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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.
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."
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 ]
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.
You forgot fuck nigga, nigga fuck fuck, hos and nigga....now that's a hit
But now in the age of "I want to be famous without any talent", successful songs are now easier to copy and more and more talentless people have access to the tools to do it
"The hands that help are better far than lips that pray." - Robert Ingersoll (1833-1899)
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 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 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.
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.
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
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.
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 ]
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.
The thing to note is, you won't see Alan Walker in any billboard lists, just like how he's not mentioned in the original pieces linked in this post. He arguably had a huge hit that would have easily surpassed many in original article, while, not getting the coverage or radio airplay that they would have enjoyed.
My problem with the article is that it ignores how there's a lot of other activity in the music industry, which isn't covered by the billboards or major recording labels. I suspect that the reason there's such consolidation is because the mainstream industry is in decline, while people's listening habits and tastes are actually broadening, while it's not being measured.
Even if Tommy Robinson were a bigot, since when has that been illegal?
What do you mean by "if"?
Of course he's a bigot, sadly, as you pointed out that is not illegal. Even Piers Morgan has called him a bigoted lunatic on national TV.
Ultimately, what landed Tommy Robinson in court was contempt of court. His first infraction was trying to film defendants outside of the Canterbury Crown Court. In the UK, defendants are granted safety from the media so that the outcome of the trial cannot be influenced by the media, so that the jury cannot be influenced or coerced by external sources (See: Lindsey Chamberlain for why this is necessary). Tommy Robinson is granted the same protections. He was bought up in front of a judge for Contempt of Court where he was given a suspended sentence (basically, if he kept his nose clean there'd be no jail time). He was arrested for Breach of the Peace and as such, violating the terms of his suspended sentence.
Realistically, Tommy Robinson was only given a suspended sentence because he's a political hot potato. Anyone else would have been jailed, contempt of court is a serious charge here in the UK. He was given special consideration and then took advantage of it. There's nothing about thought crime here, he committed an actual crime, given a second chance and did it again.
Calling someone a "hater" only means you can not rationally rebut their argument.