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Increasing Similarity of Billboard Songs
It's not just you, others have also noticed that popular songs on the Billboard charts sound similar. But what you may not realize is that in the recent days, they're sounding even more similar. Andrew Thompson and Matt Daniels for The Pudding make the case: From 2010-2014, the top ten producers (by number of hits) wrote about 40% of songs that achieved #1 - #5 ranking on the Billboard Hot 100. In the late-80s, the top ten producers were credited with half as many hits, about 19%. In other words, more songs have been produced by fewer and fewer topline songwriters, who oversee the combinations of all the separately created sounds. Take a less personal production process and execute that process by a shrinking number of people and everything starts to sound more or less the same.
This has been well known as the "four chord song" rule for a very very long time.
The Australian musical comedy group "Axis Of Awesome" has a fantastic comedy routine about it, which incidentally demonstrates it, in bold contrast, with current and historical hit songs.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?...
Australians are awesome.