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Song lyrics getting simpler, more repetitive, angry and self-obsessed – study
by nabla9
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.
Why would Spotify use those weights?
Because they are paid to, or rather because those who curate popular Spotify playlists are paid to. See also https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Payola
Payola is illegal now, and it's funny that you even bring it up in this context because there was a time when payola was one of the only ways that independent labels could actually get music on air. It circumvented the overlords. The "respected" institutions didn't want to go near rock.
The Wikipedia article you linked does not back what you're saying..
The “also” implies relatedness. It is a broader trend in the music industry. For a specific example with Spotify, you might recall the Drake promo debacle from 2018; where “Scorpion” was so thoroughly pushed on to users that refunds for Spotify Premium were demanded on the grounds that the degree of promotion crossed a threshold into outright advertising, which premium was to be free of.
"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.
Surely you’re not suggesting that the common denominator is continually getting lower and lower.
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.
Then the cardinality of the marketable featureset is inversely proportional to the feature diversity of market preferences, yeah?
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.
Also pop is now more global than ever and intentionally targeting more global audiences, and so there’s a lot more to average about.
If the market was mainly national and now it's increasingly global, why wouldn't it?
If the audience grows that is precisely what this hypothesis would predict.
"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 view culture as a competitive sport.
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.
cue lightsaber sounds
Kindered soul here. People are way too aggressive about this stuff, and not even in an objective manner.
Tedious is the perfect word for 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).
Probably multiple top 40 charts from multiple countries.
> Are these really all "popular" songs?
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.
Billboard publishes dozens and dozens of charts every week each with various formats and criteria.
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.
Agree! I'm deep into dungeon synth these days, I love how people find new art expressions in the sea of mediocrity that is this industry.
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.
Generally speaking you have a lot more diversity in sound.
Latin pop is much bigger and often is present. Kpop makes regular appearances. And now joining their Carribean music cousins are Afrobeats tunes.
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.
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I've not noticed that, if anything I'm always delighted to find a 3-minute song these days, it feels like a bit of a lost art.
I always thought most songs were too padded out. E.g chorus repeated 3+ times
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.
>pop was a serious thing that attracted the best musicians and discerning listeners.
When was this ever the case? I'm not trying to be a dick, honestly. When was that statement true?
It's more true now than it ever has been. The majority of well known mainstream pop artists are highly competent musicians with an entire team behind them. The technical skill level of the engineers, music directors, and producers working in pop is unreal right now.
This is also true of pretty much all genres too I'm not trying to put anyone down here. The level of quality across all music is just exceptionally high these days.
But also https://youtu.be/eSuK_5zW2iM?si=2g9xUznIm1nCxhqV&t=653
This is probably my geriatric grumpiness speaking, but this seems subjective so I can disagree. Today's pop stars are beautiful faces with teams of highly competent, mostly invisible, professionals working behind the scenes to prop them up with music. It's much easier to take a handsome/pretty person and use technology to manufacture formulaic music around him or her, than it is to take a talented musician and make them picturesque and sellable.
It was also the case years ago, but somehow even moreso today.
I fully agree that quality outside of the mainstream / performance artists is better than ever though!
There are enough people who are talented and pretty, no need to compromise.
OK! I won't try to convince you!
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Here's my favorite example of a pop song (though arguably second-tier in actual popularity) from the early 90s that, in my opinion, had some sophistication in the music, if not the lyrics: "That's What Love is For" by Amy Grant: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lPOe8VKqgJM Observe the way it moves between keys, the chord progressions in the chorus, and the way the guitar solo leads into a key change. Contrast that with so many later pop songs that are just a repeating four-chord pattern all the way through. I mean, there have been four-chord songs for decades (there's that famous Axis of Awesome video), but the classic four-chord songs usually didn't repeat those four chords through the whole song.
Here's a more recent example of a popular song on the theme of love and marriage from the UK.
From a band that focuses on the poetry and word play and who now draw in collaborators from about the globe and routinely pack venues.
The music is minimal but from song to song constantly inventivelt simplistic.
Official Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iKcbSOjIzjQ
Live @Nottz Arena: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8cGo4isi1Tw
Lyrics: https://www.google.com/search?q=mork+and+mindy+song+sleaford...
Just watch Rick Beato's interviews for some hints.
We can start with the Police, all three of whom he's done: tell us who nowadays is as good as Andy Summers or Stewart Copeland? Or Sting, of course.
Or watch The Wrecking Crew. Or Hired Gun.
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.
Simple can be good. Amyl and the Sniffers are good simple. Simple that's hard to achieve:
- Guided by Angels: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z--D1flPLnk
Sounds like the punk rock of the early 80s. Simplistic, repetitive, angry.
See also: various minimal sub-genres, like minimal house, where simple is one of the goals.
For another example of minimalism, here's the Kronos Quartet performing Philip Glass: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tr_xhO02Ikw
Listening to this has two benefits:
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).“Am I out of touch? No, it's the children who are wrong.” Haha
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.
Leucippus: Woah
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leucippus
I think my kids would prefer your approach to teaching history than the stuff they currently get.
That and the musical Six :-)
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.
More likely correlation than causation, IMHO
Interesting to think of this as an analog to refinement culture, where instead of endless elaboration and adding complexity, they are stripping away all unnecessary elements to discover the platonic ideal of marketable music.
But refinement culture is all about high quality...
I'd not heard of refinement culture until now. I Googled it and it appears to be to do with how sports strategies and advertisements are finely tuned to squeeze out the maximum probability of success. Which sounds like "heavily optimizing for a certain metric" is a better description than "high quality", and applies also to pop music.
As I understand it, refinement culture has nothing to do with quality per se, rather it's about the elaboration of tropes and other recognizable patterns. Think ornamentation rather than architecture.
Don't forget Knuth wrote the paper on complexity of song lyrics https://dl.acm.org/doi/pdf/10.1145/1008354.1008355
I strongly believe we live in a golden age of music. Did you know 40%+ of Spotify payouts go to independent, non-agency artists? There's SO much good new music coming out in every genre. And you can access 95% of it for like $15 a month.
Absolutely. We do NOT live in a golden age of broadcast media in general though, including and likely especially radio. Radio is dead.
And good riddance to it. The broadcast model is inherently hostile towards anything that deviates from "the norm", however defined. It is precisely because music consumption is so individual and customized these days that very niche genres can be viable.
... What a dystopian way to define "golden age", you'll-own-nothing-and-rent-forever-happily-at-whim-of-corporate-algorithm aside.
There are still many places to get downloadable DRM-free music. One of which is, ironically, Appple's iTunes Music Store (but not the newer Apple Music!). Then there's Amazon Music and Bandcamp. And that's before we get into the numerous regional providers. It's easy to buy CDs for most stuff, as well.
So I would argue the contrary: this is the golden age of personally owned digital music collections. If you do want such a thing, it's very easy to amass a collection well into into hundreds of gigabytes through legally available and conveniently accessible ways. It's just that the majority seems to prefer subscription model for most of their music (although many still purchase their favorites).
I wish things were as good for videos as they are for music. There, the trend seems to be the opposite, with platforms increasingly locking down high-quality downloads and pivoting towards pure streaming. You can still buy DVD or BluRay, but prices on those are increasingly insane (like $100+ for 4K).
To be fair, there are both positives and negatives. The positive is that the barrier of entry is almost negligible. For less than 20 bucks, anyone can get their song onto the largest platform in the world, accessible to anyone on it, in days. Compared to handing out CDs or cassettes, this is a universe of difference. You no longer have to pander to major record labels to get your music out there.
The downside, of course, is monetization. Even if you get a million streams, which is extremely difficult, you'll only make $4-7k.
I think they’re referring to something different than you are.
You can buy the same music as digital files or as blue ray. Don't use spotify if you don't want to.
My 91-year-old grandmother used to use Audacity to record audio from such services on her PC. She would the edit the .mp3 metadata and put them on an old-school iPod. I told her that I would kick her out of the house and send her to a nursing home unless she started entering into license agreements and mailing royalty checks to the appropriate parties, and she hasn't done this since, so a win for morality I guess.
Pop music and literature both reached a peak in formulaic-ness just in time for the LLMs to codify it.
Maybe if they push it far enough and hard enough in that direction we'll get some cultural pushback / revival?
I don't think we'll get a choice. LLMs do that sort of thing far better than us. It's a 'be careful what you wish for' monkey's paw.
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You'd think a study with this title would include analysis indicating a relationship between popularity, release date, and repetitiveness of lyrics. It doesn't.
In fact reports no relationship:
"As for RQ2 (Which role does the popularity of songs and lyrics play in this scenario?), we conclude that while song listening counts do not show any effects"
They don't even use data for popularity over time. They have this information,[2] they just don't use it.[3]
It's mind boggling. Your paper advertises that popular music is becoming more repetitive. You have data about which music is most popular over time, but you throw it out and just look at current listen counts. You find current listen counts has no relationship to lyrical repetitiveness. Then you publish your paper. It makes me speechless.
[1]: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-024-55742-x#Tab4
I still listen to a lot of prog rock as well as classical, more than I did when I was a teenager or in my 20s. But I also occasionally listen to current popular music with my teenage daughters. Some of it I like, some I do not, but myself and my daughters all agree that they would like to hear some big change in popular music. Not saying it should be a return to something like grunge, but it would be interesting to hear something different like that style was.
Part of me agrees that pop is ripe for that sort of upheavel but my arguments that it won't happen are:
1. Angst will probably always be the teenage condition but I don't think the distance between what's being recorded and what teens and young adults are feeling is as great as it was in the 90s.
2. Music listening is so much more fragmented now that even if some artist hooks into some underserved emotional need, it might just grab its group of followers and then sorta descend into its own little subculture, safely away from the mainstream. The third and fourth lines on any contemporary festival act list has a lot of acts that fall into this category.
3. Kurt Cobain was this unusual combination of wanting to be anti-authority, anti-establishment, alternative on one hand, but then very ambitious and seeking fame and record deals on the other. It's paradoxical but he was that and that combination of attributes is really good for changing the mainstream music scene but I don't think most people can live in that contradiction for that long and therefore people like that are rare.
In my view, we're in a sort of repeat of 00s R&B. Lot of substanceless tunes with honestly seriously vulgar lyrics but immensely catchy and fun. The main difference is this version is less danceable (but also more subject to dance routines on TikTok!). And I don't mean it in a pejorative way, not every good song need to be meaningful.
You can’t blame people. Our ancestors probably went into a state of trance with much simpler “music”. The brains didn’t change all that much since then.
Why the quotes around "music", though? Music can be very simple; complexity is not what makes it music.
These guys have 80m views pretty mainstream with not so simple or self-obsessed lyrics Half alive - Still feel https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KOOhPfMbuIQ
What I think is a major difference now vs then is we don't get any major non-English language hits. Globalization?
A pretty information free article. I would note that looking at the first singles from the Beatles, they were simple repetitive songs (three chords? too complex, let’s do two instead!) Add in that their baseline of the 70s also would be the apex of the popularity of progressive rock.
But the 70s don’t have a monopoly on complexity. Swing bands, Tin Pan Alley, Broadway show tunes, etc. were the pre-rock popular music genres with notable complexity.
Swing bands as complexity? I played a shit load of swing music on scholarship during college. It's super SUPER repetitive. It's good. Don't get me wrong. But it's very repetitive.
Sure, it’s dance music so it can’t be too wild. But Duke Ellington, Benny Goodman, Count Basie. These guys had varied songs that included (limited but real) improvisation, differing tempos, etc.
But really the OP article is about lyrics and I think it’s safe to say that the songs sung by Ella Fitzgerald, Nina Simone, Billie Holiday, Frank Sinatra, and Nat King Cole were more complex than top 40 pop today mostly is.
Some are, some not so much. Consider, e.g., Jeepers Creepers. There are plenty of simplistic lyrics in the Great American Songbook.
The medium (or in this case the distribution) is the message.
This isn’t artist’s fault, or ‘this generations’s’ fault. This is an industry being pushed by a few algorithms that control the diffusion of new music to people which are optimising for this kind of thing.
Researchers compiled lyrics to songs from five musical genres (rap, country, pop, R&B, and rock) that were released between 1970 and 2020.
This is an interesting period to sample. The late 60s and early 70s were a high watermark for pop and rock music. Pop music evolved considerably from the 40s (Crooners and jazz-dominant hits), through the 50s and early 60s ("the American Songbook"), to the emergence of psychedelic rock and the cerebral singer-songwriter in the 60s. The increased prominence of genres light rock in the 70s and hair metal in the 80s would drag complexity down.
I think if they took the period 1920-2020, the trend would not be prominent.
Knuth's famous paper "The Complexity of Songs" (1977) deserves a mention. He describes how most songs of length n require a text of length proportional to n. But he goes on to prove the complexity of Old MacDonald had a farm as O(sqrt(n)), the complexity improvement of Twelve days of Christmas, the O(log n) song 99 bottles of beer on the wall, and finally the O(1) song That's the way I like it by KC and the Sunshine Band.
https://dl.acm.org/doi/pdf/10.1145/1008354.1008355
Also, the linked Science article is just a summary. The full paper (not paywalled) is at: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-024-55742-x
Comment was deleted :(
I recently found out, that songwriting and writing the lyrics can be very much separate. I was reading an interview of the metal band Sulphur Aeon, and apparently the songwriter writes the music, and then hands it over to the vocalist, who writes the lyrics for them.
As a very vocal oriented person (though as I like extreme metal, I often can't understand them), that was fascinating to me, as music and vocals are so very connected to me.
This is a very common thing in music and I would say more the Norm than one might think.
Historically often librettists where responsible for texts. For example in opera there the librettist was as important as the composer and his texts might have been used in multiple operas.
Among the most famous examples would be the European hymn Freude schöner Götterfunken. The text is by Schiller and the music by Beethoven.
Interesting. With older music, it’s kinda expected, as (especially church) songs often have "to the melody of" parts. Just did not think it would be the same for contemporary.
FWIW, Elton John and Bernie Taupin worked the other way at least some of the time. (Taupin wrote lyrics and then John wrote the music.)
That said, repurposing music with new lyrics is very common. For example, the Star Spangled Banner is "new lyrics" for a older English drinking song.
Songs are a lot more than their lyrics and there are a great many wonderful and popular songs that have _no lyrics at all_. Lyrical complexity isn't really a good measure of the overall complexity of a song.
Anyway, a lot of this because of the rise of dance music which is often more about rhythm and timbre, and vocals if they exist at all are often background and used more as texture than as the driving force behind the song.
At some point, Prog pop/rock was relatively popular and influential. Some pretty complex pieces became hits. Nowadays the big labels are selling extremely simplistic music - it's much cheaper to produce and perform than something averagely complex (not to mention something like prog rock), and it makes them mindboggling amounts of money.
Popular songs are addapting to a mainstream modern listener which requires repetitive melodies that are easily memorable
So why did the preferences of the mainstream modern listener change?
Decrease in cultural homogeneity and increase in diversity. Have to keep simplifying to appeal to a broader and broader audience.
A lot of classic popular songs also had low information content:
https://happyhollyproject.com/2014/04/27/flowcharts-and-song...
Example of this from today: https://www.reddit.com/r/Fauxmoi/comments/1bqcrmk/beyonc%C3%...
Really illustrates the point.
Music Was Better in the Sixties, Man (2012) <https://www.discovermagazine.com/the-sciences/music-was-bett...>
thanks for objectively confirming subjective prejudices
Evolution at work.
The music industry is so much more competitive today, in the past very few could afford to make music, now anybody can do it.
There is so much supply now that bad songs die much more quickly and only the fittest survive.
The article is about simplistic styles though. There are an enormous amount of "bad" songs that don't seem to die.
How can a song which is liked by tens of millions of people be "bad".
Surely if you spend any amount of time listening to Top 40 music, you’d know the answer to your own question.
The art world has a lot of different experiences to offer if you gave it a chance.
Did you mean to respond to someone else? Listening to Top 40 is basically the definition of “not giving the art world a chance.” It’s not like it’s a secret that almost all of it follows a very simplistic formula.
What do you think is harder to make, a song which 1000 people like (avant-garde art, your favorite underground band...) or one which has 800 mil views on YouTube.
> a very simplistic formula.
Go ahead, make one, get 100 million views, make a cool few $ with little work.
The article doesn't tell us about the magnitude of those changes. 5%? 50%? 500%?
Isn't this a duplicate of a previous thread? https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39862404
I stopped listening to radio many years ago, because how predictable and simplistic i thought the songs were. Literally couplet, refrain, couplet refrain, a little variation of 10 seconds, refrain
It is insultingly dumb.
A happy enjoyer of Be'lakor here (EDIT: and old Infected Mushroom:)
Hate Haiku too, so ... formulaic.
Of course I'm being snarky.
I've learned to love constraints in part perhaps because of a part of my brain wants something familiar. A familiar voice seems to be why I seem to enjoy an otherwise second-tier song if it is by an artist I like. Familiarity seems to be why I pretty exclusively listen to songs with Western tonality.
But creativity too seems to come from constraints. And we appreciate the artists/poets that do something original within those boundaries. To be sure of course, anyone can string together 5-7-5 syllables (and perhaps too 3 chords of refrain/chorus/refrain/chorus/bridge/chorus) but we know the good stuff when we hear it.
/me runs away while listening to techno, house and drum&bass...
Sometimes repetition/simplicity is not so bad, and apparently I'm not the only one who is fine with it.
If we want AI to be able to generate all of our music, and of course we do, then we have to make it easy for them.
Oh, today the formula is basically "couplet, refrain, refrain, refrain". Writing a whole second couplet? Who has time for that when you can polish your refrain for more ear-worminess.
The same can be said about popular people, its why longform content had sich a resurgence. There us a minorityof us drowning in the simpletonification of the world.
I often find that, with a new popular song I haven't heard before, I can correctly guess the next line of lyrics.
I find myself doing that with songs and also with a lot of film and TV. I do it so often that it annoys my wife. At first she claimed that I simply watched the show before watching it with her, but for some reason I am able to guess the next words in the dialog more often than not.
This all depends on your era of course. How many 12 bar blues songs are there I wonder, hundreds of thousands perhaps?
How soon until AI replaces simple Autotune Kanye? With deep Autotune Kanye.
International audience loved simpler English
just market-based natural evolution at work
No that's not true.
The international audience usualy does not understand the lyrics because it does not speak English.
So it does not care at all.
That leads to funny cases where childish sounding pop music wiht juicy texts gets played everywhere.
I recently read an article about a pop song about small dicks which was popular in europe for some time.
The artist got invided to a live performance in a Spanish Kindergarten.
Glad someone finally quantified what everyone is obviously noticing.
At this juncture, since the entertainment industry can't take risks anymore for new ideas, it's high tine that AI simply displace it entirely.
Also... The shot length of movies is getting shorter.
I, for one, welcome that GWAR played NPR: https://www.npr.org/2023/07/17/1187572267/gwar-tiny-desk-con...
GWAR is amazing. I have never heard a band with live sound production so good.
Until you listen to The Warning. https://youtu.be/97Pxe9KTgJc?feature=shared
We are n(ever)* getting back together
All I know is your taste in music sucks.
>> Popular songs are simpler and more repetitive than they used to be
A-well-a everybody's heard about the bird!
Bird bird bird, b-bird's the word
A-well-a bird bird bird, bird is the word
A-well-a bird bird bird, well-a bird is the word
A-well-a bird bird bird, b-bird's the word
A-well-a bird bird bird, well-a bird is the word
A-well-a bird, bird, b-bird's the word
A-well-a bird bird bird, b-bird's the word
A-well-a bird bird bird, well-a bird is the word
A-well-a bird, bird, b-bird's the word
A-well-a don't you know, about the bird?
Well, everybody knows that the bird is the word!
A-well-a bird, bird, b-bird's the bird
A-well-a
A-well-a everybody's heard, about the bird!
Bird bird bird, b-bird's the word
A-well-a bird bird bird, b-bird's the word
A-well-a bird bird bird, b-bird's the word
A-well-a bird, bird, b-bird's the word
A-well-a bird bird bird, b-bird's the word
A-well-a bird bird bird, b-bird's the word
A-well-a bird bird bird, b-bird's the word
A-well-a bird bird bird, b-bird's the word
A-well-a don't you know, about the bird?
Well! Everybody's talking about the bird!
A-well-a bird, bird, b-bird's the bird
A-well-a bird!
Surfin' bird
Pa pa pa pa pa pa pa pa pa pa pa pa pa pa pa pa pa pa pa pa pa pa pa pa
Oom m-mow mow
Pa pa oom mow m-mow
Pa pa pa oom m-mow mow
Pa pa oom mow m-mow
Pa pa oom m-mow mow
Pa pa oom mow m-mow
Oom m-mow mow
Pa pa oom mow m-mow
Pa pa oom m-mow mow
Pa pa oom mow m-mow
Pa pa oom m-mow mow
Pa pa oom mow m-mow
Oom m-oom m-oom m-oom
M-oom m-mow mow
Pa pa oom mow m-mow
Pa pa oom m-oom m-oom m-oom
M-oom m-mow mow
Pa pa oom mow m-mow
Oom m-mow mow
Pa pa oom mow m-mow
Pa pa oom m-mow mow
Pa pa oom mow m-mow
Pa pa oom m-mow mow Oom mow m-mow
Pa pa oom m-mow mow
Oom mow m-mow
Pa pa oom m-oom m-oom m-oom
M-oom m-mow mow
Oom m-oom m-oom m-oom
M-oom m-mow mow
Oom mow m-mow
Pa pa oom mow m-mow
Pa pa oom m-mow mow
Oom mow m-mow
Well-a don't you know, about the bird?
Well! Everybody knows that the bird is the word!
A-well-a bird, bird, b-bird's the bird
A-well-a oom m-mow mow
Pa pa oom mow m-mow
Ba pa oom m-mow mow
Oom mow m-mow
Pa pa oom m-mow mow
Oom mow m-mow
Pa pa oom m-mow mow
Make 'em say ugh
I'm really surprised no one commented about suno.ai.
This has serious “Get off my lawn!” vibes lol
at least in the 60s there were real lyrics like "baby i love you", "love me do" and so on
Not the 60s, but I distinctly remember a song whose refrain was “Da Da Da”. Can’t get much more intellectual than that.
Don't think me unkind
Words are hard to find
They're only cheques I've left unsigned
From the banks of chaos in my mind
And when their eloquence escapes me
Their logic ties me up and rapes me
De-do-do-do, de-da-da-da
Is all I want to say to you
De-do-do-do, de-da-da-da
Their innocence will pull me through
De-do-do-do, de-da-da-da
Is all I want to say to you
De-do-do-do, de-da-da-da
They're meaningless and all that's true
Ah, The Police. That actually predates the song I had in mind:
Yes, the Trio song was a bit of a special case. Remmler was attempting to deconstruct and critique the genre, and was well aware of how the mindlessly repetitive and simplistic and musically boring the core was once all the frills were stripped away. That was actually the whole point, as can be seen in the video they did https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xqTBlft8gQA
The fact that it became a chart hit only proved his point - kinda like the cow clicker https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cow_Clicker
And just in case that didn't hammer it home, the remastered video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Rm97VG_QIXI
Notice how bored everyone looks. The sheer lack of energy. The guy pausing to light a cigarette and mount it on his guitar. The repetitive wave of the "audience" that holds awful, amateurish drawings of their faces (i.e. any moron with a synth could produce this crap).
It's a bit like looking at Picasso's bull in a grotesquely comical way...
There's plenty of new artists that make real music with real lyrics. They just don't make the mainstream anymore. Check out Father John Misty.
he has several albums that have been #1 on various billboard charts, if that's not mainstream then idk what is
There are a lot of Billboard charts, and some of them are nowhere near mainstream.
The peaks of genre/subculture popularity are not, necessarily, mainstream.
"A well a bird, bird, bird, well the bird is the word"
"Be-bop-a-lula, she's my baby, Be-bop-a-lula, I don't mean maybe"
and yet, ostensibly, this is an objective result:
A team of European researchers analysed the words in more than 12,000 English-language songs across the genres of rap, country, pop, R&B and rock from 1980 to 2020.
Regardless, it's hard to deny that PhD's today have been dumbed to a three minute music video level ( /s ):
It's also consistent with previous studies in certain ways:
https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/science-proves-pop...
https://pudding.cool/2018/05/similarity/
https://www.mic.com/articles/107896/scientists-finally-prove...
Using more difficult words that still boils down to love and sex.
Honestly thank god for J pop and K pop at least I can't understand a word of it.
> Honestly thank god for J pop and K pop at least I can't understand a word of it.
Well that's not the case. They use a lot of English. It's Easter. Have some chocolate:
Wow. And that’s Babymetal. I wonder how it will buzz once it grows up :)
I haven't heard this in so long and apparently I needed to. ♥
What has become "better" culturally over the past 50 years? It is a race to the bottom, just like everything else. Mass market, mass enshitification
<L’homme armé has entered the chat>
It seems a lot of vocal older folks will use this as evidence of an inferior future. I believe instead that this is probably moreso evidence that the systems in power that spread music have only grown more efficient both in creating profit as well putting out homogeneous simple music.
If "more efficient" means fewer, tighter oligopolies, then you and the "vocal older folks" may both be right.
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