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Comment by forgotusername6 | Hacker News Reader

Yes everything looks the same now. But hasn't that always been the case to a certain extent? The world is a lot smaller now and that leads to ideas spreading quickly. This doesn't necessarily mean that things stay the same though. What is in fashion changes and generally only the best of each fashion trend stays around. Where I live there are a number of old buildings with exposed timer frames. At some point, most of the town would have looked like this, but now only the finest examples remain. I'm sure the same thing is true for fields other than architecture. I'm sure the past was full of generic imitation like it is today, though just more localised.

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> Yes everything looks the same now. But hasn't that always been the case to a certain extent? The world is a lot smaller now and that leads to ideas spreading quickly.

Most of what the article is complaining about is because the economics has led to monopolization.

At least back in the 1960s and 1970s, you had some individuality which would poke up. A department store wanted different clothes from the other department store to draw you in. A radio DJ wanted different music to get you to listen to their channel. etc.

However, once everything is a monopoly, there is no need to spend any money to be unique since there is nowhere different for anybody to switch to.

In some areas probably you're right. Pictures of men in certain eras all wearing identical hats spring to mind. On the other hand the film industry is a stark example where it really did used to be more varied. The article mentions it, before 2000 3 in 4 big films were original. Now it's getting close to zero.

And the music? Film music for everything popular seems to have come from the same music box.

But popular music itself is to a high degree very same. That's not to say that there is no original music anymore. There is a big amount. It's just people tastes that decide what becomes popular, and everybody wants to hear the same.

And yet, fashion and taste change. It's just a matter of time.

>It's just people tastes that decide what becomes popular //

What becomes popular seems to be whatever we get brainwashed with, ie what we get advertised.

It seems to be less driven by social changes than it is driven by profit motive of those able to feed most of us 10-15 minutes of advertising within each of the several hours of media consumption most of us partake of each day.

He covers music in a follow up article, https://www.alexmurrell.co.uk/articles/the-age-of-average-en...: "Chart topping tracks are becoming shorter, less melodically diverse and more lyrically repetitive".

According to him, it is not just tastes, it is the way musicians get paid:

"Streaming platforms pay artists each time a track gets listened to. And a “listen” is classified as 30 seconds or more of playback. To maximise their pay, savvy artists are releasing albums featuring a high number of short tracks."

I'm late to reply but for the record I think you're way wrong about music. You (and I) are just old. I'm a musician and I do think there is a sense in which the most popular songs are "worse" - they contain fewer, simpler musical ideas. But there are plenty of good song writers doing interesting stuff. I'm not totally on the ball as I do prefer music from the past. But I would point to Billy Eilish as a particularly young example, there's also Jacob Collier for instance. Both very unusual, very popular.

Could this be an effect of the novelty of a new art medium?

When films first became a thing, no one knew how to make them. The proven template didn’t exist. There was more variety because there was more experimentation, and eventually what was once pioneering experimentation becomes mainstream commodity and the novelty wears off.

The same thing happened with music when the synthesizer was invented; no one knew how to make music with a synthesizer so it was all experimentation. It still happens today in burgeoning subgenres of electronic music. A new sound is invented (or rediscovered, more recently), music producers flock to this exciting new frontier, eventually it reaches mainstream, and by that time it is no longer novel or interesting. Rinse and repeat.

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