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Music Businesses

Increasing Similarity of Billboard Songs 169

Posted by msmash from the closer-look dept.
It's not just you, others have also noticed that popular songs on the Billboard charts sound similar. But what you may not realize is that in the recent days, they're sounding even more similar. Andrew Thompson and Matt Daniels for The Pudding make the case: From 2010-2014, the top ten producers (by number of hits) wrote about 40% of songs that achieved #1 - #5 ranking on the Billboard Hot 100. In the late-80s, the top ten producers were credited with half as many hits, about 19%. In other words, more songs have been produced by fewer and fewer topline songwriters, who oversee the combinations of all the separately created sounds. Take a less personal production process and execute that process by a shrinking number of people and everything starts to sound more or less the same.
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Increasing Similarity of Billboard Songs More

Increasing Similarity of Billboard Songs

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  • Surprised they are (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Anonymous Coward on Monday May 28, 2018 @02:56AM (#56687168)

    Surprised they are, when sales stagnate. Recording companies, complain to the Emperor they do. Longer copyright they want.

    • Re:Surprised they are (Score:5, Insightful)

      by Humbubba ( 2443838 ) on Monday May 28, 2018 @08:54AM (#56688048)
      The music business has been declining for so long, by now they should have discovered Arne Saknussemm's skeletal remains at the center of the earth. I was just listening to an old clip of Frank Zappa talking about the decline of the music business. Back in the 60's the music industry was run by

      "old guys who said 'I don't know. Who knows what it is. Record it. Stick it out. If it sells, all right.' We were better off with those guys than we are now with the supposedly hip young executives, you know, who are making the decisions about what people should see and hear..."

      https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KZazEM8cgt0 [youtube.com]

      • I'll give you guys another theory - Maybe all the songs are *actually* the same:
        Four Chords [youtube.com]

        If you need more proof, here's a country version [youtube.com] with 6 top-ten country songs smashed on top of one another.

        • I think, in some way, all music is derivative. Bach's 'The Well-Tempered Clavier' changed the way music is written and performed, and even how instruments are made. Some of its more notable fans/students included Hayden, Mozart and Beethoven. When my neighbor/music teacher use to play it, I would sit on the porch spellbound. And yet I know music aficionados who say it sucks. C'est la vie.

    • Re: (Score:1)

      by farrellj ( 563 )

      Music Industry insider Rick Beato has an excellent video on why the songs all sound the same...and it's illuminating and worth watching...

      The Four Chords That Killed POP Music!
      https://www.youtube.com/watch?... [youtube.com]

  • "Mainstream music sounds the same" (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward

    So what this "news story" is saying is that in recent years "mainstream music" sounds all the same. Let me guess, it's probably because "artists" nowadays use some computer algorithm to generate music which appeals to a wide audience and call themselves DJs ("disc jockeys", although I bet that none of them use discs anymore, they should be called "sample mixers").

    • Re: (Score:1)

      by Anonymous Coward

      All music is made out of construction kits and apps like ableton live , "musicians" do not know how to make music anymore. My mom can make a hit now, it is quick cheap....

    • > Let me guess, it's probably because "artists" nowadays use some computer algorithm to generate music which appeals to a wide audience

      Almost is that, and has been for a long time. Pop songs have a very well-defined structure or formula. To some extent, that makes sense because that's what makes it a pop song, not blues, not country, not hip hop, not gospel, but pop.

      Programmers have a formula for sorting, called quicksort, and lots of programmers do quicksort with very minor variations. Bakers have a pr

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by AHuxley ( 892839 )
      In the distant past artists had to be very skilled and creative. The artists had to know their music, have a total understanding of music from lyrics, instruments to studio recording and how to present their own style.
      The people buying and accepting new work to be sold had to have deep understanding of music and the later recording results.
      Now its all what will test well and what an AI thinks will be just like all the other music that sold well that year, over the pat few months.
      Merit, quality, skill, c
  • titles of the same genre have always been somewhat similar, its just that the industry figured that a few mainstream genres are worth it, and the rest not. compare this with comics, books, games, movies, series, ... . few popular exceptions can divert this a bit (increase of synth use after title xxx, mistery series after stranger things or more gore/crime after breaking bad walking dead, ... ). and ofc people want money, means artists will copy popular stuff all the time. everything is a copy of everythin

  • Yeah, I Wanna I Wanna Baby (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward
    Baby Wanna Baby Wanna Baby Wanna I Wanna Baby.

    There that is the next ten number 1 hits.

    • Re: (Score:2, Insightful)

      by Anonymous Coward
      You forgot fuck nigga, nigga fuck fuck, hos and nigga....now that's a hit

    • Re: (Score:1)

      by Anonymous Coward

      Baby Wanna Baby Wanna Baby Wanna I Wanna Baby.

      There that is the next ten number 1 hits.

      I was in the gym locker room the other day and some guy was listening to some music player. The song he was listening to was, quite literally, just a single word repeated over and over again. "Goddam, goddam, goddam, goddam,..., goddam..." I think you get the idea. No, I'm not exaggerating. That was the entire song from beginning to end, as far as I could tell. And it wasn't like there was much musical ingenuity to the melody, chord progression, etc. Well, at least I'm sure it was quite easy to memorize wha

  • Relevant? (Score:4, Interesting)

    by phantomfive ( 622387 ) on Monday May 28, 2018 @03:20AM (#56687274) Journal
    Are the billboard top 10 even relevant anymore? It seems like a different metric like "top 100 concert earnings" or something would be more relevant these days.

    • Re:Relevant? (Score:5, Insightful)

      by umafuckit ( 2980809 ) on Monday May 28, 2018 @03:34AM (#56687302)

      Are the billboard top 10 even relevant anymore? It seems like a different metric like "top 100 concert earnings" or something would be more relevant these days.

      Or no single metric. Over the last 50 years or so both the number of different genres and the quantity of being being produced have both ballooned so it's not reasonable for a single chart to make sense. What you now really want to know is who thinks what is popular rather than just what is considered popular by the largest number of people.

      • Comment removed based on user account deletion

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by Jahta ( 1141213 )

        Are the billboard top 10 even relevant anymore? It seems like a different metric like "top 100 concert earnings" or something would be more relevant these days.

        Or no single metric. Over the last 50 years or so both the number of different genres and the quantity of being being produced have both ballooned so it's not reasonable for a single chart to make sense. What you now really want to know is who thinks what is popular rather than just what is considered popular by the largest number of people.

        Another view: the charts made sense when music was sold on physical media. When people had to physically go to a store, buy a vinyl record (or CD), and bring it home to listen to it, that represented a conscious choice (and a level of commitment) on the part of the consumer.

        With the rise of easy mass downloads (and now streaming) and portable personal music players, for many people music has now become an "always on" background soundtrack; hence devolving into a sort of "muzak" is not that surprising.

    • Is that more relevant? Some bands produce decent albums, but make a poor or even terrible live act.

    • Re:Relevant? (Score:5, Insightful)

      by KozmoStevnNaut ( 630146 ) on Monday May 28, 2018 @03:58AM (#56687368)

      Top 10, Top 40, Top Whatever lists are always 100% manufactured. Either directly through payola, or indirectly by "encouraging" bars and clubs to play the same shit over an over again, so people enter a sort of Stockholm Syndrome, where they only "like" the hits because they recognize them or because "everyone likes it". People are afraid of new experiences, they actively seek to be superficially the same as everyone else. Even if that means "enjoying" utter garbage.

      • That doesn't make them irrelevant. Quite the opposite. It makes them a lovely indication of what you're likely to experience if you interact with any part of the commercial world, be it turn on the TV, radio, what concerts are likely to come up, and what shitty music will be playing over your beer and steak at the bar.

    • The chart now factors in online sales, free streaming, and paid streaming with various weightings. It's not as basic as it was historically.

  • Reverse: Sign of *diversity* ? (Score:5, Interesting)

    by DrYak ( 748999 ) on Monday May 28, 2018 @03:37AM (#56687310) Homepage

    Hypothesis: Can also be a sign of *diversification* of the means of distribution.

    In the late 80s, music distribution was though a small number of TV channels (you know, back when the "M" of MTV still stood for music), a (relatively) small number of radio channel, and by buy media (tapes, CDs) from stores (with limited physical space).
    Whatever you wanted to listen too mostly came from mainstream media.
    You would need a tiny bit more producers to cover a diverse enough offer to cover all the needs of the public within such a small restricted numbers of channel.
    In other words the remaining 80% of the 80s producers will be another dozen or couple of dozens of producers, and that's basically all that there was.

    Compare to today, even if you're into chiptunes, nerdcore, or even weirder/rarer style that only people on some obscure forum know about, there's going to be at least a dozen of youtube channels with playlist/mixes.
    There are dozens of producer event for the rarest type of stuff.
    In other word, the remaining 60% of todays producers at thousands of producers, split among so many style that they'll never register on any "top fo whatever" classifications.
    The long tail has grown a lot in the mean time, but that something that won't be registered by a simplistic stat like "top billboard song contribution from 10 topmost procuders grew from 20% to 40%" , unless you start paying attention of what's happening to the remain 80% to 60%.

    • Re:Reverse: Sign of *diversity* ? (Score:5, Informative)

      by geekmux ( 1040042 ) on Monday May 28, 2018 @06:38AM (#56687680)

      In the late 80s, music distribution was though a small number of TV channels (you know, back when the "M" of MTV still stood for music), a (relatively) small number of radio channel, and by buy media (tapes, CDs) from stores (with limited physical space).

      What the hell are you talking about? Distribution through TV channels? Uh, no. We usually watched MTV to catch a music video after a song became popular enough to justify making a music video. Radio airplay was still the main distribution method, as it had been for decades prior, which people usually wouldn't go buy media until they heard the music. Radio hasn't existed in "small" numbers since it was invented, and distributors sure as hell weren't going to limit themselves to whomever could afford cable TV.

      And stores with "limited physical space"? Are you kidding me? We used to have many stores that were dedicated to selling nothing but music, who carried many different "channels" of music in various categories. Where do you think all the media revenue came from before the internet distribution models? This is like claiming Gamestop has "limited" space to sell games when that's all they sell.

      I understand your UID implies otherwise, but this description of the 80s sounds like it was written by a Millennial who only read about it on a poorly written Wiki page.

      • Re: (Score:3)

        by jythie ( 914043 )
        There was a transitional period when MTV and such were the places things got premiered, with music videos for promoted artists coming out before radio debut of the same songs. Radio was the place to run the song over and over, but MTV was the place to tell fans what they should be listening to, though that would really be more early 90s than late 80s. As for music stores, yes, there were entire stores dedicated to selling nothing but music, but even the largest places had pretty limited selection. Like b

      • What the hell are you talking about? Distribution through TV channels? Uh, no. We usually watched MTV to catch a music video after a song became popular enough to justify making a music video.

        (That was more thrown in for the jab at MTV, rather than considering it as the number one way to distribute music).
        Hence also the progressive enumeration :
        small number of TV < relatively small number of Radios < physical media from stores (with shelf space restriction).

        Radio airplay was still the main distribution method, as it had been for decades prior, which people usually wouldn't go buy media until they heard the music. Radio hasn't existed in "small" numbers since it was invented,

        Small: Compared to what ? To modern internet/streaming/Etc. ?
        Yes, definitely. It was tiny.
        At best you'd get a couple of dozen FM channels that you could catch with your radio in the 80s. At any point of time, there would be a grand tota

      • even at the beginning MTV was used to market new music... you definitely have the tail wagging the dog

  • That's how it always is (Score:3)

    by KozmoStevnNaut ( 630146 ) on Monday May 28, 2018 @03:55AM (#56687362)

    The business types get control of art, and they homogenize it into a fetid featureless river of shit.

    Luckily, there is so much creativity outside of the mainstream, if you only cut the feed of shit they feed you, and go explore on your own.

    • The business types get control of art, and they homogenize it into a fetid featureless river of shit.

      Luckily, there is so much creativity outside of the mainstream, if you only cut the feed of shit they feed you, and go explore on your own.

      You and I rarely agree on a whole host of topics, but here we find common ground. I agree. Go out to local clubs and other venues where "unsigned" bands and musicians perform, often without even a cover charge or ticket required, and explore local talent that the "industry" won't promote because it doesn't fit into their molds dictated by algorithms and MBAs. There's tons and tons of amazing musical talents and musicians performing live shows right in your local area. The best part is you can support them d

    • This is also where Patreon shines. I support a couple of local bands, and I, along with only a hundred or so like-minded people, have managed to give them a solid financial base upon which to plan. I probably get a 75% return on my donation, with free t-shirts, albums, show covers, etc. that I would have purchased anyway. And I'm plenty happy to donate that other 25% to support some really interesting and talented musicians.

  • The Musical One Percent - only in USA? (Score:4, Insightful)

    by Robin Bermanseder ( 4925885 ) on Monday May 28, 2018 @04:51AM (#56687448)
    Sounds like the phenomenon of "Top 1% owns 99%" is impacting music as well as wealth, but it that purely an American phenomenon? The concentration does not seem to be as bad in UK or Europe, or here in Australia.

    As an old fart (punched card Fortran guy) it seems to me that most pop music has become very homogeneous there; the same four chords and riffs over and over with autotuned well-known-female-voice over the top.

    Listening to random classics on Youtube (today: The Monkeys, The Stranglers) the difference in texture and nuance from then to now is very evident.

    It will be interesting to see how AI generated music goes:
    a. Will it be indistinguishable from human output, or is there some 'human' quality that WE will always be able to detect?
    b. What music will an artificial consciousness prefer? Jazz? Human au Naturale? - we may be surprised!

    [Personal Taste warning]
    There is some 'real music' still coming out of USA, but mostly in genres ignored by the Mu$ic Indu$try, My favourite is Jackie Evancho who seems to have been blackballed by the industry since singing at Trumps Inauguration, but her vocals are very impressive (and very human) to my ears.
    [/End Personal Taste warning]

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by jythie ( 914043 )
      Wealth is a bit of a special case. When it comes to movies, music, books, etc, zipf's law tends to come into play which produces about an 80/20 split (20% of the artists having 80% of the mindshare).

    • As an old fart (punched card Fortran guy) it seems to me that most pop music has become very homogeneous there; the same four chords and riffs over and over with autotuned well-known-female-voice over the top.

      Nah, if you can't tell the difference between this style [youtube.com] and this style [youtube.com], you're deaf. And if that's not enough, this is #1 right now and wildly different [youtube.com].

      In the 60s and 70s it was all guitar and drums. Throw in an occasional piano or trumpet. Now in pop music there is more variety in instruments, more variety in chords, more variety in recording techniques. I like the classics but the skill level in music production has gone up without a doubt.

  • methodology (Score:3)

    by mapkinase ( 958129 ) on Monday May 28, 2018 @05:15AM (#56687498) Homepage Journal

    I do not care about pop music, but I am interested in methodology. Article says about 8 data points calculated for each song but it does not describe how and how did they normalize it to 0...1 scale

  • fuck the music industry (Score:4)

    by AndyKron ( 937105 ) on Monday May 28, 2018 @06:03AM (#56687602)
    I don't understand why people still buy into the bullshit music industry and even bother listening to the shitty music it produces. When I go to a store or a restaurant I don't hear shitty new music, I heard golden oldies from forty years ago.

    • That's because the boomers are still desperately hanging on to the last remnants of their cultural monopoly.

      Every notice how all the popular christmas songs are from the 50s and 60s? That's when the boomers grew up, so that's the music they like, and thus force on all of us, because obviously their music and traditions are superior to everything else /s

      The same goes for music, basically everything "classic rock" and "evergreens" should be referred to as "shit boomers like for no good reason". Sure yeah, The

      • Re: (Score:1)

        by Anonymous Coward

        Which popular Baby Boomer Christmas music do you mean?

        White Christmas, Irving Berlin 1942
        Happy Holidays Irving Berlin 1942
        Auld Land Syne words written in 1788
        The Chipmunk Sons 1958
        Feliz Navidad Jose Feliciano 1970
        The First Noel 17th century English carol
        Silent Night Franz Gruber 1818
        Blue Christmas First recorded in 1948
        Here cones Santa Claus Gene Autry/Oakley Haderman 1947
        (There’s No Place Like) Home For the Holidays Stillman/Allen 1954
        Santa Claus is Coming to Tow

    • they keep it on as background noise when they work or use it to dance to at clubs. That kind of music needs to be bland because otherwise you can't tune it out while you go about your work.

  • Shouldn't come as a suprise (Score:3)

    by GrumpySteen ( 1250194 ) on Monday May 28, 2018 @06:21AM (#56687648)

    All the data they used came from the Billboard Hot 100 chart which has a long history of being gamed by the record companies (as almost all Billboard charts are, if we're being honest).

    Smaller artists usually don't get on that chart because they don't have the resources to play that game. The companies that are willing to invest the money to game the system are generally going to back music that's similar to what's already popular because it increases the chance of success.

    And to follow through to the logical conclusion; gaming the system gets your song onto the chart which then gets you more airplay on stations that play the 'top hits' which gets you more sales. It's a complicated version of the pay-for-play that used to be commonplace, but this time with a veneer of legality to keep anyone from being arrested or fined.

  • Seems to me the concerts are packed. The "artists" are insanely rich, as are their promoters.

    Isn't that what business is about? Where is the problem?

    I still listen to stuff like Santana and Eric Clapton. I know: "get off my lawn."

    • Some people don't really come to terms with the fact that giving you something good is not good business, giving you something highly addictive is. You may not choose to listen to it and you might choose to bemoan the quality if it, yet enough listen to it so it sells. Yet they will praise business and defend its right to make a profit. It won't end well.

  • If you haven't seen it:Sir Mashalot: Mind-Blowing SIX Song Country Mashup, or 6 #1 country songs separated at birth.

    https://youtu.be/FY8SwIvxj8o?l... [youtu.be]

    So yeah, it is all over compressed, similar sounding 120 beat per minute 4 chord stuff. I don't even think the music has chord changes in the songs anymore.

  • Musical content (Score:5, Interesting)

    by swm ( 171547 ) <swmcd@world.std.com> on Monday May 28, 2018 @08:16AM (#56687920) Homepage

    I sing in a choir.
    We'll have some piece of sheet music, 3, 4, 6, maybe 8 pages.
    We start rehearsing it, and after a page or two the choir director says, now you've seen all the musical content in this piece.
    IOW, all the rest of the song is just repeats and rearrangements of what we've already sung.

    So I learned this idea of "musical content".
    Now, when I hear current pop music, I think about it in those terms.
    What is the musical content of this song?
    And it's not two pages.
    It's not one page.
    Sometimes it's a line.
    Sometimes it's just a couple of bars.
    Sometimes it's barely a few notes.

    There's really not much there.

  • For me, music is the most emotional and involving of the arts. It can span the whole human experience and dig deep into all of us. Modern pop music is a clean departure from the realm of emotion and feeling. The droning high-pitched lead voice, an uninspired repetitive lyric, and accompaniment that seems to be exclusively the product of a drum machine and bits of electronically synthesized sound patched together. The "samplers" are even worse, stealing the content of legitimate artists and pasting chunk

  • The general public is musically ignorant and they'll eat up whatever they are spoon fed.

  • Take a look at the number of units sold in country and religious genres. Number one selling albums in the pop charts wouldn't crack the top 10 for units sold on the contemporary christian charts.

    These things are just there to justify the existence of the R&R guys at the label.

  • Pretty typical of this corrupted free market.

  • Axis Of Awesome (Score:4, Funny)

    by tlambert ( 566799 ) on Monday May 28, 2018 @10:52AM (#56688540)

    This has been well known as the "four chord song" rule for a very very long time.

    The Australian musical comedy group "Axis Of Awesome" has a fantastic comedy routine about it, which incidentally demonstrates it, in bold contrast, with current and historical hit songs.

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?... [youtube.com]

    Australians are awesome.

  • I just looked at the Billboard Top 30 for 1952, and almost every single song on the list is one of two chord progressions, either ii-V-I or I-IV-V. For that matter, practically the entire Great American Songbook of popular music written from the end of WWI to the early '60s could all be represented by one chord progression.

    Popular music is not more similar today, musically.

    • Chord progressions do not tell the whole story. Sonically and stylistically, pop music is now more homogeneous than ever. Arrangements, mix, instrumentation, even sound-alike synth patches replicated endlessly. If you took the vocals off of many recent hit records, you could barely tell songs apart. Such a far cry from say, the 60s and 70s. The Beatles, The Stones, Chicago, Jethro Tull, Alice Cooper, The Jacksons, Abba, Fleetwood Mac, and on and on, they all had their own sound. Now there is one so

  • If you follow any one of those "learn to play in 2 hours" type courses, you'd know this. (These are the courses that don't teach from first principles and generally get you playing within about 5 minutes).

    You learn that most songs are composed of about 4 chords, and regardless of instrument (piano, guitar, ukelele, etc), those 4 chords are all you need to basically play about 90% of the music out there.

    The chords are I, V, vi, and IV.

    Which I think in C-major key, is C, G, Am and F. The more interesting thin

  • Pop music has been formulated by algorithm, and not "written" in a musical fashion, since the 1980's. The lyrics, the hooks etc.., it's all calculated. Every note and word of nearly every pop song is analysed for how it affects a person emotionally etc.., and then combinations of those are put together in a computer model. Ever listened to an "original" song by no-direction... it's a series of clichés set to very familiar chord changes and rhythms.. just like every other "pop" sensation. The more the
  • Teen pop is crap. Always has been, always will be. It is a disposable manufactured commodity, not art.
  • This is what one would expect to happen when an area of human endeavor is studied, "understood" and turned into a set process. It is frozen. It doesn't advance and change. And this is exactly what will happen in any area that happily lets AI take over for human beings.

  • You didn't think the multinational megamediacorps are interested in *art*, did you? All they want is to stamp out product, like laundry detergent. That's why they sound alike, that's why there are 15-book trilogies, and years-long "adaptations of complete-in-one-movie.

    Screw 'em. Buy from musicians, don't just video them on your phone, so they don't get paid. And yes, I buy CDs from the musicians all the time, and *they* get the money to keep doing what I like, rather than the friggin' record companies takin

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