Is Pop Music Now Worse Than Pop Music Then?

Have you turned on a radio recently? If so, I hope you turned it right off. Listening to the pop music that tops today’s charts is like eating baby food that’s been half-digested and then regurgitated into your mouth. It’s mushy, bland, and no matter what it ought to be, it’s all the same. Oh, how my soul has wept over dull, auto-tuned records on 102.5 FM. I hope I don’t sound pretentious. But I am, and so is everybody else. People who consider their music tastes finely tuned (and everyone does) love to bash mainstream records. This has been common practice for as long as music has been something people can buy, and thus take ownership over. But as a song ages and fades from the spotlight, it becomes fair game. So the stuff that today’s throwback-lovers dig is the same stuff yesterday’s music connoisseurs disdained, and so on and so forth. It’s cyclical. The question that arises is whether the junk that plays on radios in 2016 is actually worse than its predecessors, or whether pop music is always scorned while it’s new, and now is just the current batch’s turn. For two reasons, I argue the former.

Musical artists today face a crisis. With the prominence of streaming services, album and song sales have plummeted. In order to profit from their work, musicians have begun to treat their tracks as ad space. Brands pay artists for in-song mentions – audible product placement. The corporate/musical partnership works to perfection, particularly in rap music (which will be considered pop music in this post due to its popularity). Rap music is very self-promotional in nature, and rappers love to name-drop luxury brands to flaunt their wealth. You can’t skim through the Top 10 without finding a song in which a liquor or clothing brand is mentioned. While such promotions allow artists to make money without selling their music, they drag down the quality of the music itself. As The Atlantic’s Amanda Klein writes, “the entry of capitalism [into media] contradicts the possibility of art.” If songwriters are crafting verses around brand names, how can they create something profound? Every line of a good song ought to be meaningful. Adding commercial fluff into music dirties it, and discredits it as a form of expression.

            As modern methods of music-consumption corrupt lyrics, they also homogenize sound. When it comes to finding new music, people gravitate toward songs and artists similar to what they already like. That’s why Pandora is so beloved. Because of people’s preference for the comfortable, it is in record labels’ best interest to produce music in the mold of what’s popular. In our information age, it’s easier than ever to do this. When you hear a good song you don’t recognize, you can use the “Shazam” app to identify it. Shazam is a widely-used application that collects data on every search. When someone uses Shazam, they are providing information about what kind of music they like – and therefore what kind of music they’d like to hear more of. Record labels pay for this data, so they can profile the common listener and ensure they sign artists whose music is aligned with the preferences of the masses. They go as far as to analyze the chord progressions of the most-Shazam’d songs, to emulate popular music in even the subtlest of ways. This is why we have Desiigner as well as Future. This is why every song on the radio sounds the same. They’re supposed to.

            The fault with today’s pop music has to do with the times we live in more than the artists themselves. They have no choice other than to advertise in-song, because nobody purchases their albums. And they don’t try to sound the same, either. It’s just by an information-powered form of natural selection that the ones who happen to be imitators get signed rather than originals, and in turn, the signed artists are those whose music we hear. The times, they are a-changing, and pop music is a casualty of technological proliferation. But we don’t listen to that mainstream crap anyway, right? Nobody does.