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Comment by coldtea | Hacker News Reader

>I read it and feel it's the same as how we perceive modern music. Everyone says music "used to be better" but that's just survival bias.

Well, if the top 100 tracks from, say, 1961 to 2021 progressively get less musically diverse, with simpler chords, less harmonies, less timbral variety, lesser melodies, more repeatition, less dynamics, less genre variety, more infantile lyrics (something that has been studied and measured several time, e.g: ), etc, then it's not some "survival bias".

https://www.researchgate.net/publication/346997561_Why_are_s...

https://newatlas.com/pop-music-trends/23535/

https://www.nature.com/articles/srep00521

https://www.res.org.uk/resources-page/economics-of-music-cha...

https://pudding.cool/2018/05/similarity/

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To be fair, you have to adjust for the relevance of top 100. In the past the top 100 was the only thing most people were exposed to because that's all the radio played. Today Spotify and Youtube and their recommendation algorithms make the top 100 almost completely irrelevant.

The size too: there are far more songs released now than in the 1960s. So it makes sense that the "creme" on the top is more homogenised.

Why does that make sense? More available music should imply a more varied range of good music to rise to the top.

It happens in some simplified models. Suppose a thousand tracks get released every year, and these tracks are evenly divided among 50 different types of music, 20 tracks per type. Some of these types of music are very popular (4.95 stars), some are slightly less popular (4.90 stars, maybe because they offend some powerful group), and some are much less popular (4.00 stars). So the most popular 100 tracks will be the 20 tracks from each of the 5 most popular music types.

If we increase the number of tracks to ten thousand, there are a couple of ways we can go. We could increase the number of types of music to 500, and in that case, we'd see better music rising to the top. (Or at least more popular music, which may or may not coincide with being better.) Or we could increase the number of tracks per type to 200, in which case a random half of the tracks of the most popular 4.95-star music type will be the "top 100" for the year.† Or we could go for the middle of the road: maybe now we have 150 types of music and 67 tracks of each one. Or we could have musicians and record companies that respond to incentives by trying to produce more music of the popular types, somewhat handicapped by the fact that those popular types change every year, and however much Nickelback might try it, recording the same song under twenty different titles doesn't actually give you twenty top-ten hits.

Regardless, there are a lot of ways that more published music could both provide more variety and less varied top hits.

______

†Of course the Billboard Hot 100 is per week, not per year, but that's the least of the oversimplifications in this model!

Not necessarily. That might be true if the top X you're tracking is also expanding along with the size of the catalog, but isn't true if X is fixed, like a top 100 music chart.

More common variants of more popular genres could easily crowd out moderately popular genres. The long tail has been a long noted issue at Spotify with several attempts at fixing.

It reminds me of why Apple Pie is America’s favorite pie.

50-100 years ago when parents were deciding what pie to make or buy, parent’s favorite was X, eldest kids favorite was Y, youngest kid’s favorite was Z.

Parents instead bought Apple Pie, because it was in everyone’s top 5 favorite pies.

Top 50 is an average of all of the world wide listeners. No one’s favorite songs are in the Top 50, but they are the average top 50.

The articles you're linking are proven to be misrepresenting.

They for example look at a really small subset of music "Million song dataset" and only analysed basic metrics that could be automatically measured. To be honest I think the linked Spanish paper and the senationalist "Science proves modern music is bad" should be retracted since the methodology is flawed.

Don't take my word for it, take Tantacrul's - composer, video creator, Design Lead for MuseScore [0].

It's such a complex topic to study "music" - you have to narrow it down - genre, country of origin, purpose - it's a major simplification to say that "all music is worse now", there are a lot of types of music that didn't exist in 1961 (synths, electronic, hip-hop) - how can you compare it?

[0]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VfNdps0daF8

Really love Tantacrul's video on this. I was actually about to look for it to reply to the grandparent post when I saw your post.

>(synths, electronic, hip-hop)

Synth began in the 70's, and Moroder/Jarre is far better than the 90% of today's crap.

If it's better than 90% of today's synth music, does that mean that 10% of today's music is better than Moroder/Jarre?

That's a lot!

No, just means it's equal but derivative...

>The articles you're linking are proven to be misrepresenting.

Citation needed. The articles are actual proof and measurements, whereas Tantacrul's take is just an opinion.

>They for example look at a really small subset of music "Million song dataset" and only analysed basic metrics that could be automatically measured.

The "small subset of music" is the most popular music of any year. That is what reveals music tastes over time, and this is the kind of music that permeates culture.

As for the "basic metrics" there's not basic as in trite/insignificant but basic as fundamental.

It's just that some people want so much to cling to "each period is the same, there are no ups and downs in cultural production" to not be seen as backwards oldsters, whereas milenia of history teaches that that there are absolutely ups and downs in cultural production (periods of stagnation, etc).

>it's a major simplification to say that "all music is worse now"

It's also a strawman. Nobody said that here.

The thing about music is that "more complex chords, more harmonies, more timbral variety, etc..." doesn't say anything about whether or not the music is better. It's a silly pursuit anyway given that music is a subjective experience.

That's neither here, nor there.

This is not about whether or not this or that particular song is better, is the top (most listened/streamed/talked about) music in general losing variety in all these aspects (harmony, melody, timbre, lyrics, genres, dynamics, etc).

That's not subjective, that's objective, and has been measured to get worse.

The "subjective experience" could be good, the same way people can prefer McDonalds over a wholesome meal by the best chef. Doesn't mean its also good by other metrics, and I for one don't believe individual taste is everything. There are people with shit taste, loads of them.

Again, “worse” is subjective.

Even saying someone has “shit taste” is subjective.

In the end, everything is subjective, even morality. There's no objective physical law that says killing is bad. Animals do it all the time and could not care less about it.

But to the degree that we have a culture, though, we also have a non-100%-exact but nonetheless existing hierarchy of artistic works. There might be disagreements, even strong ones, but there's also some general agreement, that not everything is a fuzzy blob of equal value, left for the individual taste to sort or not, and this just for itself.

Is the idea that the Beatles are better than The Monkeys or Oasis, that Aphex Twin is better than Skrillex, that Dua Lipa is better than Justin Bieber, that Michael Jackson is better than Milli Vanilly, in some non-measurable but tangible way really that difficult?

That this, once a common and well accepted idea (related to the idea of the "canon"), appears like beyond the pale for the 21st century solipsistic individual, where only the subjective taste matters, is not really the fault of the idea itself.

I wonder how deeply tinted your rose-colored glasses need to be to go to these lengths to prove that things were better back in the day.

Or how deep a fear of being called an "oldster" one has to have, to need to go to these other lengths to prove that things are always a fuzzy blog, and there are no periods (and historically even decades or centuries) with worse or better artistic output...

There's a simple metric for the state of modern music - where are the modern equivalents, in musical stature, of David Bowie, Pink Floyd, Roxy Music, Bob Dylan, Elton John, U2, Fleetwood Mac, Steely Dan & The Eagles? Answer - there isn't anything anywhere near the pantheon of talent that graced the late 60s to the mid-80s. It's just a phenomenon of history. It's not relativism due to ageing. It's a fact in the same sense that Shakespeare's work outlived that of his contemporaries.

I guess this depends on 'musically diverse' === 'better' though, which isn't necessarily the case when people think about what makes the top 100 tracks for a year.

The top 100 hasn't been a relevant indicator of modern music since Napster. The top 100 is a record industry owned entity with a tremendous amount of self-interest.

If you can't find more diverse modern music than the top 100 offers today you're not trying that hard.

That's neither here, nor there.

This is not about being able to find this or that niche musician that's great or even greater than any in the past, but about what the masses listen getting worse.

Music isn't just a solitary experience, but also a part of general culture.

As streamed music is getting cruder over time, the majority of the people are listening to increasingly shitty songs. That's chilling, regardless of whether someone can find 10000s of niche bands to listen themselves.

It's reductive to suggest that the top 100 represents "general culture" (whatever that ambiguous term means). There aren't solely niche musicians outside of the top 100. Theres plenty of musicians with millions of listens/views on streaming media that don't enter billboard lists that have extremely prodigious careers that have complex lyrics, use a wide assortment of instruments/equipments, evolve genres, etc.

Your data might be objective, but it's still a narrow slice of a much broader ecosystem.

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