Personally, I used to be able to listen to a large portion of the top 50 on Spotify without skipping too many. As of late last year, though, I've found that the top 10 are almost exclusively songs made popular on TikTok. I can't stand to listen to these songs, not because I necessarily dislike the songs (or TikTok for that matter), but because there are 15-30s sections of the song that I have heard dozens of times, posted on TikTok as a part of some new trend. As soon as I hear one of these parts, I instinctively skip, because I'm generally listening to Spotify to chill out, and hearing something that is so tightly associated with a social network really works against my "chill".
In a lot of TikTok songs, the 15-30 seconds of the song that you've heard dozens of times is the best part of the song, with the rest of the piece being rather dry and bland. "Hit or miss, I guess you never miss huh" and "I'm already Tracer" are my quintessential examples of this.
Is this the natural progression from 'albums are full of filler I just want the singles'? Now it's 'the single is full of filler I just want the chorus'?
It kind of hints that people nowadays only want the highest quality content which is ironic given the same content is used to soundtrack some of the lowest quality/most unoriginal content (e.g. 10 second clips of people doing the same dance to the same music).
> some of the lowest quality/most unoriginal content
The point of meme content (which is basically what these "same dance" videos are) is not originality; the point is taking part, belonging to the hivemind. Human beings fundamentally want to belong, not to be original.
I understand your point about taking part but what percentage of people take part vs. people who simply watch? It's not just the dance videos too. There's very little interesting content on TikTok in my opinion. It will certainly suck you in and have you watching mindlessly for hours a day but I think it's possible to do that and still be considered low quality and unoriginal.
> what percentage of people take part vs. people who simply watch?
I'd argue that the percentage has actually gone up pretty dramatically, when compared to the previous media (TV/cinema/theatre/music).
In reality, I would argue, more people than ever now make or take part in "something". Because 90% of everything is crap, though, the firehose is inevitably returning more crap than ever.
Do we need better consumption filters and better ways to emerge talent? Sure. Is this worse than before? I don't know, but it's definitely more democratic.
> It will certainly suck you in and have you watching mindlessly for hours a day
Well, the music is also the most unoriginal one, otherwise it wouldn't have enough mass appeal - so I would hesitate to call it "highest quality content"...
Songs are constructed that way nowadays; iirc Old Town Road or one of those were crafted in such a way that it's missing a hook at the end, and the hook is just over 30 seconds (or 1 minute) long, making people more likely to replay it for the hook and for the song to reach the threshold to be considered "played" on services like Spotify, artificially boosting their statistics / popularity. Can't find a source right away though, so take my claim with a grain of salt.
Back when I was in school, I really hated Billboard Top 10 for the same reason. Once I've overheard them so many times, often unpleasantly, the actual song became unlistenable, not because I dislike them.
With pop music you hear exactly the same track over and over with no variation and it gets predictable and monotonous. With classical, jazz, or live music there are many performances, so any two recordings will not sound identical. This is one reason I can't stand pop music after a few listens.
To each their own, but if i wanted to be challenged i read a book, learn something new, etc.
I think i listen to music because it has an effect of transfering emotional state/causes me to feel. Being intellectually challenging is not a good thing in that context. (Although i still want it to be unpredictable and not neccesarily safe)
Music can be whatever it wants. But music having complex melodies, varied lyrics, telling stories, and having social or political commentary has very much always been a thing. Plenty of that music still exists and is still being made, but it's not really found on modern pop stations (although older pop stations have slightly more complex work).
Just walking by a radio today bothers me. I can't deal with the ear sugar that's completely flat and features non-dynamic instrumentals from start to finish and lyrics that are all just some variation of "yeah yeah club dance club club club club party party club club love you dance dance drunk drunk club club don't love you now". And I'm not even "old" yet. I can't tell singers apart (particularly women) because they seem to be melding into some non-unique vocal style and every pop artist has the exact same instrumental backing.
Muzak has been used for decades to serve as non-distracting background noise. Simple instrumentals with no vocals or anything, used just to fill a void and assure people that they're alive and the business is probably operating. It's almost music, but not quite. Just budget ambiance. Now top 40 dance/pop hits are what play in elevators. Soulless, manufactured music, but now it's something with a manufactured persona stuck to it. Pop today has devoured muzak's market share and taken its role.
So if you listen to Bad Guy by Billie Eilish, Chun-Li by Nicki Minaj and thank u, next by Arianna Grande. You would say all of these women sound the same and have the same instrumentals?
My complaint would be less the instrumentals (it's formulaic but that doesn't make it bad) but the lyrics. Look up the lyrics to any of the songs you listed and read them. If you don't have the melody in your head they read awfully. They say nothing, make me feel nothing, and make me think of nothing. They don't resonate in any way. You could obviously look at someone like Bob Dylan as a counterpoint but even if you went to see some average local punk band you would find them singing words that say something and resonate with you. That's what I want from music. It's not right or wrong to like or dislike either of these approaches by the way. A lot of people want music to listen to in the background and that's easier to do when the lyrics are meaningless.
> They say nothing, make me feel nothing, and make me think of nothing.
That's because you're not their target market. The industry as a whole targets teenagers. It's been the same model since the '60s: turn teenagers into faithful consumers of acts (which are really just brands) and ensure they will buy for the rest of their life just to reminisce.
Ariana Grande and Billie Eilish speak to teenagers. All teenagers do is hormonal-driven love drama, so all pop music talks about is love drama. Every generation gets their teenager love drama painted in a slightly different way, to grant the illusion of differing from their parents, but that's it. Even the likes of Led Zeppelin or Bob Dylan, underneath it all, is just love drama; that generation was simply having their love drama tangled up with other stuff because of historical happenstance.
I take your point but I would argue you could remove 'me' from my statement and it would hold true. I think the pop stars mentioned make people 'feel' more through their social media and image than their music. Maybe I'm just an old man now but the lyrics to Bille Eilish's 'Bad Guy' surely can't resonate with anyone...
If you're so old it's probably time to learn that the things that resonate with other people don't necessarily resonate with you, and vice versa. And that's ok. It's cultural diversity. You may at some point "get it" and start to like Billie Eilish (I'm mostly indifferent). You may not. But believing that nobody possibly could is the mark of an incomplete theory of mind.
I can tell Nicki Minaj from them, but I can't tell Selena Gomez, Taylor Swift, or Ariana Grande apart and they've been looping on the radio for years. I can point out a specific song that I've heard before and looked up who it was, but whenever a new song pops up, I can't tell them apart. They've completely merged into the same media personality with the same music.
I was on onboard with plenty of pop music stars having a similar sound (90% of everything is crap, pop music included), but taylor swift does at least have a somewhat unique style.
To be fair, if I hear a new rock song with a lead male vocalist I'll also struggle mightily to identify them immediately. There are very few bands/singers with such unique styles that they can be told immediately apart. Same with any other genre really.
I think you need to be familiar with the songs' content in order to tell all these vocalists apart. If instead each of the top 5 male and female pop singers of today were to sing each others' songs, I challenge anyone to tell them apart.
And I don't think it's an artifact of being old. It's more about how much pop production homogenizes these voices into one "ISO Standard Voice." Back in the nineties, I couldn't tell all the various grunge singers apart without having pre-knowledge of the songs. If you had Sound Garden, Pearl Jam, Stone Temple Pilots, and Alice In Chains sing random songs, I wouldn't have been able to easily tell them apart either.
I don't think is a recent phenomenon though. Good luck distinguishing by voice alone the boy bands of the 90s, or the hair bands of the 80s, or the disco bands of the 70s, or the British invasion bands of the 60s either. And going back much further, can you really say you can distinguish the operatic and choral singers from each other either? I think it's always been the case that music has a particular sound that's in, and everyone is singing to that sound. There was no one singing in the grunge or mumble rap style a hundred years ago. It would have been unique and would've easily separated itself from the pack, but it simply wasn't even a thing that anyone was doing yet.
> lyrics that are all just some variation of "yeah yeah club dance club club club club party party club club love you dance dance drunk drunk club club don't love you now".
Maybe you just don't like dance music? "Rock around the clock" or "Twist and Shout" had the same style of lyrics - simple, repetitive, rhythmic, accentuating the music rather than telling a story.
Junk food is bad comparison, because listening to unchallenging music will not harm you at all. For that matter, the same goes with visual arts and fashion and design. There are movies and books that can actually harm you (when it teaches wrong history or facts for example, when violence is more then you can handle), but I would argue the cheap predictable popular ones are rarely those.
It is cheap argument to try to imply that unchallenging pop music somehow harms the listeners, but that argument does not have base in reality.
Being cognitively unchallenged by music or visual arts could be considered "harm". I know i do but anectada I guess.
The fact that you imply his argument is "cheap" or that you very quickly judge it as "bad comparison" with no more arguments than whatever you think could be interpreted as "his point exactly".
> Being cognitively unchallenged by music or visual arts could be considered "harm".
Is being cognitively unchallenged by something being harmed by that something in general? That is extraordinary claim that would require evidence. That is not standard we apply to other daily activities. And listening to music is not even activity, it is just something you put onto environment as you do something else.
If I go somewhere without listening to music, arguably getting even less challenging sounds into my ears, am I being harmed even more?
> I know i do but anectada I guess.
Do you have anecdote of someone being harmed by unchallenging music? Anectada require anecdote that confirms one case of it happening. I see only claim itself, but no anecdote.
> The fact that you imply his argument is "cheap" or that you very quickly judge it as "bad comparison" with no more arguments than whatever you think could be interpreted as "his point exactly".
Me thinking and saying that is comparison is bad and arguing by no harm is not proving "his point exactly". He did not wrote any arguments for why unchallenging music harms listener. He avoided need to put in such arguments by avoiding direct claim, opting for implication instead. It is common tactic when people want to appeal to emotions and instincts. It is also completely valid to answer it.
It is quite literally valid disagreement with quick judgement someone else made. Also, I did not implied his argument is cheap, I said it openly.
I think "lack of development/enrichment" might be a better term than harm. And "challenge" might not have been a great word-choice of mine, either. Depth? Craft? Some value.
For example, imagine a programmer/software engineer who never, ever, in their entire career, saw good code written by others?
Does that lack of good code (and there's lots of ways for code to be "good") harm their development as software devs?
I think to make a food comparison work, you need to set the reference point straight. Since your body (and your mind) doesn't require any music / movie / book to survive, the proper comparison is to food eaten on top of nutritional baseline - to all the extra things you eat above minimum survivable calories/nutrients.
This way, pop music can be correctly likened to McDonald's food: won't harm you at all, and it's one of the most pleasant things you can get with low effort. The "movies and books that can actually harm you" can be likened not to fast food, but to poisoned food. E.g. infected with E. coli because it wasn't prepared properly.
And another extra danger reveals itself: just like you can hurt yourself by overeating, you can hurt yourself by overconsuming entertainment.
> Since your body (and your mind) doesn't require any music / movie / book to survive ...
I respectfully disagree : ). Name a single culture that has ever existed which had no art. No storytelling, pottery, visual crafts, music, dance, etc.
It might not have been art purely as its own thing as in today's Western art, it might have been art as part of religion ritual or tradition, but everyone everywhere has art.
Would you want to live in a world with zero music, and zero decorative arts, zero visual arts, zero stories, etc? Zero designed objects, zero rugs that have any sort of color or pattern, etc?
Art is totally necessary for our survival. It's so fundamental that we don't realize most of the time it's there.
Early example of fashion? The military, to distinguish soldiers and make people feel special about killing. Also, music (drums, etc) - to coordinate folks and lift their spirits. One example of how pervasive art is.
That's why the art/technology divide breaks down and why design is so interesting, imho. As soon as any material technology starts to get sophisticated, you start to get "aesthetics" and "styles". Think Russian vs U.S. engineering styles, for one example.
Creating tools is a creative act.
Plus, look at the cave paintings. Art's been around since day one. %;-)
Also if you only eat McDonalds it does indeed harm you, FYI :). Or, like, eating really unhealthy will harm you over time. Or eating ice cream all day : ).
The typical issue with McDonald's food put on top of other food is that it makes you fat and also unhealthy in the long term. As in, it is bad because it does some harm.
Otherwise there would not no issue with McDonald's food on top of regular food.
First McDonalds wants customers to go to McDonalds so they make it taste good even if that means it is no longer healthy. (the entire food industry does this)
Second they try to get away with spending as little money on ingredients as possible which lowers the overall quality of the food.
The big question is how is cheap and low quality but addictive music harmful? It's not like people can overdose on music.
"Unchallenging" isn't quite right for the food comparison, you're correct.
For instance I don't consider The Beatles, say, or Michael Jackson or Jay-Z or Frank Sinatra or Mozart necessarily "challenging" (for some people some of those artists are), but would consider them "healthy".
Healthy food can be tasty and delicious, too ; ).
I do think if someone listens only to music without any depth (again, I'm using the Beatles - or Led Zeppelin, or Jimi Hendrix, or Taylor Swift, or Robyn or Daft Punk, or Lauryn Hill, or Billie Holiday, or Kanye West as examples of popular artists with depth), it is a lost opportunity for development of the self, and in a sense, "stunts" the growth of one's own self.
It's also just a huge loss. There's so much beautiful art that is not "challenging", and much of the "challenging" work simply requires a friendly environment and an introduction, and they yield huge rewards.
At the same time I think the emotions which a lot of art can stimulate cause fear to a lot of people, which can be cause for avoidance of them, but that's a separate (albeit related) conversation : ).
I dunno. I did start off talking about "challenging" art. But, the line is so thin!
I don't think Miles Davis' "Kind of Blue" would "challenge" many people - it's maybe the most popular jazz album, one of the best, and a beautiful piece of listening. It has lots of depth though, and his other work can be considered challenging, for sure ...
Really I guess I'm making an argument for the value of cultivation of the self through education, which includes the arts : ).
There's just so much out there: Indian classical music, Afrobeat, Latin jazz, country music, tons of electronic music from everywhere, traditional Chinese music, etc.
Not unlike programming/computer science, there's so much neat stuff that people have done in the arts that often people don't even realize exists.
Not all of us have the time and the inclination to do the deep digging, but, I think it's important to have a balance and at least an appreciation for the vastness of what exists in our lives, and that doing so enriches our selves.
I guess there are lots of types of "challenging". I suppose i was thinking of it in a technical sense - the way great classical music has really complex melodies and what not. I've always been impressed by the technical achievement of that sort of thing, but i mostly don't actually want to listen to it. The technical complexity is impressive but it doesn't aid what im trying to get out of music.
If we want to make metaphors to books - a very imperfect one might be a book written in old english or latin. It is very challenging, but its challenging (to me) for the wrong reasons. Some other people might relish that challenge, and that is great for them, but for me i want to be challenged by the story not the grammar.
Any form of art or hobby can be appreciated deeply or used for simple minded entertainment. You can enjoy everything at a surface level but going deeper requires commitment and you can't commit yourself to everything at once. Therefore saying something along the lines of "It’s your loss, IMHO." will be understood as disrespect of someones personal preferences and invites unnecessary hostility.
Agreed, not all of us go deep on all things. I am biased towards being open to new experiences and continuing to learn and develop over the course of our lives, and do think it's good for people, and important, and that includes the arts.
I think part of the beauty of film (including TV), music, and literature (those three things in particular), is just how much really good stuff is easily accessible and easily available these days. Video games, too.
The real barrier is lack of familiarity and lack of that one person to introduce / guide you, in my heavily biased and optimistic opinion : ).
It's why the kids with the older siblings often knew about all the cool music ; ).
People also like it because it's colorful and multidimensional, but not so multidimensional that you can't decipher it without focusing on it exclusively and retreating to a quiet room.
I have no trouble listening to pop music from the 80s, 90s and early 00s. I don't know if that's old age and nostalgia or if music was just better then. I think in many cases, music was just better in prior decades, pop music in particular.
I also think that's partly survivor bias. You listen to the best hits of those decades, tricking you into thinking that all music from those decades was like that. In reality, there was a lot of junk in those times too but we don't listen to it anymore. The same will happen with the 10s and the current 20s in twenty years.
With the virus, most of my exposure to foreign languages is due to YouTube these days. While the words for "heart" and "eyes" and various possessive pronouns are often among the first things I pick up on from the clips themselves, if I am curious enough to bother machine translating comments I often learn how to say "the kid's music is noise" just after "anyone listening in 2020?"
(For me, the best examples are all the 2000's videos with comments saying "remember when we had real music?")
Yeah but you know I think because we listen to less and less music on the radio and more on streaming, I think it's harder for break out hits to happen today. New music has to compete on equal footing with old music that is more accessible than it has ever been and also has to compete with podcasts and other forms of audio entertainment that are available in much higher quantities today.
You mean with their music and image from the 1960's? Of course not. Just like they wouldn't have dominated the charts in the 60's if the music and image had been in the style that had been fashionable and edgy in 1910.
Some of us find that a feature, not a bug. I don't want to hear something "new" and "different" each time, with each performance being different. I want the same song that I have listened to before. Songs have emotions and memories attached to them, and you will never get that from something unique each time unless it's truly catchy/pleasurable on the first listen, which is practically rare.
Different observation, but I usually just listen to my playlist. I listened to Discover or whatever Spotify puts together and it was good for a bit, but then seemed to devolve into songs that YouTube personalities had made and posted on Spotify. It was really odd and sounded like it was made for edgy teens.
Wonder how tiktok is changing the way pop music is produced nowadays. I'm sure music producers are focusing more on that unique 10-15s catchy tune that is easy to market. This is definitely not good for the future of music.
This has been going on for years in commercials. Have you ever heard the full version of a song used in a Target or one of those drug commercials? Outside of the hook it's basically just a beat from a Casio keyboard.
