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popular music
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Is popular music getting worse?: Structural analysis
The room In 2023, ten writers had co-written the majority of Billboard Top 40 hits across pop and country. They worked in rooms — literally rooms on Music Row — where two to six writers assemble a track in a single session, each contributing a hook or cadence optimized for a... Is popular music getting worse?: Declinists
The spectrograms don’t lie Nine chord changes. Fourteen timbres. 18 dB of dynamic range. "Superstition," 1972. Morgan Wallen, "Last Night," 2023. Number one, sixteen weeks. Three chords. 6 dB. The vocal compressed to a 3 dB window. Oh come on. This is not taste.... 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...