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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.

2 of 169 comments (clear)

  1. Re:Reverse: Sign of *diversity* ? by geekmux · · Score: 5, Informative

    In the late 80s, music distribution was though a small number of TV channels (you know, back when the "M" of MTV still stood for music), a (relatively) small number of radio channel, and by buy media (tapes, CDs) from stores (with limited physical space).

    What the hell are you talking about? Distribution through TV channels? Uh, no. We usually watched MTV to catch a music video after a song became popular enough to justify making a music video. Radio airplay was still the main distribution method, as it had been for decades prior, which people usually wouldn't go buy media until they heard the music. Radio hasn't existed in "small" numbers since it was invented, and distributors sure as hell weren't going to limit themselves to whomever could afford cable TV.

    And stores with "limited physical space"? Are you kidding me? We used to have many stores that were dedicated to selling nothing but music, who carried many different "channels" of music in various categories. Where do you think all the media revenue came from before the internet distribution models? This is like claiming Gamestop has "limited" space to sell games when that's all they sell.

    I understand your UID implies otherwise, but this description of the 80s sounds like it was written by a Millennial who only read about it on a poorly written Wiki page.

  2. Re:Free Tommy Robinson! by AmiMoJo · · Score: 2, Informative

    He is not trouble for contemt of court. He already has a suspended sentence for it. It's like he wants to go to prison.

    And while I don't agree with it, the do lock Muslims up for hate speech. Quite a few actually.

    --
    const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
    SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC