4/4: A beat you can dance to

Spend any time immersed in music discussions and you'll see people ask why 4/4 is so popular.

The short and most precise answer to all questions of music and music theory is: centuries of changing traditions spanning the rise and fall of empires lead (and led) to ever-shifting conventions and it just so happens that 4/4 is popular in our little snapshot of time. In fact, it's so ubiquitous that we call it common time and gave it its own little symbol. As musicians try to break out of it in the 2020s heading into the 2030s, it's likely other meters and music that defies simple numeric description will take the lead and 4/4 will fall out of favor for a while.

The long answer to "why is 4/4 popular?" is that no one really knows for sure, but there are some great candidates for an answer. Personally, it's familiar and Ableton Live defaults to it, so I tend to just roll with it.

In general, the causality goes both ways: 4/4 is popular because everyone uses it, and everyone uses it because it's popular. It's the same situation with pianos being built around the Major scale. Play all the white keys from C to C, you get C Major. Play from D to D, D Major, and so on. We end up with a lot of music written in modes of Major. The black keys, five of them, are naturally pentatonic as a result of their role of providing flats and sharps to create minor modes from Major, so end up in a lot of dance music where simple jumpy melodies do best.

4/4 is just one way of marking time for music. You could come up with any number of ways to mark that time and get the same result. You can even throw in some irregular beats like some music traditions do and arrive back at the regular beat when it's all considered as a whole.

The generally agreed upon answer is: 4/4 sounds good and you can dance to it.

Here are some high quality discussions I found while researching this question.

What made 4/4 time the most common time signature?

Most music is written in 4/4 time, and in today’s world it seems to be the accepted norm. Now, that doesn’t mean mainstream music doesn’t use alternate meters, but it’s just less common than I imag…

Music: Practice & Theory Stack ExchangeTaco

Here's one for you to ponder: why does everyone want to know about 4/4 and not the equally popular 3/4, like in Billy Joel's Piano Man?

Or the somewhat popular 5/4 you might know from Mission Impossible.

Or the 7/4 of Pink Floyd's Money.

Or a mix of 3/4 (verse) and 4/4 (chorus) like "Lucy in the sky with diamonds"

And the answer is the same: each one rises and falls in popularity as people find a way to use it. The songs up there probably influenced a boom of other songs with the same meter.

If you have other quizzical queries about ordinary things, drop me a line. Be sure to let me know if you want credit. I can't guarantee the question will be published verbatim or answered without modification. I often run into deeper or different questions while researching and may synthesize a new one out of all of them to answer instead.