The age of average (encore) — Alex Murrell
www.alexmurrell.co.uk
The shift to music streaming has led to songs getting shorter, music getting less melodically diverse and lyrics getting more repetitive. Or to put it another way, just as our visual culture has become more homogeneous, so too has the music that accompanies it. Let’s run through these arguments one
  • techingtenor
    1·
    8 months ago

    Ngl this article hit a lot of sore spots for me. I feel that it is kind of silly to claim that all music is trending in this direction when the article only considers the top 100. Additionally repeated lyrics and a song being repetitive are not the same thing. Using lyrics as the sole metric completely ignores the timbre, rhythm, dynamic, and expression of each repetition. Also where does instrumental music fall into this? Surely its the most repetitive because there’s no words at all right!? Same problem with the part about melodic diversity where it only looks at the macro structure of a song rather than that in addition to the content in the actual melodies of the music.

    The biggest issue though is that the whole conclusion of the article breaks down if you look below the absolute surface level. Modern music has become so spread and diverse that the only expectation left to be subverted is the expectation of subversion itself. The top 100 has trended in a way that indicates commodifcation as the music industry tries to squeeze out pennies, but because of that the target demographic of popular music has been reduced to young people that haven’t had a musical awakening yet, or people who dont actually really like music as more than set dressing. So of course everything is being homogenized, their target audience has become more narrow and they have more data than ever in how to target their slice. Anyone who seeks novelty jumped ship years ago and is now listening to some niche genre musician who makes exactly the brand of music they want or is drinking deep of the craziness that modern music can hold.

    I think people still expect the top 100 to represent the most innovative or best songs at any given time, but anyone who understands music knows that the top 100 is where new ideas in music become old by way of being made commercially viable. Because of this popular music actually experiences a lot of flux over time but more on a macro level than a micro one. While songs might sound similar to each other while on the chart together, how different do they sound to their contemporaries from 5-10 years ago? IMO pretty different.

    Also I would love it if tech bros would stop trying to boil the content of art into data points with algorithms. I have a bachelors in math so I love me a good algorithm, but the cumulative effect of a piece of art often creates something greater than the individual parts. Isolating individual parts of a song and comparing that to the isolated parts of other songs only serves to further commodify music and incentivize the very behavior this article seems to be against. Not everything can meaningfully be turned into data to extrapolate trends from, especially when you need to set the kind of arbitrary restrictions that are necessary to try and apply math to analyze the content of music.

    The most interesting part of this article is the paragraph on ticket sales. But this also suffers from the fact that big artists perform more often and at bigger and more expensive venues, so of course they sell more tickets. I would expand on this personally. If i wanted a truer mapping of the homogeneity of music, I would analyze the diversity of genres represented at performing venues over time. I suspect that at dedicated music venues and festivals, the genres being performed have diversified over time as the internet has allowed niche genres to gain enough traction that venues will actually open their doors to them. Anecdotally I have been to an ambient show, a middle eastern chamber jazz show, a punk show, an rnb show, and a jazz mixed with drum and bass clown show in the last six months. All of them were packed and all of them sounded wildly different.

    This article almost has a point to it, but fails to actually justify the point to people who have a clue about modern music. It also makes no attempt to explore the opposite position to its own point and plainly assumes its hypothesis is true. As it is this article reads as nothing more than another drop of fuel in the narrative that our culture is homogenizing and degenerating rather than being reified by the internet allowing niches to thrive in ways that aren’t visible to surface level analysis.