Axis of Awesome - 4 Four Chord Song (with song titles)

random804 · 92.3M views · 2009-12-10 · 5:31

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Overview

Australian comedy group Axis of Awesome perform a sketch showing that dozens of pop hits share the same four chords. It was recorded at the 2009 Melbourne International Comedy Festival.

On Hacker News

The go-to reference in threads on chord progressions, pop music similarity and music copyright.

Recommended by 2 HN people across 2 months · HN mentions 2012–2025

Topics

Stand-up & sketch comedy Music theory, synthesis & production Music performance & songs

What people said

BrandoElFollito · 2023-05 · Recommendation
I think nobody linked to Axis of Awsome's 4 Chords Song yet. A good example of chords vs. songs: [VIDEO]
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cycomanic · 2022-03 · Recommendation
I suspect the "appealing" melodies amongst this are likely a small subset of the the total set. The whole story reminded me of this axis of awesome (OZ comedy group) song (well worth watching): [VIDEO]
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tsumnia · 2025-04 · Reference
There's a great video essay series known as "Everything is a Remix" by Kirby Ferguson [1] if you have an hour to spare. Ferguson uses the trends of music sampling as a base for how artists draw inspiration from others. The controversy of sampling has been used across genres, include around minute 9 Ferguson points out that Led Zepplin were considered ripoffs for their appropriation of Jake Holmes. Axis of Awesome also has a "chord progression song" [2] that makes fun of how similar many pop songs are. The video draws a nice parallel to how so much in our world serves as "inspiration" for our own works, but acknowledges the controversy around using a single source as "too much inspiration". Especially as we move into whatever copyright arguments are getting made toward AI right now, I think it serves as a nice outline on why this is such a complicated matter. [1] [LINK] [2] [VIDEO]
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Sources

Video by random804, played through YouTube.

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