Top Hits and Pop Optimism
Research suggests top hits are becoming more homogeneous. With the industry stabilizing around streaming, could there be hope?
A recent Pudding article suggests that top pop hits are becoming more homogeneous. Using the 8 musical dimensions developed by Spotify’s Echonest, the researchers developed a scale that measures the rising trend in musical similarity among the top hit songs. The evidence from the past few decades are hard to dispute: Most of the recent hits have been similar sounding and dominated by the same few writers. This symptom is well documented in research elsewhere, but it does little in telling us the big WHY question.
Why are top hits becoming more homogenous?
My general understanding is that from the 2000s till quite recently, the music industry suffered phenomenal losses due to digital piracy. As the article points out, hit-making is participated by powerful industry players through factory-like methods, and I suggest that the financial ruin from the last decade may have resulted in the concentration of valuable A&R resources further in the hands of a few. This, of course, extremely difficult to verify with actual data because high level A&R decisions of major labels operate in relative secrecy. Regardless, to minimize losses in a capital-intensive industry that has even higher risk and unequal returns now, it makes sense for firms to increasingly hedge their resources on reliable hit-makers with a strong track record. At the end of the day, music is business too. To understand the aesthetics of pop, one has to consider the institutional and industrial configurations behind its production (input), and not just the musical output.
The article also points out he incredible spike in the number songwriters per hit song, from an average of 2.9 writers in 2000 to 5.1 writers in 2017? It is argued that the result of having more writers on a song is that the individual characteristic of each songwriter is “watered down” and the song becomes homogenous. While this is a difficult claim to verify as well, I suggest that the increase in number of writers can also be strongly attributed to the digitization of music production through DAWs, samplers, and online collaboration. These new methods and techniques can easily break a song down into smaller chunks to be worked on by different people (or to assemble smaller chunks into one complete song).
Will top hits continue to be homogeneous?
I have good reason to argue that as the industry begins to stabilize around digital streaming platforms, music will become a bit more diverse again, but in small, incremental ways. The new infrastructure surrounding digital music will probably make it easier for large firms to raise capital and invest in more interesting-sounding music that is less safe. In some respects, this is the opposite of what the article suggests about the future. If we look only at past data from the last 3 decades, the trend of homogenization seems clear. However, what lies beneath these musical trends are also technological changes that have radically altered the ways which pop music is made and consumed.
If we are to expand the data set to consider the Top 50 hits instead of Top 10, I have a hunch that we’ll be able to see how diverse music has become. There has already been some signs of this in 2017 with more rap and hip-hop songs showing up in charts than ever before. Using the same Echo Nest song dimensions, we might end up being surprised at how diverse — both in terms of genre, ethnicity, and origin — pop songs have become.
