I don’t know about you guys, but lately music hasn’t felt as exciting as it used to. And I think that the numbers back this feeling up, too. Billboard had to change their rules to pull songs from the Hot 100 if they’ve been on there too long, with NPR saying, “Streaming services use algorithms that feed people songs they’ve already played.
” And that creates a doom loop that’s allowed recent songs to stay on the charts for absurdly long runs, which to me would make sense because hit songs we all collectively enjoy feel and far between these days. And I think there’s a few main reasons for that. Now, I’m not one of those people who’s saying that all modern music is bad or anything like that or that they don’t make good music anymore.
There is a ton of great music coming out every single day. But what I’m saying is it feels like the mainstream music, the most popular upper echelon music, just isn’t as fun and collectively enjoyed as it used to be. Let’s do a little experiment. Let’s check out the Billboard Hot 100 in 2010 and in 2020. In 2010, we have Tik Tok by Kesha, Hey Soul Sister by Train, California Girls by Katy Perry, Airplanes by Bob B, Love the Way You Lie, Bad Romance, Dynamite, and many more songs that I’d imagine we all know and enjoy. Pop songs that are fun to
dance to, fun to sing along to, fun to play with your friends and things like that. And then in 2020, we have Blinding Lights by The Weekend, Circles by Post Malone, The Box by Rody Rich, Rockstar by The Baby, Life is Good, Memories Say So, and more. I do like The Box, but it just feels like the ones from the 2010s are way more classic.
The songs from the 2010s feel like they’re more fun, they aged better, and we all enjoyed them more collectively. Let’s try again, though, looking at 2015 and 2025. In 2015, we had Uptown Funk, See You Again, Trap Queen, Sugar, Blank Space, Watch Me, The Hills, Can’t Feel My Face, Bad Blood. I mean, come on. How is 2025 going to compete? Well, 2025’s year-end list isn’t out yet, but there hasn’t been much change anyway.
So, let’s take a look at 2024, which featured a bar song, Beautiful Things, I Had Some Help, Not Like Us, Espresso, Million-Dollar Baby, and more. Again, I could be alone in this feeling, but I feel like the songs from 2015 are just miles better. I mean, what on that list I just named comes even close to Trap Queen. Name one. There’s nothing.
Those again are songs that you can sing with your friends or dance to. It felt like we all as a society collectively enjoyed these songs more. And to me, it just feels like that overarching feeling is gone. And it’s hard to describe. Well, I don’t think it’s just me. A pretty excellent selection of songs in this top 10.
I’m genuinely optimistic about pop music these days. What the [ __ ] happened? Now, this is completely my opinion, but I feel like in general, modern popular music, at least these last few years, isn’t that exciting anymore. Of course, there are bangers we all like here and there, and the independent alternative indie and underground scenes are full of more talent than ever before.
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So, shout out to Current for sponsoring this video and let’s continue. Now, it is an objective fact that pop music is getting simplified. For example, melodies and pop music have gotten a lot simpler over time according to studies. A study looked at the top five Billboard songs from 1950 to 2023 and found that both rhythm and pitch became steadily less complex over that period.
Conservatively, they have both decreased by 30%. This isn’t inherently a bad thing, but it’s just one of many studies that goes to show that pop music has been getting simpler. A study in 2012 showed that diversity of note combinations has consistently diminished in the last 50 years. Melodies are becoming more and more similar and songs are relying on a smaller range of timbers than before.
And I think the biggest driver of this is the streaming era and record labels. First of all, think about platforms like Spotify or Tik Tok. When Spotify took off, their unique playlist system was the standard for finding new music. To make it to the top Spotify playlist, your song has to work its way through the lower and mid-tier playlist first.
And if your song is skipped a lot, it won’t graduate, making it so artists might not be inclined to have a slow intro or too crazy of an intro. And when people are listening to playlist in the background, they don’t want super crazy songs. So, the focus isn’t on giving people reasons to listen to your music, but avoiding giving them reasons to turn it off.
Which is why a lot of pop songs may feel a little bit more bland or less offensive than they may have in the past. In a similar way, the Tik Tok era of music has artists hyperfocused on a 10-second clip of their song, usually the chorus, hoping that that one part goes viral, whereas the rest of the track may be a little boring or repetitive or just brushed off.
Another reason pop music all sounds kind of simpler and similar is likely because of how easy it is to make music. Now, objectively, I think that making music more accessible has been a huge net positive and has led to way more innovation, but it can also cause a couple problems. I saw a YouTuber named Lachlan Frraasier made a similar video on this topic and brought up a great point ; uh talking about how the tape sound that everyone strives for and loves isn’t actually the saturation or compression that you get from tape. Instead, the
tape sound that everyone wants but doesn’t quite realize they want is the imperfections. Tape was expensive and difficult to work with. You really needed to be good at what you were doing. And if you were considering doing a retake, uh, you really had to think it over and decide, do I really want to redo this whole take and waste more tape? And because of that, older records tend to have more flaws.
But now with digital recording, you can endlessly record takes and then comp out a perfect take and then quantize it and run it through MelOdine and then stack five EQs and 30 other plugins on top of that. ; We’ve perfected the soul out of music is a great quote from that video. And I think this leaves people yearning for some sort of imperfection in music.
For example, when the Soundcloud era popped off in the late 2010s, a lot of the draw to that genre was the artist utilizing distortion. People enjoyed what most pop songs would have edited out at the time. Personally, I’m a big fan of this underground artist named Willie Krooks who intentionally clips his kicks.
If you don’t know, clipping is a type of distortion when the audio is too high for the system to handle, so it just cuts off. And usually it sounds terrible. Basically, this is what clipping is. Me talking really loud into the mic. see the audio clipped and now it sounds shitty even if it’s quiet. But in his music, I think he makes it sound kind of cool.
Or even vocal imperfections, like when an artist’s voice cracks or messes up, can sound good. It makes the music sound so much more human. And that video by Llin was great. However, I don’t agree with all of his takes. For example, he said a lot of rap all sounds the same now. ; Rap music, I would argue, is probably the biggest offender of this trend.
The genre seems to have just been completely taken over by minimalistic trap beats and a hyperfixation on aesthetics. They’re not really offering the listener anything other than some vibes. And look, I’m not saying that every rapper needs to be Nas or Pharaoh Munch or whatever, but it almost feels like being able to actually rap or write good lyrics is now somehow cringe in modern rap.
There was a time when sounding like another rapper was taboo. Now most of these rappers sound the same, right? And again, that’s not me being an old man yelling at clouds. Genuinely, a lot of these new rappers have the same flows, the same beats, the same subject matter, the same styles, everything is the same. ; And even though I disagree with that take, it’s sort of an old head argument.
And I think there’s more diversity in rap than ever before. But I do think that rap is a big component of this dry spout we’ve been seeing lately. In fact, I just saw a headline that said, “For the first time since February 1990, there are no rap songs charting inside the top 40 of the Billboard Hot 100.
And apart from the Kendrick Drake beef, there hasn’t really been much exciting music in the mainstream rap. Remember, this video is about upper echelon mainstream. For a long time, rap hasn’t had an artist break out into the mainstream, and most of the artists carrying the genre these days are the older artists.
This is important because for a very long time, rap has been the biggest genre by market share in the mainstream. As of 2023, it still was, but I’m not quite sure where it’s at today. Regardless, in 2025, the bestselling albums were Kendrick’s GNX, Lil Baby’s Wham, Tyler’s Chromacopia and Don’t Tap the Glass, Card’s Music, Drake, Some Sexy Songs for You, and Big X the Plugs Take Care.
Aside from half of these being released in 2024, the only new artists on this list was Big X. It really feels like rap hasn’t had any big newcomers in the last like three years. And most of its newcomers who break through the mainstream have no staying power. Like Ice Spice, Rody Rich, Polo G, and a lot of these other artists.
It’s like, what are they doing today? Like they’re they’re not doing anything. And as a huge rap fan, please do not get me wrong. I think rap has a ton of great music coming out every single week, month, day, year, but it’s just not breaking through to the mainstream like I wish it would. For example, we got Two Chains and Larry Jun’s album this year.
Yeets EP, the Until Japan album, JID dropped, Earl Sweatshirt, Freddy Gibbs put out a phenomenal project, and multiple others. But none of these are going super big in the mainstream like they may have a decade or so ago. So, no, I don’t think that people think lyrics and rap are cringe. I think there are different styles and scenes that are enjoyable for their own reasons.
and both of which I believe can have longevity so long as the quality of the music is good. I think one of the biggest artists number-wise who blew up these past couple of years is Yeet. And even he hasn’t had a big hit song or become a huge mainstream artist. And think about the big three, Kendrick, Drake, and Cole.
Like there is nobody that comes to mind that can replace those three in terms of quality music as well as mainstream staying power. So of course I’m not one of those old heads saying hip-hop is dead, but it feels like it’s just kind of in a dry period waiting for its next big era to come out, like maybe the Soundcloud era. And this has a big impact on the overall music industry as the biggest genre right now.
With rap being in a dry spell, it feels like a lot of the music game is as well. However, another reason I think rap isn’t being pushed as hard right now and pop music is getting simpler is because record labels know exactly what makes them money and they are milking it. If you don’t know, for the most part, there are three major labels that own pretty much every other record label.
Those labels are Warner, Sony, and Universal. Also, by the way, I kind of want to make a video on how they created like a bit of a monopoly in the music industry. So, that’s interesting. Let me know uh if you want to see that. But unless you’re listening to a pretty small artist or a big artist that is explicitly independent or on an indie label, they are at the thumb of these major labels.
And major labels, especially when they have a large artist or an artist they’re developing, they know how to make a hit. I made a video a while ago called Why Every Pop Song Sounds the Same. And of course, that was an overgeneralization, but I’m going to play you a clip of that video to show you what I mean.
Scientists have studied 464,000 songs and found that both melodies and sounds of instruments are becoming much more similar. Songs are also becoming shorter because of this and streaming platforms are prioritizing those shorter songs mainly because shorter songs are less likely to be skipped. In the past two decades, labels have even acquired technology that they can use to analyze music and predict what songs will be hits.
They can use services such as Hit Predictor or Shazam to see what songs will blow up. Apparently, Hit Predictor was able to predict 48 out of the top 50 radio hits in 2013. There are actually even entire companies such as Next Big Sound, which are dedicated to analyzing music and finding the next big sound. And you’re probably thinking that if labels keep pumping out this generic music, people will eventually get tired of it.
And while that may be true for some people, science says it actually isn’t for the majority. In a study done by Columbia University in 2006, they showed some people music websites with a bunch of songs and told them to download their favorites. Some sites had rankings of the most popular songs and some didn’t.
It showed that people who saw the rankings were more likely to download the popular songs. They then did a second experiment where they did the same thing, but this time they sent out websites with the actual download statistics and then some websites with fake download statistics. The experiment proved again that believing that a song is more popular made people oops made people more likely to download it.
Another study done in 2011 shows that the brain produces dopamine when people hear songs that they have played and heard before. This video is almost 3 years old now and it’s more true than ever before. Also, by the way, I’ve been doing YouTube full-time for 3 years. So, I just want to say thank you guys cuz that’s that’s dope.
But yeah, what I mentioned in that video I think explicitly speaks to what I’m talking about here. Record labels are intentionally scientifically carefully crafting the most cookie cutter songs with elements from every hit to create new hits. And I think this shows in a lot of popular songs today. If we look at the biggest songs of the year so far, we have songs such as Ordinary by Alex Warren, Beautiful Things by Benson Boon, Espresso by Sabrina Carpenter, and more.
And these songs aren’t bad by any means, but there’s just nothing special about them. They’re just pretty ordinary. Also, I’m excluding Pink Pony Club and Birds of a Feather cuz I actually really like those songs. But if we’re being honest, uh, Birds of a Feather probably isn’t all that special either.
On top of all this though, not only are labels pushing for these cookie cutter songs, but now they are straight up nostalgia baiting. What I’m about to tell you is kind of crazy, but you know how they have writing camps in the music industry? If not, it’s basically where uh music industry people get a bunch of songwriters together, maybe looking to sell these songs to certain artists or asking the writers to write a certain type of vibe song, like write a love song.
But now they have camps that are specifically asking writers to write songs using interpolations. I found this out when making my previous video called The Art of Stealing Music Legally. Interpolating is basically borrowing and repurposing a melody, somewhat similar to sampling. Then once these new songs that interpolate old songs are written, they are sold to artists throughout the industry, which is just insane to think about that there are songwriting camps that instead of writing entirely new songs are just remixing old ones for artists to take
advantage of this trend. And it’s so successful because it plays on familiar melodies that labels and artists already know people like, repackaging them to a newer generation. Like I said, I did a whole video on interpolation, but it is truly fascinating. So clearly labels are meticulously crafting songs either based in nostalgia or data, which is what is resulting in things like songs sticking on Billboard for so long.
Again, Billboard had to change their rules because these songs were they’re just stuck up on the charts for so long cuz nothing new is coming in and replacing them. That’s how boring this year’s been. Like I mentioned earlier, the biggest selling rap albums this year, half of them are from last year. Like 2025 just feels like it’s been a dud.
And labels are also investing heavily into artists that play it super safe. For example, two of the biggest artists right now, Taylor Swift and Morgan Wallen, just put out some pretty big, bloated, bland albums, the 3Bs, if you will. Morgan, in particular, put out an album with 37 songs, many of which were pretty bland, average, boring country songs.
And don’t get me wrong, it’s not bad. It’s just underwhelming. Regardless, he was able to break records thanks to this album. On the flip side, Taylor Swift just put out her album with less songs, but she spam released 34 different versions of this album, and this resulted, of course, in her breaking a record for album sales, despite it being an album that many thought was bad or boring.
The point is, neither of these two albums produced a hit that we all know and love. And maybe you do, but do all of us are we all singing it at school or with our friends in the car or at the bar or wherever? I don’t think so. But this music, despite how boring or bland many may think it is, is still widely appealing and prints money for both the artist and the record labels.
It’s like the music industry version of a content farm. Don’t get me wrong, again, there are still innovators and exciting artists in pop music, but a lot of it is bloated, bland, and boring, the 3Bs. However, I think this is bigger than music. Apart from just the record labels causing problems, I feel like society as a whole may have an issue as well.
There are more genres and even more music out now than ever before. Thanks to the internet and progressions in technology, there is a sound for everyone out there. But back in the day, all the music you had access to was what was in the record stores or CD shops. So, chances were you were much more likely to be listening to more similar music as your peers.
Nowadays, though, everyone is so hyperindividualized. There are hundreds of different scenes in different genres, in different pockets of different communities. This is of course a great thing that people can enjoy their niche of music easier than ever before, but it’s also contributed to a lack of community across society.
There isn’t a monoculture like there used to be. Monoculture is a concept in pop culture studies in which facets of popular culture are experienced by everyone at once, either globally or nationally. This isn’t a widely accepted term in the sociology world, but I feel like it’s pretty fitting. And many in the sociology world argue that monoculture ended by the 21st century, mainly toward the end of the 2010s due to the rise of streaming media and the fracturing of popular culture.
Patrick CC touched on this in his video titled The Death of Mainstream, which I think is very applicable here. Not only do we have infinite music to choose from, but we have so many things to entertain us and occupy our time. Amazing YouTube videos like this one, tons of shows and movies, and of course, the lovely short form content that you can effortlessly scroll for hours.
In an article by Vox, the writer said, “We’re in the midst of the streaming wars with so many different media products and platforms competing for our attention. Journalists and critics are worried that the huge popularity and sense of universality that Avengers and Game of Thrones achieved are now disappearing for good.” The writer continued, “The fear is that we exist in a fragmented realm of impenetrable niches and subcultures enabled by streaming media.
The second concern is that because of the pressures of social media and the self-reinforcing biases of recommendation algorithms that drive streaming, culture is becoming more similar than different. And I think what they’re trying to say is that culture in these subniches is becoming super, you know, unique and uh and uniform, whereas as an entire society, it’s very niched down.
Of course, this article is speaking on culture in general, including TV, books, everything, not just music. But I think when specifically talking about music, it’s rare that we can point out too many monoculture moments in the last 5 years. Apart from maybe some Ice Spice or Sexy Red or the Drake versus Kendrick Chapel Rowan and the occasional hit, I feel like there hasn’t been a super huge monoculture moment in music in the last few years.
The artists and songs I listed were definitely like big, but I feel like it wasn’t universal. For example, let’s just scroll through the Billboard Hot 100 best performing singles of the 2020s. Apart from maybe The Box by Rody Rich, how many of these songs were like universally loved and listened to by everyone? Maybe Bad Habit by Steve Lacy, I I don’t even think that one would count.
I’m not sure if I’m making sense right now, if I’m just rambling at this point, but comparing songs from pretty much every decade of the music industry up until recently, it just seems like something’s missing. With the endless amount of music, the lack of a monoculture, and everything being so hyperindividualized, it’s unlikely we will routinely have monoculture again, unless something major changes in society.
But here’s the deal. There are always artists in the underground scene building off of sounds and innovating. This is happening every day. When an old scene dies out, new ones are born. And there’s always a musician working to create something new, original, or fresh. But for a lot of the reasons I listed, mostly having to deal with record labels and the formulaic hits they’re putting out, the mainstream is suffering, and I’m honestly not sure what it’ll take to get it back to how it used to be, or if it ever will. Another thing this has
resulted in is the disappearance of bands from the mainstream, which for a few other reasons too has become a recent phenomenon. So to learn more about that, consider clicking the video on screen right now.
