Traditional top music charts didn't exclusively show "music" per se. They would list comedy and spoken word albums as well if they sold enough to be on the main

Traditional top music charts didn't exclusively show "music" per se. They would list comedy and spoken word albums as well if they sold enough to be on the main chart. Music was just the lion's share of prerecorded auditory entertainment. Fast forward to today and the situation has changed. Instead of listening to traditional radio, a person can get audiovisual stimulation from TikTok. TikTok allows people to remix the sound and/or visual component from other people's clips into your own. So there can be thousands of people making TikTok content from the same exact music clip. But, as before, it's not necessarily "music" that counts. People will remix audio from movies, old cartoons, comedy bits, random spoken excerpts, non-charting independent music, etc. However, unlike Richard Pryor comedy albums, these little clips aren't showing up on Gioia's traditional chart sources. Is prerecorded auditory entertainment getting less creative or is it just less bounded by what we traditionally think of as music? Frankly I doubt lack of creativity is even a problem. Quite the opposite. The very fact that old stuff is still popular shows that people don't care if music is "creative" or not. If the traditional mainstream music industry is searching for the next big thing to revive sales, an exciting new genre, I don't think it's going to happen. More "creative" buggy whips isn't the issue.