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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.
Because the style of music we call "Pop music" isn't popular anymore. EDM has stolen that crown, just look at what all the kids are listening to these days.
I would not be surprised to see the same trends there.
Where I live all the kids are listening to the same autotuned R&B cr@p either with some mysogynistic neanderthal with his pants down by his knees rapping out some teenage wannabe bullshit or else some wailing woman in her knickers putting it out there.
I thought all pop music was supposed to be a descendent from Delta Blues - which definitely cant be beat on the above features (pun intended).
I woke up this morning,
with Slashdot on my mind,
pulled the bedsheet over me,
went back to sleep for quite some time!
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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.
Music today is made with the intent of creating a 'hit' song. Using formulas that have worked in the 80's/90's. The music that was made by garage bands, one hit wonders were created by talented artists who just wanted to make a song that 'they' liked, they weren't making it in order to 'sell' it. Manufactured 'pop' music is the easy thing to do. There is no 'formula' that guarantees a hit song. People, especially the newer generations, have gotten wise to the fact that having driving bass does not 'connect' with listeners. And they are going back in music history and 'discovering' great songs that many of us 'oldsters' have known all of our lives.
I think pop music blows. It seems to be one "singer" who doesn't really sing, and the music is mostly some kind of beat and there's almost no melody or music at all besides the percussion beat and maybe some kind of occasional synthesizer fill in. There seems to be a side version of this, featuring only a guitar with someone who can't lift their fingers off the strings.
And the artist? It's like "Sharyian, Featuring Gtili and Wryannn" or some other kind of "collaboration" which ranges from the featured artists' presence being almost unknowable without the credits or totally dominating the song so that you don't know it was the "main" artists' song.
But my kid loves it, so who am I? Some old guy who thinks this younger generation is full of it? Where have I heard that one before?
My larger take is that this is just pop music subsuming "rap" music. The kid if given the choice will also try to play the rap station, which is even worse. Lyrics totally devoid of meaning and a "beat" that's just kind of a cacophony of rhythm and noise. It makes flipping the station back to classic rock like discovering something amazing.
That be hip hop!
Word!
Except that I've noticed that this
1. Pop music has become slower -- in tempo -- in recent years and also "sadder" and less "fun" to listen to.
seems to apply to hip-hop as well. To my ears, hip hop music has become less "funky", less dance-able, a lot slower, a lot less R&B/soul-like, more drawn out, with more "irregular" and slower beats. Note, I'm no music expert, I'm describing it as I hear it. I mean, compare the stuff say Drake puts out with hip hop of the 2000s and the 1990s. If I listen to some 2016/17 hip hop mix (the biggest hits, the mainstream stuff) it all sounds drawn out, slow, feeble, with lyrics which are more pathetic and pop-like compared to a mix of hip hop hits from say, the late 90s.
Less dynamic:
https://youtu.be/lFqNQna_-sI?t...
More dynamic:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?...
You gain a bonus +1 to intelligence for expressing disdain for pop music or anyone who enjoys it. However, you also suffer -1 to charisma for being insufferable.
As it is louder, (compressed) I can not find joy listening to anything, It sounds horrible. Therefore, I know I'm missing a big chunk of good music that simply has been recorded or mastered to be listened in smartphones across the street. It is devastating when compared to a good ol day recording.
My absolutely despised albums are two of my favourite band: The cure. Please listen (if you can) to albums called "The Cure" 2008 and "Dream" 2008. Absolute trash sounding.
And the same with slashdot posts probably...
Violence is the last refuge of the incompetent. Polar Scope Align for iOS
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.
Even metal has gone shit in recent years. It's all emo crap these days.
Wanna buy a shirt?
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Michael Jackson died in 2009. Pop music became the worst in 2010. Coincidence? We've also recently lost other pop greats like David Bowie, Prince and George Michael.
Personally, the only pop music I really listen to is from the 80s. That was the best decade for music.
No the problem is compression or the loudness war:
https://www.cnet.com/news/comp...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
When people say that music used to be better in the old days, that is actually true, it was better in the old days. Music in the old days had more dynamic range. Today it's just loud and flat.
Pop music being a major facet of our culture, I believe this study reflects on us as a whole, and what it indicates is that human beings are growing isolated from one another, sad, and angry. That makes me feel bad.
That's a very insightful observation. Given the bad rap Facebook and the like are getting, It would be interesting to plot the rise of social media and the dumbing-down of popular music and see if there's a strong correlation. Not that I believe there's a causal relationship; rather, I think the increasing concentration of wealth and power might be the cause of both crappy music and the increasingly-superficial interactions in our society. The ruling class has gotten much better at the whole 'bread and circuses' thing. It's kinda hard to create significant art when your whole environment has been specifically designed to make you Comfortably Numb. I wonder if we'll ever manage to Tear Down (this) Wall...
It would also be interesting to find scientific ways of evaluating the 'just isn't what it used to be' quality of various art forms through recorded history, to see if it correlates well with increased power among the leash-holders and decreased autonomy among Joe and Jane Average.
'The Economy' is a giant Ponzi scheme whose most pitiable suckers are the youngest among us and the yet-unborn.
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
I remember (popular) 80s music being worse than the 70s. I also remember 90s music being better than the 80s. I remember music after that being terrible. There is a reason the 70s bands are still touring and the 80s ones aren't.
He said metal, and you pull out Grohl?
The big question is WHAT is pop music, The line on what defines it is pretty wide now a days.
Todays pop music is written by algorithms. And it doesn't sound too bad. Because we listen to music so much repetetive and meditative ambient/trance like, 'boring' music has become the norm.
The progressive pioneers of Electronic music showed us what would be coming, now it's here and part of the mainstream.
This is simply a classic evolution of artistic style. A song from 1920 sounds naive and childlike to us today, the sounds we listen to would sound like industrial noise to someone from that era. This is normal and music will continue to evolve to gain new subtleties and lose others.
We suffer more in our imagination than in reality. - Seneca
Pop music is not created anymore. It is manufactured, based on a known recipe of repetitive beats, a breathy oversexualized, Autotuned voice track crooned by a pop star that is valued more for their looks than their talent.
Labels don't employ singers or artists anymore. They employ entertainers, because a good portion of revenue comes from touring, where only the best lip-syncing dancers fill sold-out stadiums and pretend to belt out their most popular tracks for two hours. The Loudness Wars confirmed that the quality of the recording no longer mattered; it merely needed to be loud enough for radio airplay.
What is sad is finding Profit always being the #1 priority, which is why pop music is manufactured to fit into a proven revenue model. The fact that it's become simpler and more repetitive tends to show how lazy you can be to entertain the simple masses. Johnny Crooner and his iPad "band" can probably crank out a Top 10 hit in less than an hour these days, and rip off (a.k.a. "sample") a dozen hit songs doing it.
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
Michael Jackson died in 2009. Pop music became the worst in 2010. Coincidence? We've also recently lost other pop greats like David Bowie, Prince and George Michael.
Personally, the only pop music I really listen to is from the 80s. That was the best decade for music.
Michael Jackson died 8 years after releasing his last album in 2001, which was also the last year any of his work was in the Billboard Top charts. No doubt he had a lasting impact on pop music, but his days of creating music died far before he did.
George Michael died 12 years after releasing his last album in 2004, which was a comeback effort after nearly a 20-year gap since he last released any original music.
Coincidence you say? No, not really.
Santana, Eric Clapton, Fleetwood Mac, Boston, Led Zeppelin, Van Morrison, among many others.
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.
Trump being elected is pretty much unarguable proof that at least some humans are getting more stupid.
Totally agree.
How stupid does one have to be to run probably the *only* candidate that was worse than Trump against him? Hell, the Dems could have chosen almost anyone else and beat Trump easily.
We could be discussing President Sanders instead of Trump if the Clintons and DNC leadership didn't engage in election fraud in the primaries.
Want to know who to blame for Trump becoming POTUS?
Blame the Clintons and DNC leadership. THEY are the most responsible for Trump's victory, not the RNC. Hell, the RNC hates Trump almost as much as the Dems do!
Strat
Progressivism (aka US 'Liberalism'): Ideas so good they need a police/surveillance-state to enforce.
'Angry'. 'Uneducated'.
There ya go, insightful analysis. Not.
Actually, the lemming comment is equally valid accusing our youth of following whatever meme they are being fed at the moment.
Me? I'm an aging white cracker homophobe post-Republican conservative, and I love Camilla Cabello, Lourde, Khalid, Halsey. I still prefer 70s power rock/metal, Led Zeppelin is with Pink Floyd the eipitome of power rock, and She Came in Through the Bathroom Window (the Beatles version, please) is a blues song. And the Blues is God's music. Mostly. Bass305 is worth a slot in my playlist still, FSOL was and is a revelation, Air is my guilty pleasure, Moby is clever, I do NOT CARE that Toni Childs is white, Sara McLachlan can sing that sad shit forever, and Madeleine Peyroux seemed like a scared little girl when I first heard her, and it's wonderful she's still working at this. Yes, I'm a fool for female voices. Between Mahler's First, Ravel, Handel, and Beethoven I have enough, so Tchaikovsky is dessert. Puccini is enough.
But try to expand the musical horizons of my 15 yo FD? Oh, dear God, she kinda likes George Clinton, thinks George Michael is saccharine, Boy George is some weird inside joke, Snoop is old but cred, Will Smith is an actor, Hammer is a tool, and I'm stupid trying to share my decrepit music with her. All the time I realize that her radio is filled with the same 8 songs all day long, she prefers 'gangsta' rap from men who she would file restraining orders against if they were in her life, and has the modern version of picket fence/station wagon/2 .2 kids/dog/cat/vacation on the shore, which is total devotion/two against the world/total bliss/rule the world. I pray that dream is broken gently, but the music is corrosive. And she knows it, but it's like a drug. Actually, it's a drug. Yes.
I'll pass on having to explain how Baby, It's Cold Outside and Acid Queen are less sexual than anything she's listening to. That is not so easy after all.
And so it's the Deja Vu all over again.
deleting the extra space after periods so i can stay relevant, yeah.
We hate it, yeah yeah yeah
We hate it, yeah yeah yeah
We hate it, yeah yeah yeah
You think you've found your groove
Well, I'm here to set you stray-e-ate
It's not that hard to prove
Your music ain't that grey-e-ate
We say we hate it
And you know that it's all sad
We say we hate it
And you know you should feel bad
We said it hurts our ears
We almost lost our mind
Not heard such crap in years
Your drummer must be blind
We say we hate it
And you know that it's all sad
We say we hate it
And you know you should feel bad
Oo, we hate it, yeah yeah yeah
We hate it, yeah yeah yeah
With a song like that
You know you should feel bad
You know it's come to this
I think it's only fair
Stop writing all that shit
And take it off the air
We say we hate it
And you know that it's all sad
We say we hate it
And you know you should feel bad
Oo, we hate it, yeah yeah yeah
We hate it, yeah yeah yeah
With a song like that
You know you should feel bad
With a song like that
You know you should feel bad
With a song like that
You know you should feel bad
Yeah, yeah, yeah
Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah
It's worth noting that much of the top-5 songs in the past 10 - 15 years have all been written by the same tiny handful of songwriters.
Obviously Max Martin tops this list, and has been writing #1's since at least 1997. He has dominated the pop charts even more in the past decade. He has either written or co-written most #1 pop songs you can think of for the past 5 years. He also produces the songs he writes for the singers that release them. Taylor Swift, Ariana Grande, Justin Timberlake, Katy Perry, Maroon 5, P!nk, Kelly Clarkson - every single one of them had a #1 with Max Martin in the past few years - and some (Timberlake) since the beginning of their careers.
Whenever I hear that a song by Katy Perry is a "dis track" against Taylor Swift I just go "They're written by the same guy!" In fact he might be suggesting these tracks to specific artists with that kind of press in mind.
Martin himself might be single-handedly responsible for the actual stats this article outlines.
And when it's not Max Martin, it's one of his protegés, e.g.: Dr. Luke.
Because I can! [Brainrub.com]
"radical centrist" seems an oxymoron.
Consider that the hit making machine(s) analyze their works closely to see if they fit specific boundaries of a model developed to fit music, now considered "content" into their formulas.
YouTube play (used to be radio play) time, viral capability, on-tour dynamics with choreography, and the disposable nature of artists and trends.
This isn't about artistry, it's about making money. The indy-music isn't about pop-music or even a specific genre, and with the death of live music (everyone's staring at smartphones), touring becomes wholly the crux of serious marketing money.
You can rant and rave all you want, but the quality of current music distribution isn't targeting you, it's targeting the bell curve of making its shareholder return-- and not your tastes. It has to sell internationally, and be re-marketed to cultures outside of North America successfully. Is it "dumbed-down"? Not full of localized themes, protest or otherwise because they might piss-off other cultures. Everything's safe, if slightly smokey, but there is no possibility for zeal, or novelty.... or the excitement of days gone by.
When AI meets pop hits, we're doomed. Oh, wait.....
---- Teach Peace. It's Cheaper Than War.
postbigbang noted:
"radical centrist" seems an oxymoron.
It's really not, though.
A centrist is one who believes that the greatest good for the greatest number is generally found in the center of the political discourse - and achieving it typically requires compromise on both sides.
A radical centrist is one who believes that the greatest good for the greatest number can best be achieved by standing the loudest mouths on both extremes of the political shouting match up against a wall and shooting their stupid, uncompromising asses ...
Check out my novel.
You must be a kid who wasn't alive at the time if you think the 80s was only hair metal. The best stuff by Metallica, Megadeth, Sepultura, King Diamond, Danzig, Manowar, Gwar, Slayer, Napalm Death, Morbid Angel and Cannibal Corpse came out in the 80s.
Absolutely there was some good metal from the 80's, but the article is about popular music, not good music. Generally the bands you listed weren't hitting the top of the billboard charts or filling stadiums like the classic [and mostly marginally talented] 80's glam/hair metal bands.
FWIW, I was born in 1980, Megadeth is my favorite band, I'm a big fan [still] of Gwar, Metallica post black album is shit...