11 ms·

The Musical Diversity of Pop Songs

118 points by onychomys 8y ago

blackbrokkoli 8y ago
I'm always gonna be fascinated by any analyses like this - but can I just say how incredible tired I am of everything containing "music" combined with "this generation". Everyone, everyone in the industrialised world and well beyond can purchase a device smaller than their palm and listen to literal billions of songs. Noone is stopping you from only listening to "Tibet monk techno punk instrumental remixes" for the rest of your life - without buying anything you don't already have. So can this mother of all substanceless debates please just die...?
- musage 8y ago
  Yeah, and theoretically the onslaught of trash on the Steam store doesn't keep me from finding and buying what I like, but in practice it's... such a disgusting slog.
- clay_the_ripper 8y ago
  What you say is true, although it misses a larger point: that even though we CAN listen to unlimited variety, since the labels control the distribution systems (radio plays, featured music, music sold in big box stores, publicity etc etc) the music they produce becomes inevitably popular. Turn on the radio, walk into Walmart, turn on the tv, watch a movie and you’re not going to hear independent Tibetan chants. You’re going to hear what they want you to hear because they have the reach to make sure everyone listens to it. Combine that with their PR teams and you end up with a situation in which the labels have a strangle hold on what we collectively listen to. Sure it’s possible to branch out and “ignore” that stuff, but the vast majority of people don’t. They listen to and like what their friends like, which is in turn what they’ve been told is “good”.
  - JasonFruit 8y ago
    But a lot of people now don't turn on the radio or TV; the alternate channels of music discovery are becoming primary. Once there's an initial contact — and there are plenty of opportunities that aren't controlled by labels — it's increasingly frictionless to find more of what you realize that you like.
    - LocalPCGuy 8y ago
      Except that services like Spotify or Pandora still rely on the labels as well. Sure, they want to get away from the labels, but that is going to take time. https://www.recode.net/2018/4/3/17191390/spotify-plan-big-music-labels-platform-marketplace-ipo https://www.recode.net/2018/4/3/17191390/spotify-plan-big-mu...
      - chiefalchemist 8y ago
        Well, they also rely on averages, and the resulting recommendations tend to be (for me) closer to "we're certain these won't offend you." That is there's little deviation. Yes, that works for most people. But if you're seeking new, exciting and different then those recommendations come off as dull and lifeless.
  - 21 8y ago
    That's like saying that people are eating bananas and oranges and apples because there is a huge PR campaign to push them, and that this is destroying the chances for less popular fruits. Sure, there is that, but let's not kid ourselves, those fruit are popular because they are actually preferred by a vast majority.
    - fartcannon 8y ago
      Sure, but what if we only prefer it because we grew up eating it? Chicken/egg/chicken.
    - njharman 8y ago
      Bananas are a created product. Made popular by banana industry. Natural bananas are nothing like the highly breed thing you eat. They are not native in northern America. The demand for them was manufactured with marketing. Until now they are "part of our life" and seem normal. If it was not for the music industry. Pop bands would not exist. Boy bands would not exist. Etc. They are as artificil as bananas.
  - creep 8y ago
    Additionally, I find that most of pop is quite manipulative on the emotions. Rather than complexity in the music, it goes for riffs and choruses that pull precisely on some undefinable feeling but which can be broken down into categories of Power, Sexy, Nostalgia, Hypnosis/Rapture-- by which I mean, it gives a feeling of a sort of intoxication or trance. Whether it is intentional or not, that is how I've found it to be. Nostalgia in pop is also recursive. All music can influence emotions or state-of-mind to some degree, but the lack of complexity in pop music makes it so that this influence is the only "worth" or, perhaps more accurately, purpose of the music. There is nothing wrong with this necessarily, I am just giving another reason why pop and such might be so popular.
  - rainonmoon 8y ago
    I don't necessarily disagree, but I want to add that music taste has an important social component that often seems overlooked in favour of nebulous ideas like "artistic merit" (not from you, but elsewhere on this page.) If you and your friends only listen to Top 40, that music has personal and social resonance. It probably makes you feel good about your relationships, and also fosters the strengthening of those relationships. While some people prefer the individuality of their tastes, for plenty others there's a thrill to participating in a monolithic cultural event like One Direction or Ed Sheeran etc. These metrics of "good"-ness shouldn't be dismissed simply because the subjects of them don't play crazy polyrhythms where every song has 34 chords.
- pbhjpbhj 8y ago
  I still live in a World where mass-media is a thing because I watch recently made TV shows, occasionally recent films (aka movies), and listen to mainstream music on the radio. I wonder how it's going to play out because generations up to now have shared a relatively small cadre of media offerings in semi-rigid genres; that shared experience has in some ways - at least in the 20th Century - underpinned societal culture. Shared interest in YouTube stars, amongst many other things, still keeps the thread of share cultural experience in society; but what direction are we going? If I have a billion different media offerings I can consume the chances of meeting people and having a shared cultural experience we can link over get smaller. Whither nostalgia? TL;DR, Nostalgia won't be what it used to be.
- toomanybeersies 8y ago
  Exactly. People complain about how music in the 70's or 80's or whatever was so much better than modern music. That music never went away. It's not like you're no longer allowed to listen to Pink Floyd. Music doesn't have an expiry date.
  - burfog 8y ago
    Some music has an expiry date. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1999_(song) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1999_(song) http://www.lyricsfreak.com/p/prince/1999_20111205.html http://www.lyricsfreak.com/p/prince/1999_20111205.html Prince refused to perform it after it expired.
  - dizzystar 8y ago
    Those people either have very short memories or believe the hype. A lot of the stuff outside the top 40 is barely passable. Sheesh, even top 40 is full of trash, and that's picking the "best" 40 songs over a 10 year span.
    - ionised 8y ago
      The top 40 to me is a list of all the artists I should avoid.
  - cutler 8y ago
    It's not a question of availability. It's about the quality, creativity and originality of the music. The late 60s, 70s and 80s produced a stream of musical talent the likes of which we haven't seen since. Tech has played a part in that decline though the early pioneers of techno-pop, such as Gary Numan and John Foxx were genuinely creative. Ask yourself, if you think all this is merely relative, where is the David Bowie, the Bryan Ferry and the Elton John of this decade? That's just 3. I could list 100 more from those 3 decades who tower above anything coming out of the music industry today.
ogennadi 8y ago
tl;dr: by a few metrics (musical valence, producers of the top-rated songs), hit songs are becoming less diverse.
systoll 8y ago
It seems really hard to justify treating those 8 characteristics as independent, equally important, and all-encompassing variables. The page's attempt to do so amounts to saying it's a peer-reviewed method employed by other music researchers. But the paper they linked made an effort to address that concern, and weights the features; it includes more echo-nest features, like tempo, mode and time-signature; it uses a different metric; and while it's not the overall conclusion of the paper, it includes a similar measure of similarity over time, but pegs 2015 as the most diverse year since 1963 in general, and 2014 as the most diverse year ever for #1s.
sparkzilla 8y ago
"Havana" had 11 writers?! God help us all.
- chiefalchemist 8y ago
  Some of those credits might be from use of samples.
  - sparkzilla 8y ago
    You are probably right.
matchagaucho 8y ago
Cool... but clearly overfit to match Billboard and Music Genome databases.
21 8y ago
> A single songwriter can specialize in literally the snare-drum. I was an amateur level producer in high school. I had hundred of snare-drum samples, not to mention a lot of way to influence the sound of a particular one. Picking a good snare-drum is very important, it can totally change the character of the song. All of modern music producing it's like that, it's an extremely efficient market, it's really really hard to make "the sound of 2019", and this is why there are such few successful producers. https://www.nytimes.com/2018/04/22/arts/music/diary-of-a-song-the-middle-zedd-maren-morris-grey.html https://www.nytimes.com/2018/04/22/arts/music/diary-of-a-son... To put it in software engineer terms, saying that "all successful modern music is computer made, recipe driven, there is no originality" it's like saying "all successful modern sites are made exactly the same, you just pick a database, a web frontend, ads to sell, a few programmers, there is no originality"
- bdjshsvajwv 8y ago
  Except that websites are intended to be functional while songs are intended to be works of art. Thats the problem. Why are we treating music like an industrial product? (The answer is money)
  - 21 8y ago
    > The answer is money The individual artist or producer which want's to have a number one song is not driven mainly by money. The drive is just wanting to be the best. And being the best in such a competitive field requires having a highly polished product.
    - njharman 8y ago
      Nobody interested in being best would consider tip of pop charts as "best". Pop is mass appeal for money and or game. It is a lowest common denominator medium. People wanting to be best seek the recognition of their peers. Not commercial sales.
  - joe_the_user 8y ago
    Two hundred years ago, most popular music existed primarily as simply a support for public dancing. The audience didn't expect to sit and listen to compelling virtuosos perform. It was only the advent of recorded music that allowed individual performers of popular music to gain specific audiences (with free jazz performers of 1930s being perhaps the first popular recording artists noted for producing "works of art"). So music as just a product, in ways, isn't by itself new or evil. Now one can take issue with the characteristics of our modern music. For discussion of the history of pop music, I'd recommend Elijah Wald's How the Beatles Destroyed Rock 'n' Roll http://www.elijahwald.com/beatlespop.html http://www.elijahwald.com/beatlespop.html
mwcampbell 8y ago
> The two most similar songs from 2007 to 2011 were Katy Perry’s “Teenage Dream” and Kesha’s “We R Who We R” , and they indeed sound alike. I disagree. I just listened to both songs on Spotify, and they do not sound alike. Different keys, different vocal ranges, different voices, different instruments (or at least, different synthesized sounds). The Kesha song has more electronic effects on her voice. Kesha raps, while Katy doesn't. Really, the main similarity between the two songs is that they repeat the same chord progression through the whole song -- that's probably a consequence of what John Seabrook calls "track and hook".
- ireflect 8y ago
  That's like saying blue bubblegum and pink bubblegum make for a diverse range of foods. I guess maybe that seems like the case, given we've all mostly been eating bubblegum for some time. There are far more similarities in these songs that have a greater impact: * Very similar tempo (approx 120 bpm) * Very similar keys (Eb Major vs Bb Major) * Very similar dynamics (crushed and loud) * Very similar ultra-present vocal processing * Very similar light syncopation (Katy Perry's synth chords vs Kesha's chopped vocals) (edit: formatting)
  - mwcampbell 8y ago
    Yeah, you're right. The differences I listed are only superficial variations on the same template.
- ThomPete 8y ago
  None of those defines whether a song is similar. The melody and harmonies mostly do.
- Raphael 8y ago
  The example I remember is two different songs by the same artists. ("California Girls" and "Tik Tok" are the same song.) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T2dPA2dCRNY https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T2dPA2dCRNY
blt 8y ago
The algorithm producing the EchoNest scores has some questionable results, like Hollaback Girl - 38% acousticness and Hey There Delilah - 65% danceability.
hammock 8y ago
"My Heart Will Go On" gets a top-5 score for use of flute, but I believe the flute-like sound is a recorder of some type, not a flute.
- rainbowmverse 8y ago
  It sounds like an ocarina to me. Example: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1DHecFcDhbw https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1DHecFcDhbw
DavidWoof 8y ago
The missing variable here is whether the market share represented by Billboard #1 songs has increased or decreased in this time span. Is everyone listening to more homogeneous music, or is the market for #1 songs shrinking to a smaller and smaller demographic? I honestly don't know the answer, but a few decades ago in most towns the majority of the public listened to just a few radio stations and everybody knew the top songs. In the Spotify age, I'm far from certain that's true.
MarkusAllen 8y ago
Actually, pop songs follow the same basic chord progression formula... Elton John MASTERED it - revealed here: https://twitter.com/TheMarkusAllen/status/996830643949522944 https://twitter.com/TheMarkusAllen/status/996830643949522944
- stephengillie 8y ago
  Axis of Awesome showed this as well: https://youtu.be/oOlDewpCfZQ https://youtu.be/oOlDewpCfZQ
- rainbowmverse 8y ago
  I–V–vi–IV is just a chord progression. Using it does not make a song unoriginal. You can build a billion melodies on it in just one mode of a scale. Then there's all the other stuff: instrument choice, arrangement, rhythm, lyrics (if you have them). A song is so much more than a chord progression. For those playing along at home: modern pop favorite I–V–vi–IV is also the chord progression used in some arrangements of the 1788 classic Auld Lang Syne.
sonnyblarney 8y ago
Not just diversity, but quality. There are many very objective metrics we can use, but even by many creative metrics - it's worse. Lyrically: have you ever listened to what 2Pac or Biggie were saying? They were rhyming. There was an obvious lyrical flow. Now compare to Lil' Wayne who literally spouts gibberish. Lil wayne 'says words' to 'a beat' and that's it. Some people point out that 'there's always been bad music' i.e. if you go back to the top 40 in 1977 or whatever it's litered with derivative crap - but - there were many 'stand outs' of great music - even great pop music. For example, Michael Jackson was not exactly an exalted artist in the purest sense, but he was a genius pop artists. I fully respect Beyonce as a hard working and creative entertainer of our times, but I think in 10 years from now, you'll more likely hear a Michael Jackson song than a Beyonce song. Underlying issues are partly commercialization, but also - 'visualization'. Remember 'video killed the radio star?' - well YouTube is the new MTV and 'how it looks' is as important than 'how it sounds'. Pop stars now generally are more attractive. Also - it's just too easy to press a button and make noise - people confuse the creativity behind that with raw expression. I saw a band recently that had 2 guys playing 'a computer' and it was interesting, but ultimately very empty. The lack of character has me aching for good, live Jazz. :) I love Kanye, but it's really hard to get fully behind someone standing there with a microphone, it's like a big Kareoke show.
- cma 8y ago
  > Underlying issues are partly commercialization, but also - 'visualization'. Remember 'video killed the radio star?' - well YouTube is the new MTV and 'how it looks' is as important than 'how it sounds'. Pop stars now generally are more attractive. You had opera and musicals long before MTV and Youtube. And people mostly didn't hide their faces during live performances before or during the current period of recorded music.
  - sonnyblarney 8y ago
    Opera and Musicals are inherently visual. And Opera singers are not necessarily pretty. Nobody cares what the pianist looks like :) To be fair: Taylor Swift and Beyonce - if you see them totally without makeup, are not super attractive, they look in the range of fairly normal. Also there's a double standard for men and women to some extent. Top male artist right now is Ed Sheeran and he is one ugly mofo, then again, to my point - he's highly talented ... when he's not writing pop tunes 'designed for a mass audience' he does some cool stuff. On Charlie Rose he basically admitted he writes a lot of stuff for commercial purposes, it's a business.

118 points by onychomys 8y ago

I'm always gonna be fascinated by any analyses like this - but can I just say how incredible tired I am of everything containing "music" combined with "this generation". Everyone, everyone in the industrialised world and well beyond can purchase a device smaller than their palm and listen to literal billions of songs. Noone is stopping you from only listening to "Tibet monk techno punk instrumental remixes" for the rest of your life - without buying anything you don't already have. So can this mother of all substanceless debates please just die...?

musage 8y ago
Yeah, and theoretically the onslaught of trash on the Steam store doesn't keep me from finding and buying what I like, but in practice it's... such a disgusting slog.
clay_the_ripper 8y ago
What you say is true, although it misses a larger point: that even though we CAN listen to unlimited variety, since the labels control the distribution systems (radio plays, featured music, music sold in big box stores, publicity etc etc) the music they produce becomes inevitably popular. Turn on the radio, walk into Walmart, turn on the tv, watch a movie and you’re not going to hear independent Tibetan chants. You’re going to hear what they want you to hear because they have the reach to make sure everyone listens to it. Combine that with their PR teams and you end up with a situation in which the labels have a strangle hold on what we collectively listen to. Sure it’s possible to branch out and “ignore” that stuff, but the vast majority of people don’t. They listen to and like what their friends like, which is in turn what they’ve been told is “good”.
- JasonFruit 8y ago
  But a lot of people now don't turn on the radio or TV; the alternate channels of music discovery are becoming primary. Once there's an initial contact — and there are plenty of opportunities that aren't controlled by labels — it's increasingly frictionless to find more of what you realize that you like.
  - LocalPCGuy 8y ago
    Except that services like Spotify or Pandora still rely on the labels as well. Sure, they want to get away from the labels, but that is going to take time. https://www.recode.net/2018/4/3/17191390/spotify-plan-big-music-labels-platform-marketplace-ipo https://www.recode.net/2018/4/3/17191390/spotify-plan-big-mu...
    - chiefalchemist 8y ago
      Well, they also rely on averages, and the resulting recommendations tend to be (for me) closer to "we're certain these won't offend you." That is there's little deviation. Yes, that works for most people. But if you're seeking new, exciting and different then those recommendations come off as dull and lifeless.
- 21 8y ago
  That's like saying that people are eating bananas and oranges and apples because there is a huge PR campaign to push them, and that this is destroying the chances for less popular fruits. Sure, there is that, but let's not kid ourselves, those fruit are popular because they are actually preferred by a vast majority.
  - fartcannon 8y ago
    Sure, but what if we only prefer it because we grew up eating it? Chicken/egg/chicken.
  - njharman 8y ago
    Bananas are a created product. Made popular by banana industry. Natural bananas are nothing like the highly breed thing you eat. They are not native in northern America. The demand for them was manufactured with marketing. Until now they are "part of our life" and seem normal. If it was not for the music industry. Pop bands would not exist. Boy bands would not exist. Etc. They are as artificil as bananas.
- creep 8y ago
  Additionally, I find that most of pop is quite manipulative on the emotions. Rather than complexity in the music, it goes for riffs and choruses that pull precisely on some undefinable feeling but which can be broken down into categories of Power, Sexy, Nostalgia, Hypnosis/Rapture-- by which I mean, it gives a feeling of a sort of intoxication or trance. Whether it is intentional or not, that is how I've found it to be. Nostalgia in pop is also recursive. All music can influence emotions or state-of-mind to some degree, but the lack of complexity in pop music makes it so that this influence is the only "worth" or, perhaps more accurately, purpose of the music. There is nothing wrong with this necessarily, I am just giving another reason why pop and such might be so popular.
- rainonmoon 8y ago
  I don't necessarily disagree, but I want to add that music taste has an important social component that often seems overlooked in favour of nebulous ideas like "artistic merit" (not from you, but elsewhere on this page.) If you and your friends only listen to Top 40, that music has personal and social resonance. It probably makes you feel good about your relationships, and also fosters the strengthening of those relationships. While some people prefer the individuality of their tastes, for plenty others there's a thrill to participating in a monolithic cultural event like One Direction or Ed Sheeran etc. These metrics of "good"-ness shouldn't be dismissed simply because the subjects of them don't play crazy polyrhythms where every song has 34 chords.
pbhjpbhj 8y ago
I still live in a World where mass-media is a thing because I watch recently made TV shows, occasionally recent films (aka movies), and listen to mainstream music on the radio. I wonder how it's going to play out because generations up to now have shared a relatively small cadre of media offerings in semi-rigid genres; that shared experience has in some ways - at least in the 20th Century - underpinned societal culture. Shared interest in YouTube stars, amongst many other things, still keeps the thread of share cultural experience in society; but what direction are we going? If I have a billion different media offerings I can consume the chances of meeting people and having a shared cultural experience we can link over get smaller. Whither nostalgia? TL;DR, Nostalgia won't be what it used to be.
toomanybeersies 8y ago
Exactly. People complain about how music in the 70's or 80's or whatever was so much better than modern music. That music never went away. It's not like you're no longer allowed to listen to Pink Floyd. Music doesn't have an expiry date.
- burfog 8y ago
  Some music has an expiry date. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1999_(song) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1999_(song) http://www.lyricsfreak.com/p/prince/1999_20111205.html http://www.lyricsfreak.com/p/prince/1999_20111205.html Prince refused to perform it after it expired.
- dizzystar 8y ago
  Those people either have very short memories or believe the hype. A lot of the stuff outside the top 40 is barely passable. Sheesh, even top 40 is full of trash, and that's picking the "best" 40 songs over a 10 year span.
  - ionised 8y ago
    The top 40 to me is a list of all the artists I should avoid.
- cutler 8y ago
  It's not a question of availability. It's about the quality, creativity and originality of the music. The late 60s, 70s and 80s produced a stream of musical talent the likes of which we haven't seen since. Tech has played a part in that decline though the early pioneers of techno-pop, such as Gary Numan and John Foxx were genuinely creative. Ask yourself, if you think all this is merely relative, where is the David Bowie, the Bryan Ferry and the Elton John of this decade? That's just 3. I could list 100 more from those 3 decades who tower above anything coming out of the music industry today.

ogennadi 8y ago

tl;dr: by a few metrics (musical valence, producers of the top-rated songs), hit songs are becoming less diverse.

systoll 8y ago

It seems really hard to justify treating those 8 characteristics as independent, equally important, and all-encompassing variables. The page's attempt to do so amounts to saying it's a peer-reviewed method employed by other music researchers. But the paper they linked made an effort to address that concern, and weights the features; it includes more echo-nest features, like tempo, mode and time-signature; it uses a different metric; and while it's not the overall conclusion of the paper, it includes a similar measure of similarity over time, but pegs 2015 as the most diverse year since 1963 in general, and 2014 as the most diverse year ever for #1s.

sparkzilla 8y ago

"Havana" had 11 writers?! God help us all.

chiefalchemist 8y ago
Some of those credits might be from use of samples.
- sparkzilla 8y ago
  You are probably right.

matchagaucho 8y ago

Cool... but clearly overfit to match Billboard and Music Genome databases.

21 8y ago

> A single songwriter can specialize in literally the snare-drum. I was an amateur level producer in high school. I had hundred of snare-drum samples, not to mention a lot of way to influence the sound of a particular one. Picking a good snare-drum is very important, it can totally change the character of the song. All of modern music producing it's like that, it's an extremely efficient market, it's really really hard to make "the sound of 2019", and this is why there are such few successful producers. https://www.nytimes.com/2018/04/22/arts/music/diary-of-a-song-the-middle-zedd-maren-morris-grey.html https://www.nytimes.com/2018/04/22/arts/music/diary-of-a-son... To put it in software engineer terms, saying that "all successful modern music is computer made, recipe driven, there is no originality" it's like saying "all successful modern sites are made exactly the same, you just pick a database, a web frontend, ads to sell, a few programmers, there is no originality"

bdjshsvajwv 8y ago
Except that websites are intended to be functional while songs are intended to be works of art. Thats the problem. Why are we treating music like an industrial product? (The answer is money)
- 21 8y ago
  > The answer is money The individual artist or producer which want's to have a number one song is not driven mainly by money. The drive is just wanting to be the best. And being the best in such a competitive field requires having a highly polished product.
  - njharman 8y ago
    Nobody interested in being best would consider tip of pop charts as "best". Pop is mass appeal for money and or game. It is a lowest common denominator medium. People wanting to be best seek the recognition of their peers. Not commercial sales.
- joe_the_user 8y ago
  Two hundred years ago, most popular music existed primarily as simply a support for public dancing. The audience didn't expect to sit and listen to compelling virtuosos perform. It was only the advent of recorded music that allowed individual performers of popular music to gain specific audiences (with free jazz performers of 1930s being perhaps the first popular recording artists noted for producing "works of art"). So music as just a product, in ways, isn't by itself new or evil. Now one can take issue with the characteristics of our modern music. For discussion of the history of pop music, I'd recommend Elijah Wald's How the Beatles Destroyed Rock 'n' Roll http://www.elijahwald.com/beatlespop.html http://www.elijahwald.com/beatlespop.html

mwcampbell 8y ago

> The two most similar songs from 2007 to 2011 were Katy Perry’s “Teenage Dream” and Kesha’s “We R Who We R” , and they indeed sound alike. I disagree. I just listened to both songs on Spotify, and they do not sound alike. Different keys, different vocal ranges, different voices, different instruments (or at least, different synthesized sounds). The Kesha song has more electronic effects on her voice. Kesha raps, while Katy doesn't. Really, the main similarity between the two songs is that they repeat the same chord progression through the whole song -- that's probably a consequence of what John Seabrook calls "track and hook".

ireflect 8y ago
That's like saying blue bubblegum and pink bubblegum make for a diverse range of foods. I guess maybe that seems like the case, given we've all mostly been eating bubblegum for some time. There are far more similarities in these songs that have a greater impact: * Very similar tempo (approx 120 bpm) * Very similar keys (Eb Major vs Bb Major) * Very similar dynamics (crushed and loud) * Very similar ultra-present vocal processing * Very similar light syncopation (Katy Perry's synth chords vs Kesha's chopped vocals) (edit: formatting)
- mwcampbell 8y ago
  Yeah, you're right. The differences I listed are only superficial variations on the same template.
ThomPete 8y ago
None of those defines whether a song is similar. The melody and harmonies mostly do.
Raphael 8y ago
The example I remember is two different songs by the same artists. ("California Girls" and "Tik Tok" are the same song.) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T2dPA2dCRNY https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T2dPA2dCRNY

blt 8y ago

The algorithm producing the EchoNest scores has some questionable results, like Hollaback Girl - 38% acousticness and Hey There Delilah - 65% danceability.

hammock 8y ago

"My Heart Will Go On" gets a top-5 score for use of flute, but I believe the flute-like sound is a recorder of some type, not a flute.

rainbowmverse 8y ago
It sounds like an ocarina to me. Example: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1DHecFcDhbw https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1DHecFcDhbw

DavidWoof 8y ago

The missing variable here is whether the market share represented by Billboard #1 songs has increased or decreased in this time span. Is everyone listening to more homogeneous music, or is the market for #1 songs shrinking to a smaller and smaller demographic? I honestly don't know the answer, but a few decades ago in most towns the majority of the public listened to just a few radio stations and everybody knew the top songs. In the Spotify age, I'm far from certain that's true.

MarkusAllen 8y ago

Actually, pop songs follow the same basic chord progression formula... Elton John MASTERED it - revealed here: https://twitter.com/TheMarkusAllen/status/996830643949522944 https://twitter.com/TheMarkusAllen/status/996830643949522944

stephengillie 8y ago
Axis of Awesome showed this as well: https://youtu.be/oOlDewpCfZQ https://youtu.be/oOlDewpCfZQ
rainbowmverse 8y ago
I–V–vi–IV is just a chord progression. Using it does not make a song unoriginal. You can build a billion melodies on it in just one mode of a scale. Then there's all the other stuff: instrument choice, arrangement, rhythm, lyrics (if you have them). A song is so much more than a chord progression. For those playing along at home: modern pop favorite I–V–vi–IV is also the chord progression used in some arrangements of the 1788 classic Auld Lang Syne.

sonnyblarney 8y ago

Not just diversity, but quality. There are many very objective metrics we can use, but even by many creative metrics - it's worse. Lyrically: have you ever listened to what 2Pac or Biggie were saying? They were rhyming. There was an obvious lyrical flow. Now compare to Lil' Wayne who literally spouts gibberish. Lil wayne 'says words' to 'a beat' and that's it. Some people point out that 'there's always been bad music' i.e. if you go back to the top 40 in 1977 or whatever it's litered with derivative crap - but - there were many 'stand outs' of great music - even great pop music. For example, Michael Jackson was not exactly an exalted artist in the purest sense, but he was a genius pop artists. I fully respect Beyonce as a hard working and creative entertainer of our times, but I think in 10 years from now, you'll more likely hear a Michael Jackson song than a Beyonce song. Underlying issues are partly commercialization, but also - 'visualization'. Remember 'video killed the radio star?' - well YouTube is the new MTV and 'how it looks' is as important than 'how it sounds'. Pop stars now generally are more attractive. Also - it's just too easy to press a button and make noise - people confuse the creativity behind that with raw expression. I saw a band recently that had 2 guys playing 'a computer' and it was interesting, but ultimately very empty. The lack of character has me aching for good, live Jazz. :) I love Kanye, but it's really hard to get fully behind someone standing there with a microphone, it's like a big Kareoke show.

cma 8y ago
> Underlying issues are partly commercialization, but also - 'visualization'. Remember 'video killed the radio star?' - well YouTube is the new MTV and 'how it looks' is as important than 'how it sounds'. Pop stars now generally are more attractive. You had opera and musicals long before MTV and Youtube. And people mostly didn't hide their faces during live performances before or during the current period of recorded music.
- sonnyblarney 8y ago
  Opera and Musicals are inherently visual. And Opera singers are not necessarily pretty. Nobody cares what the pianist looks like :) To be fair: Taylor Swift and Beyonce - if you see them totally without makeup, are not super attractive, they look in the range of fairly normal. Also there's a double standard for men and women to some extent. Top male artist right now is Ed Sheeran and he is one ugly mofo, then again, to my point - he's highly talented ... when he's not writing pop tunes 'designed for a mass audience' he does some cool stuff. On Charlie Rose he basically admitted he writes a lot of stuff for commercial purposes, it's a business.