Objective proof that modern pop music has degenerated, and the reason why it happened

Reader Phil sent me this recently-posted 20 minute video which proves through SCIENCE that pop music has gone downhill since the Sixties, a thesis I raised yesterday. (I have to say that many responses were uncivil, and some positively nasty: one calling me a “retard” because I didn’t like a particular song. I’m not sure why the incivility is increasing here: it may either reflect a general increase in irritability of people on the Left, or may simply be that, with a larger number of subscribers, a fixed percentage of uncivil people will manifest as an increasing absolute number of nasty comments. If you haven’t commented here before, read “Da Roolz” first!).

But I digress. The topic is the video below is by “Thoughty2” (the “2” is an exponent), which asks the provocative question, “How did we go from Bob Dylan to Britney Spears, from Led Zeppelin to Lady Gaga, and from the Kinks to Katy Perry?”

The video recounts some work conducted in 2012 by the Spanish National Research Council, which analyzed 500,000 recordings from 1955 to 2010. They measured three statistics for each song: harmonic complexity, timbral diversity, and loudness. Over that period, the timbre (“the texture, quality, and color of the sounds within the music” or “richness and depth of sound”) has dropped steadily after peaking in the 1960s. Music has become more homogeneous among songs, with a progression called “The Millennial Whoop”.

Another study looked at what it called the “lyric intelligence” of Billboard chart-toppings songs: the difficulty of lyrics and quality of the writing; and that, too, has dropped over the past decade. Lyrics are getting shorter and more repetitive. Further, the video argues that a huge swath of chart-topping music in recent years was written by just two men: the Swede Max Martin and the American Lukasz Gottwald, or “Dr. Luke.” This was new to me, but explains the monotony and homogeneity of so many recent songs.

There have been other changes, too: a faster-appearing “hook” appealing to those with shorter attention spans, and increasing loudness of songs using dynamic range compression,

Why has this happened? The decline of quality, says the narrator, is intimately connected with the risks of marketing music. I’ll let you listen to that part on your own, which starts at 13:33.

The conclusion:

“Music as an art form is dying; it’s being replaced by music which is a disposable product designed to sell but not to inspire. So we shouldn’t be so complacent in allowing systematic, cold, factory-produced music to dominate—or else the beautiful, soulful, and truly real music that we’ve all at some point loved, and has been there at our darkest times and our happiest times, could soon be a distant memory, never to be repeated.”

Amen, brother! I’m not sure who the video maker is, but I like the way he thinks.