The Musical Diversity of Pop Songs
pudding.cool
The Musical Diversity of Pop Songs
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Re: The Musical Diversity of Pop Songs
#2I'm always gonna be fascinated by any analyses like this - but can I just say how incredible tired I am of everything containing "music" combined with "this generation".
Everyone, everyone in the industrialised world and well beyond can purchase a device smaller than their palm and listen to literal billions of songs. Noone is stopping you from only listening to "Tibet monk techno punk instrumental remixes" for the rest of your life - without buying anything you don't already have. So can this mother of all substanceless debates please just die...?
Re: The Musical Diversity of Pop Songs
#3tl;dr: by a few metrics (musical valence, producers of the top-rated songs), hit songs are becoming less diverse.
Re: The Musical Diversity of Pop Songs
#4I'm always gonna be fascinated by any analyses like this - but can I just say how incredible tired I am of everything containing "music" combined with "this generation". Everyone, everyone in the industrialised world and well beyond can purchase a device smaller than their palm and listen to literal billions of songs. Noone is stopping you from only listening to "Tibet monk techno punk instrumental remixes" for the r…
Yeah, and theoretically the onslaught of trash on the Steam store doesn't keep me from finding and buying what I like, but in practice it's... such a disgusting slog.
Re: The Musical Diversity of Pop Songs
#5It seems really hard to justify treating those 8 characteristics as independent, equally important, and all-encompassing variables. The page's attempt to do so amounts to saying it's a peer-reviewed method employed by other music researchers.
But the paper they linked made an effort to address that concern, and weights the features; it includes more echo-nest features, like tempo, mode and time-signature; it uses a different metric; and while it's not the overall conclusion of the paper, it includes a similar measure of similarity over time, but pegs 2015 as the most diverse year since 1963 in general, and 2014 as the most diverse year ever for #1s.
Re: The Musical Diversity of Pop Songs
#6"Havana" had 11 writers?! God help us all.
Re: The Musical Diversity of Pop Songs
#7I'm always gonna be fascinated by any analyses like this - but can I just say how incredible tired I am of everything containing "music" combined with "this generation". Everyone, everyone in the industrialised world and well beyond can purchase a device smaller than their palm and listen to literal billions of songs. Noone is stopping you from only listening to "Tibet monk techno punk instrumental remixes" for the r…
What you say is true, although it misses a larger point: that even though we CAN listen to unlimited variety, since the labels control the distribution systems (radio plays, featured music, music sold in big box stores, publicity etc etc) the music they produce becomes inevitably popular. Turn on the radio, walk into Walmart, turn on the tv, watch a movie and you’re not going to hear independent Tibetan chants. You’re going to hear what they want you to hear because they have the reach to make sure everyone listens to it. Combine that with their PR teams and you end up with a situation in which the labels have a strangle hold on what we collectively listen to. Sure it’s possible to branch out and “ignore” that stuff, but the vast majority of people don’t. They listen to and like what their friends like, which is in turn what they’ve been told is “good”.
Re: The Musical Diversity of Pop Songs
#8I'm always gonna be fascinated by any analyses like this - but can I just say how incredible tired I am of everything containing "music" combined with "this generation". Everyone, everyone in the industrialised world and well beyond can purchase a device smaller than their palm and listen to literal billions of songs. Noone is stopping you from only listening to "Tibet monk techno punk instrumental remixes" for the r…
I still live in a World where mass-media is a thing because I watch recently made TV shows, occasionally recent films (aka movies), and listen to mainstream music on the radio.
I wonder how it's going to play out because generations up to now have shared a relatively small cadre of media offerings in semi-rigid genres; that shared experience has in some ways - at least in the 20th Century - underpinned societal culture.
Shared interest in YouTube stars, amongst many other things, still keeps the thread of share cultural experience in society; but what direction are we going?
If I have a billion different media offerings I can consume the chances of meeting people and having a shared cultural experience we can link over get smaller. Whither nostalgia?
TL;DR, Nostalgia won't be what it used to be.
Re: The Musical Diversity of Pop Songs
#9I'm always gonna be fascinated by any analyses like this - but can I just say how incredible tired I am of everything containing "music" combined with "this generation". Everyone, everyone in the industrialised world and well beyond can purchase a device smaller than their palm and listen to literal billions of songs. Noone is stopping you from only listening to "Tibet monk techno punk instrumental remixes" for the r…
Exactly. People complain about how music in the 70's or 80's or whatever was so much better than modern music.
That music never went away. It's not like you're no longer allowed to listen to Pink Floyd. Music doesn't have an expiry date.
Re: The Musical Diversity of Pop Songs
#10Cool... but clearly overfit to match Billboard and Music Genome databases.