Is popular music getting worse?: The Story

Three chords, sixteen weeks

Morgan Wallen’s Last Night was the number-one song in America for sixteen weeks in 2023. Three chords. No key change. Dynamic range of 6 dB — the loudest moment and the quietest are about as far apart as two people talking at slightly different volumes.

Stevie Wonder’s Superstition, 1972. Nine chord types. Fourteen timbres. A clavinet riff shifting micro-timing on every pass, live Moog bass, horn stabs, ghost-noted drums, vocals moving between chest voice and falsetto across five and a half minutes. Dynamic range: 18 dB.

Both were the most popular song in the country. The distance between them is measurable.

The alien DJ

Researchers at the Spanish National Research Council analyzed 500,000 recordings: timbral diversity, pitch transitions, and dynamic range all narrowed from 1955 to 2010. The loudness war compressed average album dynamic range from 12 dB to 5. Now imagine the Spotify recommendation engine as an alien DJ that studied every song in history and concluded the optimal experience is a three-minute track with a hook in the first five seconds, because that keeps the organism from pressing skip.

The alien is not wrong about engagement. It is profoundly wrong about music.

A producer in Lagos who discovered Mdou Moctar through an algorithm finds the decline narrative provincial — the charts got blander because the charts stopped being where music lives. The discovery optimists point out that 57,000 artists crossed 100,000 streams in 2023.

But someone who has worked in Nashville’s co-writing rooms can explain exactly why the charts sound the way they sound, and talent has nothing to do with it. Spotify counts a stream after thirty seconds. That single design decision restructured the opening of every song competing for playlist placement. Per-stream payouts average $0.003 to $0.005. A song needs 300,000 streams to earn $1,000. The structural analysts are mapping incentives — and the incentives point toward short, front-loaded, harmonically simple tracks that optimize for the algorithm’s first impression.

And the working musicians — the ones actually making the music everyone else is arguing about — are doing the math on $0.004 per stream and wondering whether making music remains a viable way to pay rent.

Vinyl surpassed CD sales in 2022, driven by listeners under thirty-five who discover through streaming and then choose to own the thing that moved them. The youngest generation is using the alien DJ to find music and then choosing deliberately to hold it in their hands. Whether that parallel culture can sustain artists — or whether it remains a boutique devotion subsidized by the streaming economics it rejects — is the question none of the camps has answered.

Perspectives:
- Declinists
- Discovery optimists
- Structural analysis
- Working musicians