Throughout history, any era of music you care to mention, in any genre you care to mention, there have been a small number of innovators, and a lot of imitators/plagiarists.

Personally, I'd question who the innovators are nowadays, and their agenda.

They sure aren't songwriters.

 

There are a few things I know for sure without the remotest prejudice:

• There are wonderful musicians and songwriters who cannot read a note of music or explain why they do what they do.
• There are wonderful musicians and songwriters who read and understand music well and can explain everything they do and some in between.
  
• Music if labelled good by one person may not be considered that by another, regardless of what boxes it ticks on a musical, enjoyment, correctness, theoretical or popularity level.
• Music that is popular does not necessarily mean it is good in musical terms or sensible, or tunes like 'On the good ship lollipop' and 'Baby,baby,baby,baby' would never have been popular. Again, people will like what they like there are 8 billion of us in the world.
• There are musicians who can tell how good something is without saying a word and musicians who feel the need to tell everyone because everyone is different.
• People who can really play and really write have no need to sweep the floor with testosterone, they are too busy doing it and can do it with a computer or without one and the musical likes, tastes, style or genres make no difference. If there was a Global electromagnetic pulse and everything electronic died, people immediately who are musical becomes crystal clear, because it is inside them and everything else is a tool to express what is inside them.
• Is Rick Beato a pain in the ass? - He can be but he does know things, nobody lives that long and does not learn something...and last..
• If a person wants respect, give respect, because it does not matter how good anyone is, there will always be someone better.

 

Last edited: Apr 21, 2026 at 7:48 PM

All two of them!

Well, yeah, I mean.. ABBA did enable Max Martin. Whether that's a good thing is .. very debatable

(And honestly a more fun discussion!)

I agree, but neither you nor me have the authority to judge because we grew up and still live in our own, very tiny musical bubbles that won't let us see the bigger picture no matter what.

And when one hasn't been exposed/hasn't experienced/hasn't learned music from the bird's eye view (1500 years, 1500 genres, 100k songs), then one is just stuck with imprinted involuntary tastes.

I don't. All I'm saying is that I don't have authority to judge qualitatively (nor do you).

Don't you think that the music you referenced earlier is also measurably a decline from the musical depth, sophistication and diversity of earlier times ..? A dramatic, ..catastrophic decline? Or does the Hendrix-chord make up for all of that decline ..? Is disco's four on the floor really the peak of rhythmic sophistication?

I used to read Chris Dalla Riva's blogs on music and data. Maybe you'd be interested in his findings and charts.

https://flowingdata.com/tag/chris-dalla-riva/
https://substack.com/@chrisdallariva/posts

I don't know how to filter his substack, so it's a bit of a long scroll between his data science posts.

What is significant? A 5% decline in key changes relative to what was the norm in 1976, 1932, 1779 or <my year>? Why year X as the anchor? Please explain. I don't understand. What about absolute change? Are those more significant than relative changes? What are the bounds on the Y axis? And why is anything outside of those bounds irrelevant?

Where's the data (you have not shown any!) and your explanation of that data? No data + no explanation = opinion.

That's a great way of putting it. I'd argue that all of 1920-2030 can be summed up as "shades of beige". Don't feel like backing it up with data though, haw haw.

Bach gang repreZnt.

Relative to what? The artists you name-dropped? Again, how is it that it's exactly those artists who've had a combined 30-40 years of musical relevance in the 2nd half of the 20th century and no one and nothing outside of that tiny time frame?? Do you genuinely believe that music peaked during those 30-40 years and that per-chance your formative years and artist preferences fall into that tiny window?!

You must be winning the lottery every week!

Always been.

Bringing back key-changes to 3% of billboard 100s won't change that. Big money won, musicians will go the way of the weavers post 1820. Music will always be around of course - and if I had to guess: mostly as background AI vibe semi-noise (ie. further reduced in depth/sophistication to facilitate maximum palatability and engagement (like deliveries/fast food)) going forward.

 

The examples (Jobim, ABBA, Rodgers) weren’t meant to be exhaustive, just illustrative! The point isn’t to build a tiny "hall of fame", but to point to long-term structural influence, especially in melodic and harmonic language that keeps getting reused and reshaped over time. If anything, adding more examples would only make that pattern clearer.

Linking ABBA to Max Martin doesn’t really undermine the argument... if anything, it sharpens it. The question isn’t whether influence exists, but what happens to structural diversity along the way. What I’m looking at is how melodic variability, harmonic movement, and phrase-level development behave in the current mainstream. The lineage is there, sure... the question is what it does to the palette.

I’m not trying to make a claim about all music across history. This is a much narrower scope: mainstream Western charting music in the recording era, where we actually have comparable datasets. Within that space, analyzing things like melody, harmony, and phrase structure isn’t speculation, it’s pretty standard practice.

I don’t think this comes down to personal authority. It’s more about how clearly the criteria are defined. If we’re talking about pitch range, interval distribution, harmonic function, and how phrases evolve, then the argument can be evaluated on its own terms. It’s less about who’s saying it and more about whether the framework holds up.

That’s a fair point, but it shifts the frame a bit. I’m not claiming the 60s–90s are some absolute peak across all of music history. The comparison is within modern recorded popular music, where the systems are comparable. Once you move into earlier traditions, you’re dealing with different compositional rules, which is a different analysis altogether. Along those lines, computational work on large chart-based datasets (including research by Chris Dalla Riva) points in a similar direction. You do see convergence in certain features, especially around melodic repetition and reduced variability. It’s not that everything evolves the same way, but some structural parameters do tend to narrow over time.

"Significant" here just means measurable changes in defined features relative to a consistent baseline. For example: less melodic variability (narrower pitch range, fewer interval types), more static harmonic movement, and less differentiation across phrases. That lines up with findings from studies like The Evolution of Popular Music: USA 1960–2010 (Mauch et al., 2015), which show periods where musical features converge within Billboard datasets. You can debate the baseline, sure... but the directional trends tend to show up regardless.

This isn’t just a gut feeling, it comes from analyses of chart-based datasets (Billboard and similar), where people actually measure things like melodic contour, repetition, harmonic transitions, and phrase structure. For example, Trajectories and Revolutions in Popular Melody Based on U.S. Charts (1950–2023) points to declining melodic complexity and increased repetition. The Evolution of Popular Music: USA 1960–2010 (Mauch et al., 2015) shows periods of convergence in large Billboard datasets, and Changes in Lyrical and Hit Diversity (1956–2016) finds narrowing distributions in some dimensions over time. I’m not saying "everything got worse". The narrower claim is that some features (especially melodic variability and phrase-level movement) have tightened in the charts. If you see it differently, the best way forward is to engage those findings directly or bring counter-analyses using comparable data and metrics (that’s where the discussion gets concrete!).

If you zoom out far enough, almost anything starts to look uniform. But at a finer level (looking at melodic behavior, harmonic movement, and how phrases are structured), differences between periods do show up. So it’s less "everything is beige" and more "some shades are closer together than they used to be!"

The timeframe isn’t arbitrary, it’s tied to when we have consistent, large-scale chart data (like Billboard). That’s what makes longitudinal comparison possible using the same metrics. Again, it’s not about that period being "better", just that it gives us a stable dataset to observe structural trends.

Then it sounds like the disagreement isn’t about whether something changed, but about how to interpret it. My take is simply that reductions in melodic variability, harmonic movement, and phrase-level development are structurally meaningful (in the sense that they affect how distinct, varied, and internally dynamic charting music tends to be) rather than simply a matter of taste.

There’s no question that industry constraints (algorithms, economics, production pipelines) shape what ends up in the charts. But even within those constraints, you can still measure how much variation remains in melody, harmony, and structure. When that variation starts to narrow, it’s worth describing, whether it’s reversible or simply where things are settling.

 

There are just some songs so beautiful that you can listen to them for years to come.

You sense that there's more to a song than just instruments and notes; it's an idea, a piece of soul—something connects the listener to the music. Some call it magic, some divine, and for others, it's all just pure mathematics.

 

The problem for all of us, as music lovers, is simple.

We need more QUALITY music, NOT more music.

What really is the point of swamping the musical world with garbage?

I'd quite happily go back to much simpler pre-algorithm days, when a friend or someone in the know would switch you on to quality tunes or bands, or singers & musicians. Music had value then.

As for the Beato video, yes, most music these days seems to be built using loops. That can be done intelligently, or lazily.

I'm no fan of Noel Gallagher or Oasis (very derivative), however he often hit's the mark in interviews.

https://www.youtube.com/shorts/fnsMkdSHq8s?feature=share

 

You are talking like everyone is suddenly only chasing algorithms, that everyone lives to be in Spotify Top 100, that it's somehow impossible to find something else on there and that most people listening to Spotify do that because of 5% of music there. If anything, plenty people lost all incentives to compete for the same pie, don't have the actual need to chase same labels and can actually make music without worrying about any of that, finding audience, releasing it publicly and actually standing out in sea of sameness. Your friend actually now can stumble upon more of those bands and musicians, which was nearly impossible before, they didn't had outlet for their music, just demo and hopes to be picked and presented to mass audience.

Now when most people with AI subscription can churn out all these algorithmic nonsense, making that kind of stuff seems pointless, now more then ever folks who truly have love for the music do it for the love of the music, knowing to well it's not going to pay their bills from selling, knowing to well they stand no chance competing in the same realm and it boils down to giving up or doing music for the love of doing it.

Even locally I see plenty of folks that made this step, buried all the dreams of making it big and focused on music they truly love, audience that truly love their music and they are doing pretty well, people still go to gigs, still dig good music, but those people are also already in realization that quality music isn't on Billboard charts and it's not most mainstream pop.

Even for EDM, amount of people that still attend parties, packed festivals that don't need to appeal to mass audience to survive, music that is tailored to dance floor, not optimized for charts or made to be consumed by masses, just enjoyed by true lovers. Not everyone's goal is to be on Tommorowland, Ultra or whatever, plenty of people decided all they need is 50 people in the crowd who genuinely love what they are listening, dancing and immersed in experience.

Personally I'm even more committed to making better music, reaching even less people and investing even more in my craft, more time, more money and not settling to anything less then something I can be proud of standing next to AI generated music, I need this for myself and I notice more and more people are reaching this mindset around me, like fuck it, now I'm really going to do something I truly love, fuck people, fuck AI and fuck money.

 

No, I said that back in the day, a lot of times you'd find great new music from savvy friends, who might even lend you their copy, or make you a mixtape. It was a time when music had value, because you actually had to pay money for a physical product.