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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.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?... Axis of Awesome - 4 chord songs...
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.
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.
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.
Pop music isn't written to make music, it's written to make money. The more efficiently they can get that earworm in with the flattest hook they can the better. Rinse, repeat ad infinitum.
Wanna buy a shirt?
https://www.redbubble.com/people/stealthfinger/shop?asc=u
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.
He said metal, and you pull out Grohl?
Music hasn't become worse; record labels have become more efficiënt.
It's far cheaper to exploit starting musicians than to cultivate succesful musicians.
It's far cheaper to dump a performer as soon as they get popular enough to start making demands and just get another one.
Slashdot social media options: AIM, ICQ, Yahoo, Jabber and Mobile Text. Why no MySpace?
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
New music has always sounded crap. It's a case of Sturgeon's Law (90% of everything is crap) combined with survivor bias (the 10% that isn't crap is more likely to be remembered and still played much later). For every great song you can remember from a prior decade, there are nine more that were such complete crap that you don't even remember that they were briefly popular.
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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...
'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
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.
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]
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.