Contrary to the opinions of hordes of classic rock-loving boomers, a new study in Royal Society Open Science claims that rap was the most important and influential development in the history of popular music since 1960. The researchers, from two different London universities, state that the study used hard math and data analysis to come to its conclusions.

“Everybody thinks the best music was produced when they were 17 years old. We wanted to do something better than that,” said study co-author Armand Leroi. “We had a sense that lots of people have opinions about popular music, but nobody has any objective evidence,” said the Imperial College London evolutionary biology professor. The study disregards the “musical lore and aesthetic judgment” that color people’s recollections of pop music history.

The study contradicts another popular gripe that pop music has become more homogeneous and uniform in recent years. Rather, it contends that rap music’s entrance on the scene increased the diversity of the pop charts. The least varied period in the time studied was the early 1980s. Only a few genres like disco and new wave held sway at that time.

The researchers used digital music recognition technology to gather the data that backs up their claims. This technology, which is also used in the popular song-identifying app Shazam, can identify and sort songs according to various attributes.

30-second clips from more than 17,000 hit songs–almost 90 percent of the songs that made the Billboard Hot 100 between 1960 and 2010– were divided into classes based on their broad musical features. Categories included “major chords without changes” and “guitar, loud, energetic.” The scientists used the streaming site Last.fm to collect their samples and to divide the songs into recognizable genres based on these attributes.

The study concluded that rap and hip hop were “the single most important event that has shaped the musical structure of the American charts” during the last fifty years. Although many rock-lovers would think that the “British Invasion” kicked off by bands like the Beatles, the Who, and the Rolling Stones was a more important moment in American cultural history, the study found that these bands were not single-handedly responsible for the great flowering of American music that happened during the 1960s. Instead, the British invasion bands reaped gains from the increased musical energy during this time and “fanned its flames.”

Rap, unlike the rock bands of the 1960s, introduced innovations that completely changed the face of pop music. “Hip-hop us a realization of how James Brown saw music, which is that it’s about the beats and grooves rather than chords and harmonies. It’s the realization of the innovations of funk,” said music journalist and author Dorian Lynskey. “It redefines what counts as a pop song and what elements you can use: the rapping on one level takes you away from the need for vocal melodies, while the production on the other is more about loops than chords and sampling.”

According to the researchers, the three most innovative years in pop music during the period studied were 1964, 1983 and 1991. Thee years featured respectively the aforementioned British Invasion, the rise of Hip Hop, and the rise of alternative music and grunge.

The researchers hope to apply their data-driven trend finding approach to other art forms like literature and painting. Research is already in progress trying to determine the most important trends in literature by analyzing e-books. The research is connected to the computer-based analysis common in evolutionary biology. The lessons learned from studying the evolution of organisms will be used to create a new field studying cultural evolution.