The Data Behind Your Favorite Music | Featuring Chris Dalla Riva

Chris Dalla Riva lives at the intersection of music and data.

Playing in bands and recording music since his teenage years, Dalla Riva is currently a Senior Product Manager at Audiomack where he focuses on data analytics and personalization. He also writes about the data behind popular music in his Substack newsletter and upcoming book.

Listen to our conversation where we talk about topics like

* The intersection of anlaytical minds and structured forms of art like music and dance

* Chris’s tech stack for his music data analysis

* How to approach data projects

* And of course lots of his insights from analyzing the data behind music

Chris’s first book is a data-driven history of popular music called Uncharted Territory: What Numbers Tell Us about the Biggest Hit Songs and Ourselves. It is due out via Bloomsbury on November 13, 2025. He wrote it as he spent years listening to, and building a dataset about, every number one song in history.

If you want to keep up with Chris, you can check out his biweekly newsletter Can't Get Much Higher or his TikTok page where he regularly posts to his 100k+ followers about music and data.

Links:

* Pre-order Chris's book: https://bio.site/uncharted_territory

* Follow Chris on TikTok: @cdallarivamusic

* Follow Chris on YouTube: ‪@cdallarivamusic‬

* Subscribe to his newsletter:

This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit datastoryteller.substack.com