Does Today's Music All Sound The Same?

What's wrong Simon? Is this music too interesting?

Recently, whilst out shopping, my young son asked "why is all the music in these shops exactly the same?" He had a point. Every neon-illuminated consumer-hovel of fashion we visited was pumping out the same insidious four-to-the-floor musical effluent. There was no variation in rhythm, tempo, timbre or anything else. Absolute tedium.

You've heard it said over and over again: "all today's music sounds the same!" It's something that your parents probably say about the music you listen to. Or you say about the music other people listen to. It was probably also something your grandparents said about the music your parents were into. But who is right? Are any of them right? Does today's music really all sound the same? Or is it just generational crankiness?

If you're on the ball, you'll already know that the music industry doesn't have your best interests at heart when deciding which music to allow you to listen to. Unfortunately, they are cynically aware that the emotional centers of the human brain respond better to familiarity, even when unfamiliarity better suits your personal tastes. So, they analyze what sells and what doesn't, predict which tracks will make them and their shareholders a tidy sum of cash, and spoon-feed the public accordingly. Then they 'incentivize' (i.e. pay) people to make sure the media drums the track into your head, time and time again, until it becomes 'popular'. But a track isn't played everywhere because it's popular; it's popular because it's played everywhere. It's a well-studied psychological process called the mere exposure effect. It's a form of brainwashing.

So, it's clear that the music industry has a vested interest in breeding familiarity. As competition increases and revenues fall due to a shift towards streaming and away from digital download, the business model becomes less and less speculative. This is why the (non-independent, i.e. major label) music industry no longer supports artistry, experimentation and minor genre music. It's not about the creativity, it's only about the money.

Having established a motive, can we also establish any evidence? Does today's music actually all sound the same? Or, are we just out-of-touch crusties? Well, a person's reaction to music is a personal thing, even if they are preconditioned by the music industry itself. Their judgment depends on their environment, their upbringing, the music they were exposed to throughout their lives, even their socio-economic and political background. We can't generalize it with a set of parameters which 'define' how music sounds to the human ear. It's just not that simple.

But we can analyze popular music itself and see, on average, what the major characteristics are. We can limit ourselves to those characteristics which are universal to all popular music; tempo, time signature, key signature, length and (for recorded music) loudness. We can then ask whether these change with time? Is there a period where music was simpler? Faster? Louder? It might only give us a subjective answer, but it might be interesting.

The Billboard experiment was just such an analysis of the basic characteristics of all songs that have been ranked on the Billboard Hot 100 at some point in time since the 1940s. It reveals some interesting facts about popular music. The average popular music track (during the current decade) is 4:26 long, in the key of C Major, with a time signature of 4/4 and has 122.33 beats per minute. If you're a musician you'll probably agree that these characteristics couldn't be any more standard. That's the first nail in the coffin of creativity, right there!

The Billboard results also reveal that the length of popular music tracks has been increasing steadily since the 1940s and their loudness has increased decade on decade too. This last point isn't a surprise, but it's also another worrying aspect of the music industry destroying creativity and fidelity known as the loudness war. The results also show that the average song tempo has hovered around 120 beats per minute for the last six decades. There is some evidence that this tempo is the one which the human brain finds most natural or is the human's 'spontaneous tempo of locomotion'. Jog up and down and you'll be doing it at 120 beats per minute! Finally, the Billboard results show that artist familiarity is now more important than ever before in making a track successful and that this factor jumped significantly at the start of the new millennium. Again, this is no surprise. As digital download and then streaming took off around this time the music industry underwent a paradigm shift too. Genre music declined and investment in the 'safe-bet' ensued. Now that the music industry is more about the 'industry' than the 'music', it makes sense that resources are pumped into established products.

The Billboard analysis of course doesn't take into account the other things which make music distinctive; and those things are probably more important for a definition of whether two tracks are similar. Here we are talking about (among other things) song structure, arrangement, instrumentation, rhythm, timbre and production. We can't quantify these nor easily come up with a process to judge 'sameness' based on them. But a recent study did manage to partly quantify the 'variety', 'uniformity' and 'complexity' of half-a-million popular music albums and compared these to popularity measured by sales.

The study concluded that all musical genres become more homogeneous with time. As genres become more popular, they become less complex. The reverse is also true. Musical genres which have increased in complexity over time such as alternative rock, experimental and hip-hop music have seen a corresponding fall in popularity. Musical genres which have retained a level of complexity over time, such as 'folk', are the least popular. But the overriding conclusion is that music of any genre starts to become generic and similar sounding given enough time. So, everything eventually condenses to the least common denominator. The simplest beat, the obvious tempo, the easiest key signature, the standard time signature. Uniformity and dullness, in other words. That's why those cathedrals of consumerism were all pumping out the same monotonous garbage.

So, does today's music all sound the same? It's a bit more complicated than this, but in a word, yes. At least for the most 'popular' genres.

Of course, there's two ways of interpreting this fact. First, we can suggest that humans are more comfortable with familiarity and uniformity and this naturally makes generic music more popular and successful. Or we can suggest that the manipulative music industry itself, once it recognizes the financial potential of a style or genre, regurgitates it, promotes it and capitalizes on it, thus forcing it into predictability and mediocrity. I know which argument I'd favor.

For those of us who enjoy listening to music, and even making it, the greatest dividend lies in the unexpected, the original and innovative. Although it will always remain a fringe, it's worth cannot be measured in dollars or downloads.