Musical onset detection approach
Your question is really quite broad. 

In a nutshell, if you think of the "successive differences", called spectral flux, understood per frequency range you can start to generalize to different kinds of music where maybe the kick drum is not present but the other instrumentation is sufficient to conclude that there is still on onset. One can also better measure the "strength" (loudness) of an onset, which is useful for algorithms processing onsets to conclude something at a higher rhythmic level (meter, phrasing, other groupings)

There's a lot of literature &amp; code out there to try:


Look into MIREX publications and datasets
Try out code on github (https://github.com/CPJKU/SuperFlux, https://github.com/search?utf8=%E2%9C%93&amp;q=onset+detection&amp;type=Repositories&amp;ref=searchresults, https://github.com/adamstark/Beat-Tracking-Evaluation-Toolbox)
Play with Beatseeker (https://www.ableton.com/en/packs/beatseeker/)