Want to know how to write a smash hit song? Turns out all you need is the Millennial Whoop.



According to a music expert, a LOT of modern pop songs feature a similar "Wa-oh-wa-oh" hook - and once you've heard it, you won't be able to hear anything else.

As musician and product manager Patrick Metzger pointed out (via Quartz), the 'Millennial Whoop' features in pretty much every pop song you've ever heard.

Here's how he explains it: "It's a sequence of notes that alternates between the fifth and third notes of a major scale, typically starting on the fifth.

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"The rhythm is usually straight 8th-notes, but it may start on the downbeat or on the upbeat in different songs.

"A singer usually belts these notes with an 'Oh' phoneme, often in a 'Wa-oh-wa-oh' pattern. And it is in so many pop songs it's criminal."

(Er, does that make sense to any of you-wa-oh-wa-oh..?)

Metzger cites Owl City and Carly Rae Jepsen's hit 'Good Time' as a perfect example, with the first whoop coming in after just 4 seconds. Who knew writing a pop hit was so easy?

That's not the only trend he spotted. He also pointed out that a lot of songs feature the same four chords - something the Axis of Awesome parodied in their 2009 song '4 Chords'.

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