@Background Pony #9AF9
Coming from someone who doesn’t even like western pop music, I am afraid to say that nothing from that article you have quoted actually says that the music is “worse” in any way. After all, taste is subjective and equating homogenization as being “bad” is just a subjective opinion.

Unless I missed something important, if a lot of songs within a genre are sticking to similar sounds and volume that sounds more like the genre becoming more defined over time. If you value diversity, that’s fine but isn’t the point of genres to group together a bunch of similar things? As I’ve heard one person put it, “complaining about pop music being all the same is like complaining about doctors constantly using the same treatments like penicillin instead of using a wider variety like leeches and blood letting,” or something to that effect. It is hard to understand how it is bad that artists and the like are learning the most widely appealing or effective techniques to accomplish their goal.

@Background Pony #9AF9
Interesting; so they proved that music is objectively getting more homogeneous. I suppose that doesn’t necessarily mean “worse,” though it’d probably be reasonable to say it’s less interesting as a whole.

peaking in the 1960s

@Background Pony #9AF9

Besides, it’s scientifically verifiable that pop music is slowly getting worse over time, so you’re absolutely right.

I’m curious, how would you go about proving that?

The researchers based their analysis on the Million Song Dataset, a publicly available 280-gigabyte file that provides a sort of background sketch—name, duration, tempo, and so on—of songs from nearly 45,000 artists. Of the million songs therein, 464,411 came out between 1955 and 2010 and include data on both the sonic characteristics and the year of release.

Joan Serr, a postdoctoral scholar at the Artificial Intelligence Research Institute of the Spanish National Research Council in Barcelona, and his colleagues examined three aspects of those songs: timbre (which “accounts for the sound color, texture, or tone quality,” according to Serr and his colleagues); pitch (which “roughly corresponds to the harmonic content of the piece, including its chords, melody, and tonal arrangements”); and loudness (more on that below).

After peaking in the 1960s, timbral variety has been in steady decline to the present day, the researchers found. That implies a homogenization of the overall timbral palette, which could point to less diversity in instrumentation and recording techniques. Similarly, the pitch content of music has shriveled somewhat. The basic pitch vocabulary has remained unchanged—the same notes and chords that were popular in decades past are popular today—but the syntax has become more restricted. Musicians today seem to be less adventurous in moving from one chord or note to another, instead following the paths well-trod by their predecessors and contemporaries.

Finally, it comes as no surprise that music has gotten louder. A piece of music’s loudness is an intrinsic characteristic of the recording, not to be confused with the listener-controlled volume. “Basically, the audio signal, when recorded and stored, is physically bounded to be between certain values (+1 and –1 volts in original recording systems),” Serr explained in an email. “You can record signals fluctuating between –0.2 and +0.2 or between –0.6 and +0.6 (positive and negative fluctuations are necessary to make the loudspeaker membrane move). That’s the intrinsic loudness level we’re talking about.”

For years audiophiles have decried the “loudness wars”—the gradual upping of recorded music’s loudness over time, in an apparent effort to grab listeners’ attention. Loudness comes at the expense of dynamic range—in very broad terms, when the whole song is loud, nothing within it stands out as being exclamatory or punchy. (This two-minute YouTube video does a great job of demonstrating how excessive loudness saps richness and depth from a recording.) Indeed, Serr and his colleagues found that the loudness of recorded music is increasing by about one decibel every eight years.

Besides, it’s scientifically verifiable that pop music is slowly getting worse over time, so you’re absolutely right.