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.
This amuses me. People like you were saying the same thing about disco, then the synth pop of the 1980s, and on and on and on, especially about the lyrics. Seriously, you want to go there? I can list dozens of songs from the 1970s, for instance, with lyrics every bit as vapid as those Sabrina Carpenter lyrics. Vapid lyrics are part of pop music. It's also highly debatable if a key change necessarily equates to musical complexity. Truly stupid stuff, just old people complaining about the music popular among the youth, as old people have done going back centuries.
It wasn't just the technology that brought us here. See the great 1994 book by Martha Bayles, Hole in Our Soul. Or see some of the key posts in my NRO essay series (in the teens), Carl's Rock Songbook. Carl Eric Scott
Strong data-driven take on musical simplification. The TikTok incentive structure really nails it: front-loading choruses and creating repetitve hooks optimizes for virality but kills compositional depth. The zero key changes between 2010-2015 surprised me though, that's a longer drought than I would've guessed. Watched this happen in real-time working with indie musicians who slowly started sturcturing songs around 15-second clips instead of full listens.
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.
This is about Billboard/Pop music so duh lol
(Aside: Data much appreciated tho)
This amuses me. People like you were saying the same thing about disco, then the synth pop of the 1980s, and on and on and on, especially about the lyrics. Seriously, you want to go there? I can list dozens of songs from the 1970s, for instance, with lyrics every bit as vapid as those Sabrina Carpenter lyrics. Vapid lyrics are part of pop music. It's also highly debatable if a key change necessarily equates to musical complexity. Truly stupid stuff, just old people complaining about the music popular among the youth, as old people have done going back centuries.
It wasn't just the technology that brought us here. See the great 1994 book by Martha Bayles, Hole in Our Soul. Or see some of the key posts in my NRO essay series (in the teens), Carl's Rock Songbook. Carl Eric Scott
Strong data-driven take on musical simplification. The TikTok incentive structure really nails it: front-loading choruses and creating repetitve hooks optimizes for virality but kills compositional depth. The zero key changes between 2010-2015 surprised me though, that's a longer drought than I would've guessed. Watched this happen in real-time working with indie musicians who slowly started sturcturing songs around 15-second clips instead of full listens.