Over the past 2 years, the people at Hooktheory have been painstakingly building up a database of pop songs taken from the Billboard Hot 100 and analyzing them one at a time. At the moment their database of songs has over 1300 entries of verses, choruses, etcetera. The entries contain raw information about the chords and melody, while omitting information about the arrangement and instrumentation. According to their database, these are the most popular keys in pop music, and the most used chords within a key.

Most Popular Keys In Pop Music

What keys are most popular for the songs in the database?

Chord Use

Every song in the database was transposed to key of C to make them directly comparable. Chord use in the key of C:

Read the full article, its lively comment section is worth reading as well.

(via Bobby Owsinski’s blog).