Mike McCready

Who is Mike McCready?

Mike McCready is an entrepreneur in the music industry, CEO of Music Xray, a blogger on Huffington Post and musician. He is most known for having pioneered the science of hit song prediction known as Hit Song Science using acoustic analysis software to analyze the underlying mathematical patterns in music. The challenges his company faced in bringing the technology to market were later documented in a Harvard Business School case study penned by Anita Elberse titled Polyphonic HMI: Mixing Music and Math.

McCready's work with Hit Song Science worked its way briefly into the public consciousness in the first decade of the 2000's, earning him high profile media attention including features in The New York Times Magazine, The Guardian, Le Monde, and a piece by Malcolm Gladwell in The New Yorker. He was additionally included in several high profile documentaries by National Geographic Television, Discovery Channel, ITV and Hit Song Science became the inspiration for the plot of an episode of the CBS drama Numb3rs. He was the subject of a supposed investment by one of the characters in Aaron Sorkin's short-lived series, Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip.