I'm not sure they make the correct conclusion (ie that people necessarily prefer simpler music when facing options).
I think it's more that... to be popular, you need to fit the tastes of many people, and the best way to do that is by being generic, rather than specialized or niche. So pop music is essentially about finding the common denominators in tastes, and sticking to only those features. Obviously that's going to lead to music which is simpler, more repetitive, and therefore broadly appealing. And it's the music industry which selects for this, as it's the most profitable formula (and the reason for the trend of things getting simpler over time). But as individuals, I'm not sure that's what people necessarily prefer.
Popular music is not decided by the public anyways. The music that becomes popular is a sub-set of the music that is decided on by the overlords - the folks who decide what should play on the radio, on television, in movies, or on the internet. There are hidden weights and biases to the algorithms that select the songs put for display by your popular media service providers. It is not truly decided by the public, nor neutral in any way.
"Muzak is music which has nothing wrong with it. But because it has nothing wrong with it, it also has nothing right with it. And that is what makes muzak so horrifying."
No, I don't remember where that's from. But it seems to fit.
Also, TIL that's actually a proper name rather than only a generic term.
Similar/related theory I have is that humans have just gotten much better at optimization in the past 5 decades, and as a consequence we've lost a lot of variety present in decades past due to the fact that it's easier to recognize and attain the "optimal" configuration.
I see this not just in music, but in tons of different artistic areas. I think interior design most notably for me - SNL recently did a great send up of this with their "AirBnB Designers" skit, https://youtu.be/H5E5DkBXyfw
Back on the music front, I see this with annoyingly repetitive Spotify recommendations that I find nearly infuriating. My music tastes may be "pop-basic and bland", and at first I liked how I could just start with one song and then Spotify would create a playlist of related songs that I would (usually) like. Except it was always like the same 30-60 related songs. After a while I started hating using Spotify recommendations, they were always so incredibly annoyingly repetitive. Perhaps I'm just dumb and missed something, but I wish there was a way to tell Spotify "Please, for the love of God, just scramble your algorithm a bit and give me new recommended songs in the same genre!"
I’ve always wondered why they don’t do this already, it seems like a natural design feature to build around. Pandora had the same problem, if not worse. YouTube has it too, perhaps not as badly, but they’re kind of also their own SSP. If I had to guess, they don’t want to go making a lot of bad recommendations so they stay in a safe lane, and they probably also (more importantly?) have some contractual quotas to hit with big publishing partners.
That is not quite what I was thinking. More like the industry is selecting for the optimum combination of common factors. For an overly simple example:
- person A likes musical features W,X,Y,Z
- person B likes musical features I,J,K,Z
- person C likes musical features A,B,K,Z
Z is a common feature they all like, so it's very popular. K is the next most common feature, but not quite as popular as Z. Making a song that only has features K+Z is bound to be more popular than one that is solely made of Q+D (which no one likes). Mind you, features could be anything from rhythm, time, timbre, melodies, as well as other emergent stuff.
But having song with features K+Z is not Person C's favorite music, and rather a song which has features A+B+K+Z would be Person C's preferred music, but the industry doesn't select for that since A+B aren't common features everyone likes. And a song consisting solely of K+Z is simpler than one which has A+B+K+Z.
However, making a song of solely of feature Z is too simple, and hence doesn't work. As if there's a minimum complexity requirement to meet in order to be a song. Hence K+Z works but a song solely of Z doesn't. And K+Z isn't necessarily anyone's ideal/preferred music, even though it's popular.
Also, making a song of A+Z would probably stand to be somewhat popular, but not as much as K+Z. And so, a lot of popular songs seem repetitive, because they all use common features, such as feature Z in this example.
As there's more sources exposed to the public all around (not just a few radios and a few tv shows) and tastes diverge, that would be the natural outcome.
Also people can seek their better targeted, more appealing music elsewhere so pop doesn't need to fill these shoes.
"insultingly dumb, i listen to metal"
"check this out, this top 100 musician isn't mainstream so you probably haven't heard of them"
this thread's turning into a decent example of why i hate talking to people about music. no matter how polite or reasonable someone is otherwise, there's like a 90% chance they have all these weird value judgements tied up in what people are listening to. it's incredibly tedious.
Some people use pop culture trivia as the basis for their identity, get preoccupied by trying to prove they’re a ‘real fan’ to other people just like them and forget to enjoy any of it.
> according to an analysis of more than 350,000 top 40 hits
Wow, that's a lot of "top 40 hits". More than 134 new "hits" per week for the last 50 years! Are these really all "popular" songs? Because that number seems like the analysis must cut well into the long tail too.
The method in the paper seems different than what was reported. They used a last.fm dataset of two billion listens across 50 million songs. They enriched the data and restricted the study to 1990-2020 to create a balanced dataset of the 350k songs for training their stat tools. Then they analyzed 2,400 songs per genre with that, 12,000 total. I didn't see "top 40" mentioned in the paper.
Top 40 is a descriptor, not a list. Every genre can have their own Top 40, though it is most commonly associated with pop music (again, a term that doesn't specifically mean what it says). And there's not a unique Top 40 for any given time period - for example, in the US we had both American Top 40 with Casey Kasem and Rick Dees and the Weekly Top 40s, so that's a potential 80 right there (despite there was usually overlap).
I'm not totally sure why what plays on the radio plays on the radio, but I feel like there's a mix of what's actually popular and what was selected to become popular by industry insiders.
Even so, is it really a big deal? There is more - and more varied and complex - music now, than there has ever been at any point in history. And you can find and access almost all of it instantly! Who cares or even knows what's in the charts these days? I can be a huge kids-these-days curmudgeon about music, and the recommendation algorithms aren't even that good, but I have found more music in the last five years that I truly love than I did in the entirety of teens.
yeah. Hip hop / pop or whatver the nomenclature is, is way more compoex now. Why? because the real artist is no longer the rebellious young girl or the face tattooed young boy, but the geeky/middle aged music producer behind the scene. Making even the lamest mumblings enjoyable. The singer is just the brand. The face.
Agreed! My hot take among my millennial friends is that popular music today is way more varied and interesting than what we grew up with. Sorry 50 cent. And it’s not like that music disappeared. We get both!
My only complaint is how short songs are now. Everything is tiktok optimized.
More than TikTok optimized, stream optimized. Artists get paid by individual stream, so they make their songs shorter in hopes of getting more streams per album.
I think that’s really it. Pop used to be much better because pop was a serious thing that attracted the best musicians and discerning listeners. Now the best musicians and listeners are all in niche musical communities. Pop is dead.
This mirrors a broader trend. There really isn’t a majority anymore or a popular culture. There are only a million fluid ever changing niches and subcultures, seemingly so rapidly changing and evolving that they can’t even be named.
It's also the case that song structures have shifted as recording and songwriting has become more often sampling and copy/paste than capturing an entire live performance. A lot of top 40 songs now couldn't even exist without the digital tools that enabled them. The use of sampled repeated vocals as background lines might skew the results a bit.
Music creation is always closely tied to technological progress though. At any point in a music's history you can find plenty of works that would have been impossible to create even a decade or two earlier.
This is true even of relatively conservative genres like what we now call classical. It has often taken advantage of at-the-time state of the art developments in metalworking and acoustics to create new sounds.
The tools being digital does change the dynamics of this process, but that sort of change is still a familiar part of the musical tradition.
1. People around you will notice you listening to fancy high-brow music and they'll conclude you must be a very smart person.
2. It's actually really good (whether or not point 1 holds in your case).
Today’s youth hasn’t been what it used to be for at least 2000 years. We must have been on a steady decline for millennia. Just imagine how smart and noble our distant ancestors must have been!
One afternoon, ca 440 BC, Leucippus and Democritus were sitting on their tripods doing bong rips (Leucippus had scored it from his Scythian dealer), when Democritus said:
Democritus: Dude, like sweet is just whatever people say is sweet, and the same goes for bitter, and we get taught which is hot and which is cold and which colours are which, but have you ever thought about ... like ... it could be that that's all in our heads, man ... y'know in reality, there's like nothing but atoms; atoms and void between them.
I think one reason for a change in music could be the "downfall" of record labels as a big driver in the music industry. You can blame them for taking a big cut away from the artists, but the whole industry did a lot for developing the music. I had thought about this more from a perspecitve of the use of very talented studio musicions to help bands, but it may have impact on writing too. Of course, even if that was an effect on quality of music in any way, I think people have much bette access to music now than ever before. I couldn't afford to buy records or cds back when I was a kid in the 70s and 80s.
From these set of facts it seems more like the thing lost is curation. People have more freedom and choice now so the top 40 are more representative of what more people want to listen to.
More complex music is still around. We didn't have polyrhythms in the 80s and genres of math rock, prog, and funk are thriving. They're just not top 40.
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I think it's more that... to be popular, you need to fit the tastes of many people, and the best way to do that is by being generic, rather than specialized or niche. So pop music is essentially about finding the common denominators in tastes, and sticking to only those features. Obviously that's going to lead to music which is simpler, more repetitive, and therefore broadly appealing. And it's the music industry which selects for this, as it's the most profitable formula (and the reason for the trend of things getting simpler over time). But as individuals, I'm not sure that's what people necessarily prefer.
No, I don't remember where that's from. But it seems to fit.
Also, TIL that's actually a proper name rather than only a generic term.
I see this not just in music, but in tons of different artistic areas. I think interior design most notably for me - SNL recently did a great send up of this with their "AirBnB Designers" skit, https://youtu.be/H5E5DkBXyfw
Back on the music front, I see this with annoyingly repetitive Spotify recommendations that I find nearly infuriating. My music tastes may be "pop-basic and bland", and at first I liked how I could just start with one song and then Spotify would create a playlist of related songs that I would (usually) like. Except it was always like the same 30-60 related songs. After a while I started hating using Spotify recommendations, they were always so incredibly annoyingly repetitive. Perhaps I'm just dumb and missed something, but I wish there was a way to tell Spotify "Please, for the love of God, just scramble your algorithm a bit and give me new recommended songs in the same genre!"
- person A likes musical features W,X,Y,Z
- person B likes musical features I,J,K,Z
- person C likes musical features A,B,K,Z
Z is a common feature they all like, so it's very popular. K is the next most common feature, but not quite as popular as Z. Making a song that only has features K+Z is bound to be more popular than one that is solely made of Q+D (which no one likes). Mind you, features could be anything from rhythm, time, timbre, melodies, as well as other emergent stuff.
But having song with features K+Z is not Person C's favorite music, and rather a song which has features A+B+K+Z would be Person C's preferred music, but the industry doesn't select for that since A+B aren't common features everyone likes. And a song consisting solely of K+Z is simpler than one which has A+B+K+Z.
However, making a song of solely of feature Z is too simple, and hence doesn't work. As if there's a minimum complexity requirement to meet in order to be a song. Hence K+Z works but a song solely of Z doesn't. And K+Z isn't necessarily anyone's ideal/preferred music, even though it's popular.
Also, making a song of A+Z would probably stand to be somewhat popular, but not as much as K+Z. And so, a lot of popular songs seem repetitive, because they all use common features, such as feature Z in this example.
Also people can seek their better targeted, more appealing music elsewhere so pop doesn't need to fill these shoes.
this thread's turning into a decent example of why i hate talking to people about music. no matter how polite or reasonable someone is otherwise, there's like a 90% chance they have all these weird value judgements tied up in what people are listening to. it's incredibly tedious.
Tedious is the perfect word for it.
Wow, that's a lot of "top 40 hits". More than 134 new "hits" per week for the last 50 years! Are these really all "popular" songs? Because that number seems like the analysis must cut well into the long tail too.
I'm not totally sure why what plays on the radio plays on the radio, but I feel like there's a mix of what's actually popular and what was selected to become popular by industry insiders.
My only complaint is how short songs are now. Everything is tiktok optimized.
Latin pop is much bigger and often is present. Kpop makes regular appearances. And now joining their Carribean music cousins are Afrobeats tunes.
This mirrors a broader trend. There really isn’t a majority anymore or a popular culture. There are only a million fluid ever changing niches and subcultures, seemingly so rapidly changing and evolving that they can’t even be named.
When was this ever the case? I'm not trying to be a dick, honestly. When was that statement true?
This is true even of relatively conservative genres like what we now call classical. It has often taken advantage of at-the-time state of the art developments in metalworking and acoustics to create new sounds.
The tools being digital does change the dynamics of this process, but that sort of change is still a familiar part of the musical tradition.
- Guided by Angels: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z--D1flPLnk
- Hertz: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zb5Ja6V4OeY
Listening to this has two benefits:
Democritus: Dude, like sweet is just whatever people say is sweet, and the same goes for bitter, and we get taught which is hot and which is cold and which colours are which, but have you ever thought about ... like ... it could be that that's all in our heads, man ... y'know in reality, there's like nothing but atoms; atoms and void between them.
Leucippus: Woah
More complex music is still around. We didn't have polyrhythms in the 80s and genres of math rock, prog, and funk are thriving. They're just not top 40.