought. As long as your process is sound, an analysis is generally worthwhile irrespective of the results.”

The Rolling Stones were actually third in Wikipedia “influence points.” Led Zeppelin came in second with 151 points. The Top 5 in Dalla Riva’s research was rounded out by U2 (139 points) and David Bowie (127 points).

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