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.

Comments

Relevant?

[phantomfive]

Are the billboard top 10 even relevant anymore? It seems like a different metric like "top 100 concert earnings" or something would be more relevant these days.

Reverse: Sign of *diversity* ?

[DrYak]

Hypothesis: Can also be a sign of *diversification* of the means of distribution.

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).
Whatever you wanted to listen too mostly came from mainstream media.
You would need a tiny bit more producers to cover a diverse enough offer to cover all the needs of the public within such a small restricted numbers of channel.
In other words the remaining 80% of the 80s producers will be another dozen or couple of dozens of producers, and that's basically all that there was.

Compare to today, even if you're into chiptunes, nerdcore, or even weirder/rarer style that only people on some obscure forum know about, there's going to be at least a dozen of youtube channels with playlist/mixes.
There are dozens of producer event for the rarest type of stuff.
In other word, the remaining 60% of todays producers at thousands of producers, split among so many style that they'll never register on any "top fo whatever" classifications.
The long tail has grown a lot in the mean time, but that something that won't be registered by a simplistic stat like "top billboard song contribution from 10 topmost procuders grew from 20% to 40%" , unless you start paying attention of what's happening to the remain 80% to 60%.

Musical content

[swm]

I sing in a choir.
We'll have some piece of sheet music, 3, 4, 6, maybe 8 pages.
We start rehearsing it, and after a page or two the choir director says, now you've seen all the musical content in this piece.
IOW, all the rest of the song is just repeats and rearrangements of what we've already sung.

So I learned this idea of "musical content".
Now, when I hear current pop music, I think about it in those terms.
What is the musical content of this song?
And it's not two pages.
It's not one page.
Sometimes it's a line.
Sometimes it's just a couple of bars.
Sometimes it's barely a few notes.

There's really not much there.