This article originally appeared on the Daily Caller News Foundation and was republished with permission.
Guest post by Natalie Sandoval
No, it’s not just nostalgia. Music really is getting dumber.
Or lazier, at least. Musician and author Chris Dalla Riva tracked the percent of Billboard number one hits with a key change between 1960 and 2025.
You’ll note that even at their peak in the 1970s, songs with key changes still made up a minority of hits. Digestibility is king when it comes to mass consumption.
There is a precipitous decline in hit songs with key changes around the 2000s, with apparently zero between 2010-2015. Probably we can credit the lessening popularity of rock music, and the increasing popularity of rap music, for this trend. Hip-hop fell out of Billboard’s Top 40 — for the first time in decades — in October.
A key change is far from the only measure of musical complexity, and certainly can’t make up for a bad song. But modern pop certainly isn’t redeemed by overwhelming lyrical beauty. Sabrina Carpenter’s “Espresso” secured the seventh slot on Billboard’s 2024 Year-End Hot 100 chart with insights like: “Move it up, down, left, right, oh / Switch it up like Nintendo / Say you can’t sleep, baby, I know / That’s that me espresso”
I’ll repeat: That’s that me, espresso. What does this mean? Who knows? Who cares? (Another Carpenter hit, “Please Please Please,” does feature a key change, which you can take as evidence that bad songs sometimes switch keys.)
We also can’t defend the complexity of pop music on the grounds that the most popular musicians are doing interesting things with time signatures. The percentage of Billboard Hot 100 Number One Hits that are completely in 4/4 time is nearly 100, and has been for quite some time, according to Dalla Riva.
Then you have TikTok, which incentivizes musicians to create repetitive songs with widely relatable lyrics, with a chorus shoved as close to the beginning as possible.
I see no reason why the race to the bottom shouldn’t continue.
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I'm a boomer and a musician and I can tell you first hand that much of the reason for the massive decline in the quality of music is because of the companies that run it. Back in the day we wrote our own songs and said what we liked and we came up with things that were unheard of prior to our era, but over time the "industry" began to control things and tell artists what they could and couldn't do, or else.. and repetitiveness was part of their formula. which is why the chorus or refrain is up front and/or repeated endlessly. If the Beatles or the Moody Blues or the original Carpenters (In my book Karen was one of the most incredible singers who has ever lived) and dozens of other fabulous groups had been stifled we never would've been able to created what we did, nor would we have become who we did frankly because music has a profound impact on shaping people's lives. But here we are.. another mess that big business has created in the name of profit, and who cares if the quality of life suffers. I say no thank you, I'd rather sit on my porch and play oldies on my acoustic or write my own stuff, (which usually happens spontaneously and is to my mind far better than anything I hear today) or crank up the stereo to nine and rock out with some oldies for a while. Music should be joyful, creative and fun, and if it dosn't change and return to what we had and what existed before we came along, as you said there's no reason to think the race to the bottom won't continue.
The vapid slop that comprises so much Pop music today could easily have been created by AI. The transition to AI-created music will be so seamless as to be unnoticeable to its consumers.