New Study Says Pop Music Is Getting Louder And Dumber

[Aero]

As if you needed actual evidence (my ears already figured this out a long time ago), a study from Spain back in July says that music has become loud, predictable, and simpler than music from the past. The article talks about both how song structure has changed along with getting into the Loudness Wars debate. Some pretty interesting stuff.

Article
Pop music is getting louder and dumber, says one study: Here

Complex breakdown of the study
Measuring the Evolution of Contemporary Western Popular Music : Scientific Reports : Nature Publishing Group

 

[Reddy4u2]

They really still call it music?

 

[AboutAGirl]

Bit of an irrelevant tidbit for us, rock music has never relied on complex orchestrations. That's never been what made rock music good to begin with. If that was a consequential issue for any of us here, we'd have never started listening to rock music from the start. Instead we'd listen solely to classical, jazz, et cetera.

As far as the loudness wars go... I like loud music. Hasn't that been a tenet of rock for fifty years? No surprise that the attributes of rock music have spread to a larger percentage of the "popular music" umbrella from 1955 to 2010... hey, that's right around the time rock music took over the world! Coincidence? Of course not.

What this study shows is that rock music has been culturally influential.

 

[Riff Raff]

Its one thing to like loud music, I do too for the most part but loudness war there is no excuse for. With technology the way it is there is no excuse for that sort of stuff up with the mixing.

 

[Vehicle]

Your tax dollars, hard at work.

 

[CP/M User]

Is this a good time to mention how bad Pop Music has become because of the amount of Pop music which features Falsetto lyrics!

For crying out loud it's 2012 (perhaps 13 by the time I finish writing this), the 1990s finished over a decade now and the mother of all Falsetto songs is some 20 years old! 8o

I know I lie cause Del Shannon was doing it back in the 60s and I guess it irritated those, but then there was a break for a short while until Elton John arrived on the scene and did some in his music.

 

[Taboo]

Its one thing to like loud music, I do too for the most part but loudness war there is no excuse for. With technology the way it is there is no excuse for that sort of stuff up with the mixing.

Well said!

 

[Aktivator]

Yeah but is that true of non pop music?
I doubt it and would add music is more diverse today than ever before.

As far as dumber can we blame the ramones

 

[METALPRIEST]

The Ramones are great

 

[Khor1255]

Popular music seems to be a little better these days than what it was when rap, boy bands and 'diva's' dominated the scene. I do; however, agree that the long term trend points to an incredible amount of dumbing down and deux ex machina in pop and this doen't seem to have any end in sight. It's one thing to use technology to provide interesting new sounds but quite another to supplement someone's poor musicianship with gadgets. I wish that was the worst part. I think the actual decline rests in the fact that many if not most pop artists today don't have a strong foundation in any other kind of music than modern pop. This means that no possible element of something like jazz, classical or even honest to goodness blues has a chance of emerging in their stuff because a lot of today's artists don't and maybe have never listened to this stuff.
Music does not do well in a vacuum and only fares slightly better in a one dimensional setting like we see in today's pop. It didn't even take the Red Star or Temples of Syrinx to exterminate great music. Just laziness and corporate manipulation ala MTV and it's ilk.