Graphic by Vivian McPherson ’23
BY TISHYA KHANNA ’23
With songs that sound more or less the same, popular music charts are promoting a consistent model of a hit song each year.
Research has shown that the musical diversity of the top 40 charts has decreased exponentially over the past two decades. A study from the New York Times measured 5 features of what makes a song a hit — loudness, danceability, acousticness, valence and energy — and compared to charts from 1970 to 2015. The data shows that, as the years progressed, the top singles started to form a surprisingly consistent footprint. From the song lengths to the choice of key, the music sounds the same. The music industry cannot advance until artists move away from this formula and more attention is given to innovative sounds.
Forty percent of the top singles were produced by the same 10 producers from 2010-2014. The Swedish producer Max Martin produced 32 of the top singles of 2010-2017 alone. Other big producers include Dr. Luke and Shellback, with 20 and 18 top singles from 2010- 2017, respectively. The pattern is so consistent that you can now Google “recipes” for a Max Martin hit song — or any hit song in general. Follow the pattern and bam: you have your hit single, here’s your Grammy.
The Mount Holyoke College campus radio, WMHC, has also run into this problem.
“People tend to play very similar things on air,” WMHC Program Director Zoe Farr ’21 said.
To combat this, WMHC has all of their DJs include two songs outside of their genre on their setlists from a compilation of CDs sent into the station, all classified under seven genres of music.
“It’s a good way to make people get outside of their genre. I’ve discovered a bunch of artists this way,” Farr said.
I am bored of listening to the same songs play on the radio and having to search for better music in this rigged system. Platforms like Spotify are trying to fix this with their hand-curated playlists. These curated playlists have songs handpicked by people who spend their time looking for hidden gems and try to bring them to a larger audience — a better method of curation than following an algorithm.
This increasing homogeneity in music can perhaps be attributed to the ease with which it is possible to produce music now. Anyone and everyone is a musician. One would expect that this would lead to more creativity, but the scenario seems quite the opposite. Electronic instruments like synthesizers are easier to learn than traditional instruments and produce sounds with little variation. Music is becoming less innovative each year. Artists are taking fewer risks and creating within a narrow range of sounds and tonalities.
But as producers like Kevin Parker are starting to rise in the game, I am hopeful. Parker’s Tame Impala comes with fresh and experimental sounds. Parker genres from hip hop to psychedelic, in addition to his new age music. From his 2015 hit album “Currents” to his recent collaborations with Lady Gaga and Kanye West, he has been changing the recipe and going out of the box with a mix of electronic and instrumental music.
Hopefully producers like Parker will bring about the much-awaited change and growth in the music industry — and my daily playlists.
Editor’s note: Zoe Farr ’21 is a current member of the Mount Holyoke News.