To examine the usefulness of applying experimental aesthetics techniques to popular music, two experiments studied interrelationships between pleasingness and familiarity ratings and recordings' past chart performance. There was a moderate positive linear correlation between pleasingness and familiarity. Records which had the greatest chart success were the most familiar but they were not necessarily the most pleasing. Comparison of different methods of obtaining pleasingness and familiarity ratings suggested that, for this kind of material, ratings made from memory, cued by artist and title, accord closely with ratings made immediately after hearing a recording.