The other day I was in the car with my 17 year old and a song came on the radio from the late 90s and she thought it was a new song. I didn't laugh because I've noticed the sameness to pop music myself and if I hadn't lived through it I probably couldn't tell either.
[EDIT] I gather someone may have thought I was taking a swipe at electronic music? I wasn't, but its enduring appeal for the commercial side of the industry is probably related to costs.
[EDIT] You can basically have most or all of your non-vocal tracks ready before stepping into the studio. Maybe even some of the backing vocals, if you sample.
[EDIT EDIT] see also: the state of movie soundtracks, which have in the last couple decades skewed towards rhythm-over-melody electronically-composed (and possibly finalized that way!) works, largely for reasons of cost and (related to cost) predictability.
On the other hand, if you were to play me an unfamiliar song from about 1965 to about 1980, I can, with pretty good accuracy, narrow down its release to within a year or two just by its sound. It's a game I like to play with the SiriusXM radio channel.
There's no doubt that pop music has become a lot more homogenized in the past couple decades, and the technological advances that drastically alter the sound of music are becoming fewer and fewer. Has there really been anything other than (the scourge of) Autotune that's really affected the sound of music in the past 20 years? The only other thing I can think of is digital sampling, which hit like a tidal wave around 1983-4.
However, I must vehemently disagree that you wouldn't immediately recognize something from the 80s. The sounds and styles of music in the 80s were much more distinct. Even my kids, who were born in the 90s, can immediately recognize song from the 80s by their sound.
Digital equipment also increased the amount of material with very high production values.
"One reason automobile styling has changed so little these last two decades is because the industry has been struggling to survive, which made the perpetual big annual styling changes of the Golden Age a reducible business expense. Today, Starbucks doesn’t want to have to renovate its thousands of stores every few years. If blue jeans became unfashionable tomorrow, Old Navy would be in trouble. And so on. Capitalism may depend on perpetual creative destruction, but the last thing anybody wants is their business to be the one creatively destroyed."
It seems to me (in fashion, culture, technology, art, etc.) that we consumers are the victims of a giant hill-climbing problem, and our current batch of corporations, in their relentless effort to optimize everything, have us stuck at some local maxima that they can't A/B test their way out of. This year's jeans are a variation of last year's. This year's smartphones a minor iteration from last year's. It's too risky financially to make a wave, or move us into the next generation. Those shareholders want their risk-free YoY growth after all.
As a child of the 90s, I remember 8th grade being all about fashion: baggy pants/shorts, high white socks, "stuffed" skate shoes, low hanging backpacks with band patches, etc. Our appearance was the primary means by which we performed identity and grouped ourselves and each other into cliques.
However, as the popularity of the internet rose, we were given a new means by which to express ourselves: AIM screen names and profile content, Xanga and LiveJournal custom styles and angsty post, etc. But, even in the 90s, our digital avatars were still small, manageable, and mostly disconnected from our REAL, in-the-flesh, identities--there was a degree of anonymity, particularly for those who wanted it.
At some point, with the rise of MySpace, Gmail, Facebook, Tumblr, and (more recently) Instagram and Snapchat, and the proliferation of smart phones, the barrier between people's real identity and digital identity disappeared. With less anonymity comes MUCH more anxiety. Ridicule for faux pas now are infinitely reproducible, potentially permanent, and move at the speed of light. I imagine if you talked to middle school students today, they'd be much less concerned with the fashion of their peers than the contents of their social media profiles--this seems to be semi-supported by this article[1]:
"In my dozens of conversations with teens, parents, clinicians and school counselors across the country, there was a pervasive sense that being a teenager today is a draining full-time job that includes doing schoolwork, managing a social-media identity and fretting about career, climate change, sexism, racism–you name it. Every fight or slight is documented online for hours or days after the incident. It’s exhausting.
...
It’s hard for many adults to understand how much of teenagers’ emotional life is lived within the small screens on their phones, but a CNN special report in 2015 conducted with researchers at the University of California, Davis, and the University of Texas at Dallas examined the social-media use of more than 200 13-year-olds. Their analysis found that 'there is no firm line between their real and online worlds,' according to the researchers."
[1] http://time.com/magazine/us/4547305/november-7th-2016-vol-18...