Is Modern Pop Music Bad?
Pop music being the most popular genre of all automatically makes it the most talk about genre. Naturally this leads to hundreds of opinions about this style of music. Opinions which often fall on the opposite sides of the spectrum.
Some say pop is amazing, and modern popular music is the pinnacle of cultural evolution. Others laugh at them and say the modern pop is the worst thing to even happen to music. So what is it? Is contemporary music really bad? If it isn’t, then why would so many people continue bringing this arguments?
It’s unfair to say that the whole genre of modern pop music is bad. It’s too diverse and has too many sub-genres to label it all together. But the quality and the variety of the most popular hits has been indeed decreasing lately.
And this drop of variance and standard in pop music happens for many reasons. Some are easy to notice and others are kinda hidden. So while it’s definitely unjustifiable to generalize the entire genre, I can actually point out the things that support the argument of modern pop getting worse.
How Pop Music Changed Over The Years
It doesn’t take a PhD to see how pop music has changed over the decades. If you take a popular hit from 60s or 70s and compare it to modern tracks you will be amazed. The difference is undeniable.
But what’s interesting is that if you increase the sample and listen to a larger number of hits from previous eras and compare them to a large number of modern pop songs, you will start noticing some patterns.
That was the idea behind the study published in Nature in 2012 by Joan Serrà and his colleagues. They analyzed over 464,000 popular music recordings from 1955 to 2010. The researchers focused on pitch, timbre (the unique quality or color of a sound), and loudness. The results revealed these 3 trends:
- Pitch Diversity Decrease: Modern songs tend to have a narrower range of pitches, making melodies simpler.
- Timbral Decrease: The trend shows that the variety of sounds and instruments has narrowed. As a result, we have a sort of similar sound across various tracks from different artists.
- Volume Increase: Modern tracks are louder. This trend is also known as the “loudness war”. It aims to grab listeners’ attention as quickly as possible and keep that attention by repeating hooks more often.
In other words, the research noticed a shift towards simpler melodies, a blend of similar sounds, and the music becoming simply louder.
Simpler doesn’t mean worse though. But if the vast majority of popular songs are simple, it does decrease our options. Besides, are you sure all these songs all gonna be of the same high quality?
And since it’s always fun to compare songs, I’ll also throw a couple. One by Elton John and the other by extremely popular Justin Bieber. The songs are 50 years apart. It’s just a fun comparison, but you make your own conclusions.
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Prevalence of Auto-tune
Auto-tune started as a tool to fix small mistakes in singing. Pretty harmless right? But now it’s a huge part of pop music. It allows singers to sound perfect and can even make their voice have a special effect. And when I say singers I mean literally anyone. You don’t have to be a great vocalist, with autotune you can sound amazing and do no wrong.
It’s made some people argue about how “real” today’s music is. While songs are super smooth and cool to listen to, you better don’t know how they sound live and without the tech behind them. You know, just to not be disappointed.
Same Authors Behind Multiple Artists
Did you know that the same small group of songwriters creates hits for many of our top artists? These lyricists literally help to shape the sound of modern pop music. For example, Max Martin and Dr. Luke have created chart winners for stars like Katy Perry, Taylor Swift, Avril Lavigne, Backstreet Boys and Britney Spears.
This in no shape or form diminished their writing ability, but it does mean that much of today’s pop has a familiar vibe and maybe even sound.
Industry Focusing on Profits
The music world often goes for what already works to make sure they make money. Studios prefer to play it safe by sticking to musical patterns and elements that have previously succeeded. Why fix what ain’t broken, right?
It is understandable. We have such an easy access to music that our attention span is much shorter than ever before. So if the song doesn’t catch our attention right away we most likely skip it and move on to the next one.
But this also means studious don’t look for something new as much as they used to. It’s just too risky. And so they produce a lot of songs and artists that end up sounding the same. They also spend more on promoting stars we already know instead of finding new ones. If you ever find yourself hearing the same song on the radio, or in the mall, or in a movie, or commercial, that’s the power of promotion big studios have.
Digital Streaming Platforms
What’s one of the most used way to search for new music? The answer is – streaming platforms and apps. While being very convenient and easy to use, they do come with a trade off. You are reliant on the algorithm that is out of your control.
There is an argument that these platforms often promote tracks based on algorithms that favor repetitive and easily digestible music. This means we end up with a cycle where only certain types of music get widespread attention. We keep hearing similar tunes over and over again. Making it hard for different or deeper music to get noticed. Is this true? Hard to tell as algorithms are usefully kept behind closed doors.
Conclusion
Looking at how pop music has changed it’s kinda clear why so many consider it inferior to the genre of the previous eras. It’s more about catchy tunes with lots of Auto-tune and less lyrical diversity nowadays. These trends make songs sound alike. Pop hits are still super catchy, just not so different from each other.
Because the genre has so many branches and sub-styles you can always find plenty of talented musicians and artists to you liking. You’ll probably need to dig a bit deeper and further away from the most played hits though.
Of course this is mostly my opinion, you listen to what you like. If it makes you happy, that perfect. But maybe it’s worth checking something out of the usual playlist from time to time.
