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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.
Surprised they are, when sales stagnate. Recording companies, complain to the Emperor they do. Longer copyright they want.
So what this "news story" is saying is that in recent years "mainstream music" sounds all the same. Let me guess, it's probably because "artists" nowadays use some computer algorithm to generate music which appeals to a wide audience and call themselves DJs ("disc jockeys", although I bet that none of them use discs anymore, they should be called "sample mixers").
titles of the same genre have always been somewhat similar, its just that the industry figured that a few mainstream genres are worth it, and the rest not. compare this with comics, books, games, movies, series, ... . few popular exceptions can divert this a bit (increase of synth use after title xxx, mistery series after stranger things or more gore/crime after breaking bad walking dead, ... ). and ofc people want money, means artists will copy popular stuff all the time. everything is a copy of everything at the end
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Y%27All_Want_a_Single#Captions_in_the_music_video
Answered, right here, right now. Bank it like Trump! OFFSHORE!
Baby Wanna Baby Wanna Baby Wanna I Wanna Baby.
There that is the next ten number 1 hits.
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.
"First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
Dam Da Dum Da Da Dum Dum
Dam Da Dum Da Da Dum Dum
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%.
"Sufficiently advanced satire is indistinguishable from reality." - [Tips: 1DrYakQDKCQ6y52z6QbnkxHXAocMZJE61o ]
Free Tommy Robinson!
UK government is suppressing large-scale UK Muslim pedophile child abductions, child-sex trafficking, and rape gangs. Reporting on the rape gangs and child-trafficking and even upon Tommy Robinson's arrest for reporting on them as been banned by the UK government.
This could well be the beginning of violent revolution in the UK.
The business types get control of art, and they homogenize it into a fetid featureless river of shit.
Luckily, there is so much creativity outside of the mainstream, if you only cut the feed of shit they feed you, and go explore on your own.
Eat the rich.
Sounds like the phenomenon of "Top 1% owns 99%" is impacting music as well as wealth, but it that purely an American phenomenon? The concentration does not seem to be as bad in UK or Europe, or here in Australia.
As an old fart (punched card Fortran guy) it seems to me that most pop music has become very homogeneous there; the same four chords and riffs over and over with autotuned well-known-female-voice over the top.
Listening to random classics on Youtube (today: The Monkeys, The Stranglers) the difference in texture and nuance from then to now is very evident.
It will be interesting to see how AI generated music goes:
a. Will it be indistinguishable from human output, or is there some 'human' quality that WE will always be able to detect?
b. What music will an artificial consciousness prefer? Jazz? Human au Naturale? - we may be surprised!
[Personal Taste warning]
There is some 'real music' still coming out of USA, but mostly in genres ignored by the Mu$ic Indu$try, My favourite is Jackie Evancho who seems to have been blackballed by the industry since singing at Trumps Inauguration, but her vocals are very impressive (and very human) to my ears.
[/End Personal Taste warning]
I think much of today's music with some exceptions with country music is born out of the music not the lyrics. Certainly there is plenty of the one hit wonders going around and when that song get's played to death they move on to the next one hit. I've also noticed the lack of interest in a artist in general, people don't buy entire albums or collections but rather just singles. This is probably why record companies push single hit wonders and not artists that can hold a listener for a entire group of songs.
I do not care about pop music, but I am interested in methodology. Article says about 8 data points calculated for each song but it does not describe how and how did they normalize it to 0...1 scale
I do not believe in karma. "Funny"=-6. Do good and forbid evil. Yours, Oft-Offtopic Flamebaiting Troll.
I don't understand why people still buy into the bullshit music industry and even bother listening to the shitty music it produces. When I go to a store or a restaurant I don't hear shitty new music, I heard golden oldies from forty years ago.
All the good music like Stratovarius and Morcheeba is being played in other countries. All the goid news that keeps us informed about the FBI meddling in elections via Operation Crossfire Hurricane using spies like Professor Stefan Halper, comes from other countries too.
So to hell with all the people who served. They're the reason this fascist police state got away with 9-11. ae911truth org
All the data they used came from the Billboard Hot 100 chart which has a long history of being gamed by the record companies (as almost all Billboard charts are, if we're being honest).
Smaller artists usually don't get on that chart because they don't have the resources to play that game. The companies that are willing to invest the money to game the system are generally going to back music that's similar to what's already popular because it increases the chance of success.
And to follow through to the logical conclusion; gaming the system gets your song onto the chart which then gets you more airplay on stations that play the 'top hits' which gets you more sales. It's a complicated version of the pay-for-play that used to be commonplace, but this time with a veneer of legality to keep anyone from being arrested or fined.
Seems to me the concerts are packed. The "artists" are insanely rich, as are their promoters.
Isn't that what business is about? Where is the problem?
I still listen to stuff like Santana and Eric Clapton. I know: "get off my lawn."
If you haven't seen it:Sir Mashalot: Mind-Blowing SIX Song Country Mashup, or 6 #1 country songs separated at birth.
https://youtu.be/FY8SwIvxj8o?l...
So yeah, it is all over compressed, similar sounding 120 beat per minute 4 chord stuff. I don't even think the music has chord changes in the songs anymore.
i counter your argument with this :)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eOGkj2w0_Rs
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.
For me, music is the most emotional and involving of the arts. It can span the whole human experience and dig deep into all of us. Modern pop music is a clean departure from the realm of emotion and feeling. The droning high-pitched lead voice, an uninspired repetitive lyric, and accompaniment that seems to be exclusively the product of a drum machine and bits of electronically synthesized sound patched together. The "samplers" are even worse, stealing the content of legitimate artists and pasting chunks of it together. It's something I would expect a 12-year-old to do, and shows very little creativity and no artistry. The music industry has corrupted itself and now it's trying to corrupt us.
they keep it on as background noise when they work or use it to dance to at clubs. That kind of music needs to be bland because otherwise you can't tune it out while you go about your work.
Hi! I make Firefox Plug-ins. Check 'em out @ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/youtube-mp3-podcaster/
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.
(That was more thrown in for the jab at MTV, rather than considering it as the number one way to distribute music). :
Hence also the progressive enumeration
small number of TV < relatively small number of Radios < physical media from stores (with shelf space restriction).
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,
Small: Compared to what ? To modern internet/streaming/Etc. ?
Yes, definitely. It was tiny.
At best you'd get a couple of dozen FM channels that you could catch with your radio in the 80s. At any point of time, there would be a grand total of a couple of dozen of different songs that you could be hearing available simultaneously.
That is a tiny trickle compared to giant Niagara of content that is available today online.
There's a crazy insane amount of content that is immediately accessible to you.
There are style that you would probably never be able to hear on the radio that are a single click away from you on internet.
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.
All stores *DO* have limited physical space.
Yes, it's in the "several hundreds to thousands" range of media, which is impressive by 80s standard.
But again that's dwarfed by the amount of content currently available online.
There things that you couldn't find in the shelf back then.
With some luck, it could be ordered by the shop. Without luck, you would need to hunt for small very specialized store that don't sell any mainstream media but only rarities and oddities. And you would need to go through several shops until you find what you need - as in physically travel in a nearby town. And/or hunt any garage sells / etc.
Nowadays, it's just a few search terms aways from you, all from the comfort of you internet-enabled laptop. Within seconds. No travel required.
At worse you would need to get it peer to peer instead of from a website, because some copyright holder is still refusing to make it available. But you'll get it online faster anyway.
That's the whole point of my post. :-P )
Nowadays, even if you're interested in completely weird music that only 3 other guys are listening to, there WILL be content available for you now. (A distant SFW-equivalent of rule 34 of the internets
As there are only 4 guys listening - counting you - this will never register on any "top 10 billboard song".
On the other hand, that's yet another additional (even if eccentric) style made available for listening thanks to the modern internet media, so more argument in favor of an actually diversification of available media.
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.
Not a personal example, but I have some friends who are huge metal heads:
Back then, when they were teens, they would littteraly travel to manage to buy the media which interested them. (Some were happy to buy CDs during obscure band's tour. One even opened a specialized music shop to cater to people with similar non mainstream tastes)
Same guys, a couple of decades later. They reminisces about some obscure band that they've seen once on tour (and which disappeared no longer afterward). One flings her phone open, types a few keywords, and blasts the music to the bluetooth
"Sufficiently advanced satire is indistinguishable from reality." - [Tips: 1DrYakQDKCQ6y52z6QbnkxHXAocMZJE61o ]
The general public is musically ignorant and they'll eat up whatever they are spoon fed.
Take a look at the number of units sold in country and religious genres. Number one selling albums in the pop charts wouldn't crack the top 10 for units sold on the contemporary christian charts.
These things are just there to justify the existence of the R&R guys at the label.
"Well, good luck finding a judge that doesn't run a bestiality site."
> Let me guess, it's probably because "artists" nowadays use some computer algorithm to generate music which appeals to a wide audience
Almost is that, and has been for a long time. Pop songs have a very well-defined structure or formula. To some extent, that makes sense because that's what makes it a pop song, not blues, not country, not hip hop, not gospel, but pop.
Programmers have a formula for sorting, called quicksort, and lots of programmers do quicksort with very minor variations. Bakers have a pretty standard recipe for bread, with different people doing minor variations, there are a couple formulas for lipstick, with the ratio of colorants being the only thing that changes, and there is a formula or recipe for a pop song. Music majors can tell you the formula or pattern for a pop song.
Nothing wrong with using a well-proven formulas. The only thing is, as a consumer don't expect a pop song to B original, and don't expect paying $80 for lipstick is going to get you anything different than paying $8. When you buy lipstick, you're going get wax (mostly carnauba wax), oil, and pigment. When you buy a pop song, you're probably going to get intro, verse, pre-chorus, chorus (or refrain), verse, pre-chorus, chorus, bridge ("middle eight"), verse, chorus and outro.
I wish you still got that. Now you get intro verse chorus chorus chorus chorus chorus chorus chorus.
Decades ago, radio was music. Then, when the ASCAP/BMI fees were too hard to pay, we had talk radio. Now, even on the music stations, we get more "morning team" patter than actual music. And the commercials! The NAB and FCC once had strict limits on commercials per hour. Now, radio is just one long commercial interrupted by a short musical interludes.
Pretty typical of this corrupted free market.
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.
I just looked at the Billboard Top 30 for 1952, and almost every single song on the list is one of two chord progressions, either ii-V-I or I-IV-V. For that matter, practically the entire Great American Songbook of popular music written from the end of WWI to the early '60s could all be represented by one chord progression.
Popular music is not more similar today, musically.
You are welcome on my lawn.
Ever been a beer judge?
If you're tasting entries into the American light lager category and you don't like light lagers (e.g. because you're an IPA freak), that doesn't mean they're bad entries. It just means American light lager isn't your bag, baby. They're supposed to be light. They're supposed to be lagerey. They aren't supposed to taste like IPA.
And if you have been drinking IPA all night and someone hands you a couple light lagers, they're going to taste the same to you (like crap).
I have listened to a lot of heavy metal, psychedelic rock, blues, and progressive mixes of all that stuff, but I have never explored the billboard genre. But it's easy to imagine that the billboard genre of music has specific requirements that make them sound all the same to people who listen to other genres.
When I was a kid and played metal for my dad, he said it all sounded the same, too ("like International Harvester"). He didn't know the genre. Maybe it's the same with you and billboard style music, just because you're not familiar with what properties make it be billboard style music, as opposed to some other kind of music.
You forgot the hook.
If you follow any one of those "learn to play in 2 hours" type courses, you'd know this. (These are the courses that don't teach from first principles and generally get you playing within about 5 minutes).
You learn that most songs are composed of about 4 chords, and regardless of instrument (piano, guitar, ukelele, etc), those 4 chords are all you need to basically play about 90% of the music out there.
The chords are I, V, vi, and IV.
Which I think in C-major key, is C, G, Am and F. The more interesting thing is, you play these chords in the same order! (On a piano, I think you'd play it with D-major, and guitar is what, G major?)
It's a somewhat harmonious chord relationship, which is why it can be transposed to any key and the songs sound "the same".
To see this, you can google "4 chords music", or watch the following pretty much canonical YouTube video -
https://www.youtube.com/watch?...
There are at least hundreds more videos that do exactly the same thing, covering 40, 80, 100+ songs.
PS - looks like Wikipedia is in on it too.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
Ok with it going bye bye in baseball and football too...
Not pron tho..
Pop music is becoming a banal as your standard commercial jingle...
Play only the music which less than 2% of your peers would appreciate.
Pop music has been formulated by algorithm, and not "written" in a musical fashion, since the 1980's. The lyrics, the hooks etc.., it's all calculated. Every note and word of nearly every pop song is analysed for how it affects a person emotionally etc.., and then combinations of those are put together in a computer model. Ever listened to an "original" song by no-direction... it's a series of clichés set to very familiar chord changes and rhythms.. just like every other "pop" sensation. The more they "refine" these algorithms, the more pop music sounds similar, and the more similar it sounds, the more obvious it becomes. and... there isn't one of us (perhaps excluding the deaf) who doesn't know a ridiculously stupid pop song or artist that we love listening to, knowing full well their music is crap. We really could use more talented poets and more real musicians in the world... but when mediocrity ends up being the big hit, and the song with truly meaningful lyrics and some originality from a musical standpoint ends up not being heard.
music. I have never been into the Top 40.
Bands like New Model Army, Killing Joke, The Church have always been my preference. I do admit an affinity for Midnight Oil, but this is more because I like their politics and Peter Garrett in particular.
I loathe anything cookie cutter: music, houses, software (prefer the off-beat text-based older stuff).
Teen pop is crap. Always has been, always will be. It is a disposable manufactured commodity, not art.
The Uncoveror: It's the real news.
In that year, all of the dullards will be trying in vain to pull the string with the carrot slice at the end to ace the SAT to even care about music!
This is what one would expect to happen when an area of human endeavor is studied, "understood" and turned into a set process. It is frozen. It doesn't advance and change. And this is exactly what will happen in any area that happily lets AI take over for human beings.
E Proelio Veritas.
Country music is dead. It's been replaced by pop/dance music with a few steel guitars.
One of our competitors trademarked the term "hypothesis". From now on, we will call them "boneheaded ideas".
You didn't think the multinational megamediacorps are interested in *art*, did you? All they want is to stamp out product, like laundry detergent. That's why they sound alike, that's why there are 15-book trilogies, and years-long "adaptations of complete-in-one-movie.
Screw 'em. Buy from musicians, don't just video them on your phone, so they don't get paid. And yes, I buy CDs from the musicians all the time, and *they* get the money to keep doing what I like, rather than the friggin' record companies taking most of it, and cooking the books. (Arlo said, a few years back, that it was THIRTY YEARS before he ever saw a penny of royalties on Alice's Restaurant, and Janis Ian was being charged $11 PER CD by her record company for her *own* CDs).
What explains that? Guy got a Nobel for a âoesongâ that just sounds like noise with a few spoken words.
What algorithm did he download?
But you can still tell it's Country because they still sing through their noses. This is true even with the Country/Hiphop thing they're doing these days.