When I was young and learning music theory in piano lessons, one day I realized that literally half the songs on the radio used the chord progression "I V vi IV". This was a huge revelation to me! To my dismay, I couldn't find any evidence on the internet that anyone else had noticed this, until very recently I saw the "Four Chord Song" by Axis of Awesome (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5pidokakU4I). I was hoping to see some mention of that in this article, but was disappointed.
Hi fferen, I V iv V is indeed a super popular progression. You can see an example of it here: http://www.hooktheory.com/analysis/view/james-blunt/youre-be.... One cool thing about the way we store music (using relative notation) is that we can compare any two songs to see how similar they are harmonically. For example, there are several "similar songs" shown below the I V vi IV example in the link that all use the same progression in different keys.
All the music nerds I've been hanging out with consider this a pretty obvious observation. So maybe it's a bit weird it hasn't shown up on the internet before.
But like a lot of other people in here have been saying: There's more to a song than the chord progression. We might as well have been talking about rhythm - the vast majority of Western music is in 4/4 time. Also, practically ALL Western music uses the 12-note system. Not pointing this at you, but it's annoying to hear all the people in this thread complain about how pop music sucks because it's all based on the same foundation. Practically all computer programs are in some way based on C. Does this mean that all computer programs suck?
It's called a deceptive cadence -- that's the I V vi part. The IV is warmup for the V - I cadence that ends it all. "Deceptive" because vi is one note away from I, but in minor, not major.
It's a well-known pattern; sorry the internet let you down.
