The best is to use animated texture to drive the light's emission. The bulbs should be mesh lights for this purpose.
Create a texture strip with as many pixels as you have bulbs. Unwrap each bulb into it's corresponding pixel.
Animate the texture strip in a loop to create whatever color and motion pattern you desire. It's easy to do in AfterFX or similar app.
Simple animations like switching between odd and even bulbs could be also driven with lamp objects using drivers and #frame keyword to drive the light's strength. Drivers can be copied easily between many bulbs. This approach is not that flexible though.
In the provided example it seems the light groups are driven straight from the midi file for the instruments. You can load such file in the MIDI Driver addon and assign each instrument channel an animation Action for example (like turning a group of lights on and off).