The Devolution of Pop Music or Why Pop Music SUCK
Guess what the single most influential music genre has been since 1960?Video from: youtube.com
After 2:50 another topic is addressed in the video.
The tile of this video, from SciShow, is called "Evolution & The Science of Popular Music," The appropriate title should be "The Devolution of Pop Music" ...or perhaps "The Degeneracy of Pop music."
At the root of the degeneracy of popular music is what is know as Lack-of-chord-structure or chord-less music structure. In other words the music is being dumbed down, and that has consequences since there is a correlation between IQ and what music you listen to. The science suggests that music can contribute in making you DUMB and pop music is the big culprit, not Beethoven.
Music Is getting more and more simplistic & less diverse. It all sounds the same these days. There are scientists Measuring the Evolution of Contemporary Western Popular Music.
A project called the Million Song Dataset initially launched in 2011 by Columbia University set out to aggregate metadata for a million contemporary popular music tracks and use it to discover trends and other useful information. By using “timbre” to distinguish and grade songs, the study found that on a scientific level, music is becoming less diverse. (Wait a minute, isn't globalism and corporate monculture about "diversity"?)
This evidences a growing homogenization of the global timbral palette. It also points towards a progressive tendency to follow more fashionable, mainstream sonorities…These rather low rank correlations would act as an attenuator of the sensation that contemporary popular music is becoming more homogeneous, timbrically speaking. The fact that frequent timbres of a certain time period become infrequent after some years could mask global homogeneity trends to listeners.
More: The Science Behind Why Pop Music Sucks.
The other problem with the premise presented in the video is the assumption about correlation between popularity and what ends up at the top music charts. Just because something ends up on the charts, doesn't meant that people actually love that music and that this is what people want. As we know, the marketing of music has been steered inorganically for a long time. A few major record labels control the music industry the same way a few media companies control the news. A good example is Payola but it's not restricted to these activities. The music industry is highly managed and there are interests pushing certain music genre both for sales purposes, but also for political purposes. Entertainment (TV shows and films) is a tool to manage opinions and morals of people and music is used the same way.
Major labels put their latest product on the top of the charts and then people buy it, in the same way most people buy what they see on the evening news. So what would pop music sound like the if there wasn't manipulation by record labels and propaganda marketing? What would the charts look like?
