Forget the Beatles and The Rolling Stones! When talking about actual, hard, evidence, Hip-Hop is the most important development in pop music from the past half century.

The influence of the Beatles, and other British bands of the 60s were highly thought to be the biggest influences in music history, while the influence of hip-hop was often downplayed.

However, researchers analyzed 30-second snippets from over 17,000 songs, representing 86 percent of all the singles that have ever charted on the Billboard Hot 100 during the 50-year scope of the study.

Based on a digital analysis of chord patterns, tonal shifts and other audio features between 1960 and 2010, Armand M. Leroi has concluded that, “HIp-Hop is the single greatest revolution in the U.S. pop charts by far.”

Music has made impact on society for as long as people have made music and listened to it. In urban areas, music has acted as a means for giving a cultural voice to minorities, as well as a means of voicing frustrations about things that are going on around them.

Having formed in the 1970s, Hip Hop got it’s start in the Bronx. It was there where block parties where DJs played percussive breaks of popular songs, while an MC would rap lyrics over them grew more and more popular among African-American youths.

The explosion of rap in 1991, had far more influence on the popular songs that followed than the British invasion of 1964 or the synth-pop surge of 1983—the other two years that saw big shifts in musical styles, according to researchers at Queen Mary University, Imperial College London.

Although this study’s findings raise eyebrows, there are some who won’t buy into its mathematical truth.

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