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THE VIDEO SHELF · pop chord progressions

4 Chords | Music Videos | The Axis Of Awesome

A comedy-music medley from the Australian band The Axis of Awesome showing that dozens of famous pop songs use the same four-chord progression. The performers cycle through a long list of hits over the same chords.

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Why HN readers recommended it

HN commenters use it as the canonical demonstration that popular songs reuse one chord progression, especially in threads on music analysis and AI-generated music.

This is a summary from the source dataset, not an endorsement by Hacker News or the video creator.

Video & recommendation details

Creator / channel
The Axis of Awesome
Topic
pop chord progressions
Format
comedy
Level
general
HN recommenders in dataset
3
HN mentions in dataset
16
Recommendation years in dataset
2012–2025

These counts and years describe the included Hacker News records; they are not YouTube views or the video’s publication date.

From the original HN conversations

Excerpts from the recorded comments. Follow each source for the full comment and surrounding discussion.

  • On a related note (corniest pun of the day), the Australian musical comedy act Axis of Awesome made a song called Four Chords Song , which is basically a 47-song medley all using the same chord progression. [LINK] They've said that the chords are used …

    csl on Hacker News · 2012-06
    In I analyzed the chords to 1300 popular songs for patterns. This is what I found.

  • Though a bit more on the "actual implementation" side of things, there's an Australian group called "Axis Of Awesome" who did an interesting song called "Four Chords". It shows the use of a set of four common chords in a lot of different songs. [VIDEO]

    jcr on Hacker News · 2013-03
    In I analyzed the chords to 1300 songs for patterns. Part 3 – Interactive Discovery

  • Heh, I just this afternoon listened to a radio show about the famously popular vi-IV-I-V/I-V-vi-IV chord progression [1]. If you haven't heard it before, the "4 Chords" medley by Axis of Awesome is a great demonstration of its ubiquity [2]. [1] [LINK] [2] [VIDEO]

    Sharlin on Hacker News · 2022-04
    In What chords do you need?

Summaries, classifications and recommendation records are from the HackerTube source dataset. Read about this library and its limitations.

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