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Is Pop Music Becoming Louder, Simpler and More Repetitive? (bbc.co.uk)
dryriver writes: The BBC has posted a very interesting article that investigates whether people claiming all over the internet that "pop music just isn't what it used to be" are simply growing old, or if there actually is objective science capable of backing up this claim of a "steady decline in music quality." The findings from five different studies are quoted; the findings from the fourth study is especially striking:
1. Pop music has become slower -- in tempo -- in recent years and also "sadder" and less "fun" to listen to.
2. Pop music has become melodically less complex, using fewer chord changes, and pop recordings are mastered to sound consistently louder (and therefore less dynamic) at a rate of around one decibel every eight years.
3. There has been a significant increase in the use of the first-person word "I" in pop song lyrics, and a decline in words that emphasize society or community. Lyrics also contain more words that can be associated with anger or anti-social sentiments.
4. 42% of people polled on which decade has produced the worst pop music since the 1970s voted for the 2010s. These people were not from a particular aging demographic at all -- all age groups polled, including 18-29 year olds, appear to feel unanimously that the 2010s are when pop music became worst. This may explain a rising trend of young millennials, for example, digging around for now 15-30 year-old music on YouTube frequently. It's not just the older people who listen to the 1980s and 1990s on YouTube and other streaming services it seems -- much younger people do it too.
5. A researcher put 15,000 Billboard Hot 100 song lyrics through the well-known Lev-Zimpel-Vogt (LZV1) data compression algorithm, which is good at finding repetitions in data. He found that songs have steadily become more repetitive over the years, and that song lyrics from today compress 22% better on average than less repetitive song lyrics from the 1960s. The most repetitive year in song lyrics was 2014 in this study.
Conclusion: There is some scientific evidence backing the widely voiced complaint -- on the internet in particular -- that pop music is getting worse and worse in the 2000s and the 2010s. The music is slower, melodically simpler, louder, more repetitive, more "I" (first-person) focused, and more angry with anti-social sentiments. The 2010s got by far the most music quality down votes with 42% from people polled on which decade has produced the worst music since the 1970s.
1. Pop music has become slower -- in tempo -- in recent years and also "sadder" and less "fun" to listen to.
2. Pop music has become melodically less complex, using fewer chord changes, and pop recordings are mastered to sound consistently louder (and therefore less dynamic) at a rate of around one decibel every eight years.
3. There has been a significant increase in the use of the first-person word "I" in pop song lyrics, and a decline in words that emphasize society or community. Lyrics also contain more words that can be associated with anger or anti-social sentiments.
4. 42% of people polled on which decade has produced the worst pop music since the 1970s voted for the 2010s. These people were not from a particular aging demographic at all -- all age groups polled, including 18-29 year olds, appear to feel unanimously that the 2010s are when pop music became worst. This may explain a rising trend of young millennials, for example, digging around for now 15-30 year-old music on YouTube frequently. It's not just the older people who listen to the 1980s and 1990s on YouTube and other streaming services it seems -- much younger people do it too.
5. A researcher put 15,000 Billboard Hot 100 song lyrics through the well-known Lev-Zimpel-Vogt (LZV1) data compression algorithm, which is good at finding repetitions in data. He found that songs have steadily become more repetitive over the years, and that song lyrics from today compress 22% better on average than less repetitive song lyrics from the 1960s. The most repetitive year in song lyrics was 2014 in this study.
Conclusion: There is some scientific evidence backing the widely voiced complaint -- on the internet in particular -- that pop music is getting worse and worse in the 2000s and the 2010s. The music is slower, melodically simpler, louder, more repetitive, more "I" (first-person) focused, and more angry with anti-social sentiments. The 2010s got by far the most music quality down votes with 42% from people polled on which decade has produced the worst music since the 1970s.
I would not be surprised to see the same trends there.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?... Axis of Awesome - 4 chord songs...
Get your music off my lawn
WARNING: Smartphones have side effects--most of them undocumented.
I imagine polling people in the '00s they would say that the pop music from the same decade was the worst ever produced. If anything, pop music since 2000 has had no identity. If the 80s was the decade of New Wave, and the 90s the decade of Alternative Rock, the 00s was an eclectic mix. There was the Nu Metal movement, which turned out to be short-lived; a resurgence in some 90s acts like Green Day/Gwen Stefani; and a growing broader interest in rap/hiphop thanks mostly to Eminem.
However, the biggest influences were the double-whammy of American Idol and Britney Spears causing Idol singers to be the primary marketed form of pop music. Many of these Idols even write their own music; however, the likelihood of being beautiful, marketable, skilled at singing/playing an instrument, AND being a talented songwriter is very low, causing song quality to fall low on the priority list. People will buy anything if it's marketed right, ya? In the old days, Idols like Elvis had their songs written by other people who were actually good at doing so; sure, many of the British Invasion bands wrote their own songs, but not all. Artists back then had more raw skill, so their songs had more complex compositions to show it off. On the flipside, recent music tends to be overproduced, with too many studio musicians, and editors inserting synthesized sounds with computer software (as opposed to standing at a synthesizer keyboard, pressing keys in realtime.)
Thanks to the Internet, there's better awareness of older music. If you want to listen to some obscure song by some obscure band from 40+ years ago, a quick trip to Youtube and you can hear it in seconds. As opposed to scrounging through used record stores for hours to find a song you've never heard before. That means current acts have to compete for mindshare with all this older music. It's also much easier to listen to music produced in other countries; I never even heard of J-Pop until the Internet put it at my fingertips (although if you check Amazon Japan, much of it is crap that sounds suspiciously like American pop.)
Considering how many more ballads were aired on radio in the past, I'm surprised songs have slower tempo nowadays on average. Perhaps that's due to increased prevalence of rap and hiphop, which tend to be more down-tempo. Dance tracks are probably more common, and seem about the same tempo as they were. The Loudness War has been well-documented. I imagine songs have lyrics that are sadder and more focused on self due to end of the civil rights era and increased wealth stratification leading to increased individualism, and more prevalence of rap/hiphop which tend to have a more negative tone.
Lyrics are more repetitive, I predict, because the hook is repeated more. More often lately, it's just repeated over and over and over, the song having an A-B-B-B... ad nauseum structure. Ok I got it, you want a catchy hook to easily market the song. But you know what songs I like most? The ones WITHOUT any identifiable hook... because the entire song is amazing despite it having multiple differing sections.
But wait, it gets worse! Major music labels decide what acts to pick up based not only on subjective listening, but also by algorithm. They now use algorithms that compare their songs to existing hit songs. If it's close enough to what sold before, then they get a second chance. In other words, they're (at least sometimes) selecting for musicians that ape what came before, ensuring it sounds same-y and not original. With the steadily decreasing music sales, the labels are likely getting increasingly conservative, even less likely to sponsor acts that break the mold (i.e. established genres) too much. That's why this decade has the same Idol domination of last decade; airbrushed airheads and smooth douches singing love songs. Every time I hear a new song I like that I hadn't heard before... it turns out it was from last decade, or a cover of one. Go figure.
Corruption is convincing someone that the selfless ideal is the same as their selfish ideal.
Whilst I find it somewhat interesting that music is more egocentric now than before, the declining quality of pop music is of no concern to me at all. I don't even need to listen to anything new. As the article states, it's now possible to listen to whatever you like on the internet and there's more excellent music already recorded than I will ever have a chance to hear. So I don't really understand why people complain that modern pop music is crap. If it's crap then just don't listen to it.
soylentnews.org
1. Pop music has become slower. Pop music is not music made by a computer to get repetitive beat to become some other genres.
2. Sound consistently louder. Invest in a better studio that will make music as the talented artist instructs. If the artist cant tell the studio what they want due to lack of skill, the studio will just make the product loud.
3. When pop music became worst. Artists did not face a Vietnam draft. See Vietnam on TV. The computer change of the 1980's that still needed classical musical skills. Lack of skills and lack of emotional drive over a decade produces a lack of artistic creativity.
4. Song lyrics. People putting music groups together want a group thats controllable and can sell on good looks. Lyrics can be created by anyone for a wage.
Without the life skills, politics and passion of one person to write lyrics the music will fail.
In the 1960's and 1970's people had to learn how to be musical. What would sell. How to write music and lyrics. In the 1980's only a select few could afford a computer system to do music, had musical talent and got accepted as music that would sell. Recording time was expensive and a real craft, an art. You had to pay your own way or get some to pay for music to be recorded and sold.
That was a loan that got offered to people with music skills. People with no music skills did not get invested in, did not have their music in shops and on the radio.
Your music had to have merit to even get considered.
With todays computers, low cost equipment more very average people are trying "music". The results are new bands that are created on looks not talent to sell.
Past music had to present in ways to avoid TV censorship in some nations. That really motivated and advanced the needed musical skill set.
The listen audience in 2018 is starting to see a created band with people creating the music and lyrics for them. Moving around to created music on the set of a horror movie does not present in the same way a creative musician recalling a war, their politics, their wealth, their poverty. The way censorship had to be worked around created professionals. A generation that had to know classical music, computer programming, the limitations of an audio signal processor, MIDI, how to work in a studio setting.
Domestic spying is now "Benign Information Gathering"
With the exception of groups like Postmodern Jukebox and other live-recorded artists, most music today is written with software. Loop-based software. The way it works is you first define a "groove", a short, typically 4-bar pattern that's as catchy as you can make it. Now take those 4 bars and repeat them 32x, add 1 or 2-bar patterns as occasional transitions, and presto, you have a "pop" song.
The problem is that software makes it so easy it entices people without real skills to write. This is similar to when laser printers and WYSIWYG editors first came on the scene, and suddenly everyone was a typographer and a graphic artist. *shudder*
You still have to have real talent as a songwriter. The software makes it "easier", not "better". Stevie Wonder can do it, for example. The vast, vast majority of other people cannot.
"We receive as friendly that which agrees with, we resist with dislike that which opposes us" - Faraday
I think you've *almost* hit the nail on the head. A glancing blow, so to speak.
It isn't that they're more efficient, but that they are wielding more control. I suspect they now write the lyrics, the music, all of it -- and merely parade anyone out front to sing the trash.
This isn't to say that some of this didn't happen before, but I suspect that they're doing it much more directly, powerfully, and with of course the lack of understanding that any exec seems to have in the entertainment industry.
So of course, all they're doing is formulaically copying the past...
Ever since the 70s there has been a progression of suppressing melody in favor of accompaniment. Melody is where creativity shines, and it is what moves people, especially moves them to revolt. No one will ever join a cause that is put to accompaniment.
I have to agree, you hit the nail on the head here. There was, of course, plenty of bad music before and during the 70's though. There has been a gradual shift from melody to "beat" though. Pop music has always been gimmicky of course, but modern stuff is all about the gimmick; every modern hit song has something gimmicky inside it. I think it's a matter of "what can we do to stand out"; there are thousands of great melodies, so what can we do to stand out from all the melodies... oh lets add some gimmicky squeal or gimmicky vocable.
The one genre I find most amusing at the moment though is country. Country used to have it's own style and format (not popular with many). Now, it's just pop sung with a godawful accent. Jazz has followed the same path and is more simplistic than it used to be too... more poppy.
New music has always sounded crap.
In a certain way, yes. However there is no dubt that today music is among the crappiest new music ever created. I am particularly annoyed at the fact that new music is getting louder and louder since the 80s (point 2). That is a well known and sourced fact: during the 80s, music producers discovered that people's attention is better caught by loud music, especially when they are doing other things (e.g. driving, watching tv, having a drink at the bar...). Not only that, but it must be constantly and continuously loud to hold attention. The end result is music without volume dynamics. It is very stressful to hear, albeit catchy at first. I sincerely cannot stand it physically, my poor ears need something better (yes, better).
You can find a lot of documents on the subject, just google it. And it is not a new thing, it is a known and documented fact since at least the late 90s, when the trend became evident.
Yeah, that's part of it. but TFA talks about some actually objective measures of quality.
In particular, #2 and #5 are hard to argue with.
Historically, music has been defined as having three main components: Rhythm, melody and harmony.
And for a generation now, the mix between the three has definitely changed, where melody is reduced and harmony is so reduced that it's almost gone.
This is an observable trend. It's been observed before in history, with music trends that were biased to one of these three at the expense of the other two. Mozart was melody focused, Bach was harmony focused.
Pointing out a difference doesn't imply that this is bad, but the pendulum has swung so far on especially harmony that it seems likely to swing back again. It would surprise me if the next generation won't have music with both 3- and 4-note chord harmonies and counterpoints throughout it.
In addition to the three commonly acknowledged components of music, I'd argue for a fourth one: dynamics. How much the whole range between quiet and loud is used. That one seems to have diminished significantly too, starting in the early 80s and culminating with the loudness wars. It's either full volume or silence, and never any subtlety. Pink Floyd might have been one of the last chart-topping bands to actively use dynamics.
New music used to be incredible. New styles, new performances, different sounds. Now, I dare you to identify a random new "pop" song as coming from what band (or, in some cases, even identifying the specific song) in a limited number of measures and in many cases not even excluding vocals. It's almost like some bad AI was able to select performers on their blandness and fitting into a small predefined set of parameters and cranks out 1 of 3 potentially different base beats. If you've got teenagers in the house, you'll know exactly what I'm talking about.
Now, to be fair, in the past there was plenty of crap music, and even some of the music that you may have thought great doesn't sound all that wonderful when you listen to it now. I pulled out some old LPs you won't hear anywhere anymore, and gave a couple a (brief) listen. Cringe worthy in some cases, a couple of gems elsewhere. Filtering through some of the bands from yesteryear was an interesting exercise where you definitely can see that some were hyped on the me-too bandwagon much like almost all of today's pop "artists" and really were just clones of the originals. How do you find the originals? They're the ones with more than 1 style and show variations and explorations in their compositions. The majority of today's "artists" basically do the manufactured pop songs for a few top 40 hits and if they move on, they go into self-absorbed woe is me crooning, in which they are but a mere photocopy of a pale shadow of Adele (who I don't particularly care for, but she does have talent)
The real issue here is that pretty much 99% of what is considered pop music since 2000 will never be nostalgically played in 20 years. Hell, 99% of pop music from the 2000s isn't played today, instead we get tired replays of music from the 60s through the 90s. They're tired because that's all we get to hear. I mean, where are today's Fleetwood Mac, Beatles, Prince, U2, Judas Priest, Def Leppard, Madonna, Johnny Cash, Metallica, Blondie, Ramones, Ozzy, Run DMC, Nirvana, Soundgarden, Cab Calloway, Green Day, Jerry Lee Lewis, Marvin Gaye, Nine Inch Nails, Bob Dylan, Simon and Garfunkel, Salt N Peppa, Led Zeppelin, Berlin, Digital Underground, Concrete Blonde, Lou Bega, or even Tom Jones in his many incarnations or really anyone that stands out not only with a unique sound but truly individual material that's identifiable and usually says something that people can relate to?
That's not by any means a comprehensive list of artists with unique sounds, but since 2000, I can only name a couple of artists/bands that even stand out: Pitbull, Imagine Dragons, Lady Gaga and The Killers. Of those, only Lady Gaga really qualifies in the same category as the top tier of pre-2000 artists. Imagine Dragons is definitely on their way, The Killers may move from 1 hit wonder into the next tier with their recent reinvention, considering anything notable came from their debut album. (I'd love to see a list of artists that qualify for the post 2000 list. This obviously doesn't include recent up and coming artists like Portugal the Man - I find they're pretty unique and certainly not more of the Radio Disney crowd, which is what I find a lot of the post 2000 pop music to be)
As an example of one of today's stars that seems to maybe have leveraged the pop machine well is Harry Styles. Time will tell if his solo career was a one hit wonder or if he'll truly be an artist. At least he's contributed something different to the mix even if I prefer different genres of music.
The cesspool just got a check and balance.
I seem to recall Nirvana doing pretty well, and they were based on the wild dynamics of the Pixies.
The same arguments were made about early Elvis Presley and rock and roll. Then the Beatles came along.
There's so much music being made (and released) today, that pointing to one single trend and saying, "This is where music is going" is a fool's errand. There are too many counter-examples.
You are welcome on my lawn.
I'd say there's a period between about 1965 and 1975 where popular mainstream music basically exploded in the genres it absorbed. You had The Beatles and The Beach Boys in the mid-60s, along with acts like the Kinks and the Yardbirds and a whole slew of other bands, just putting incredible records out. That was the dawning of the age of the studio. The Stones basically reinvented themselves in 1968 after some pretty unremarkable records and began probably the greatest four record streak in recording history beginning with Beggars Banquet.
You get to the early and mid 70s, you get the high point of Pink Floyd, Yes, Genesis, and if pure rock and roll is your thing, you've got AC/DC basically taking the original rock model and making it a lot louder, but still bands like AC/DC and Led Zeppelin knew how to make a song swing, even if they were belting it out at 10,000 watts.
I even like some punk, or at least proto-punk like the Ramones. Again, basically pure rock and roll just sped up, but still, there was a good beat that you could tap your foot to.
But after that, with some exceptions (I do like Blondie and the Police) it begans a downhill slide. I think the money men finally replaced all the good old fashioned A&R guys. There wasn't going to be any more Elvises or Ray Charles or Beatles or anything like that. Mainly I attribute it to MTV and the promotional video, which had been around in one form or another since the mid-60s, replaced the single. Video really did kill the radio star.
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.