4 Chords | Music Videos | The Axis Of Awesome

The Axis of Awesome · 50.8M views · 2011-07-20 · 6:20

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Overview

A comedy-music medley from the Australian band The Axis of Awesome showing that dozens of famous pop songs use the same four-chord progression. The performers cycle through a long list of hits over the same chords.

On Hacker News

HN commenters use it as the canonical demonstration that popular songs reuse one chord progression, especially in threads on music analysis and AI-generated music.

Recommended by 3 HN people across 3 months · HN mentions 2012–2025

Topics

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

What people said

Sharlin · 2022-04 · Recommendation
Heh, I just this afternoon listened to a radio show about the famously popular vi-IV-I-V/I-V-vi-IV chord progression [1]. If you haven't heard it before, the "4 Chords" medley by Axis of Awesome is a great demonstration of its ubiquity [2]. [1] [LINK] [2] [VIDEO]
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jcr · 2013-03 · Recommendation
Though a bit more on the "actual implementation" side of things, there's an Australian group called "Axis Of Awesome" who did an interesting song called "Four Chords". It shows the use of a set of four common chords in a lot of different songs. [VIDEO]
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csl · 2012-06 · Recommendation
On a related note (corniest pun of the day), the Australian musical comedy act Axis of Awesome made a song called Four Chords Song , which is basically a 47-song medley all using the same chord progression. [LINK] They've said that the chords are used by some of the most well known songs in the world, and their performance demonstrates this nicely, as in this clip: [VIDEO] The above link is the official video; but they explain their reasoning better in this live performance: [LINK]
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Sources

Video by The Axis of Awesome, played through YouTube.

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