Posted on 07/26/2012 6:16:26 PM PDT by Dallas59
Researchers in Spain used a huge archive known as the Million Song Dataset, which breaks down audio and lyrical content into data that can be crunched, to study pop songs from 1955 to 2010.
(Excerpt) Read more at reuters.com ...
I wasn’t aware there was any after 1970. It just got worse with each succeding decade.
Got a start point for that?? Cause since about 1980, so-called “country” has mimicked every bad pop/rock trick in the book. But prior to that, yes, you are right.
It did, you are right, but somehwere in the 90’s, whatever there was left just went straight down the crapper.
With rap, boy bands, lip synching dancing chics, alternative nonsense...music just became a wasteland, and now in 2012, it almost isn’t even worth discussing, although some worthwhile compositions do still seem to occur, it’s incredibly rare and won’t be heard on radio anywhere.
Me either. Have you heard the crap that passes as music today and back as far as the 1980s? Pure, unadulterated unmelodic junk and often played with the heaviest speakers on Earth (I'm referring to the hearing-destroying equipment in cars and trucks).
Today's kids don't have the benefit of listening to real pop music, you know, music that had differentiating melodies and lyrics that made some sense.
or 
or 
I know whatcha mean. I agree. 1980’s a good starting point.
Rock N Roll’s been going downhill ever since Buddy Holly died.
Well it’s hard for me to say, I’m still pretty young, 41 a genXer, so I imagine people would say that much of the music I love was crap too.
I am a huge fan of 70’s and 80’s rock, I also enjoy classical, especially piano and strings. I also enjoy some of the older ballad style country music from Marty Robins, Conway Twitty, Charlie Rich and guys like that. I enjoy some classically trained singers such as Bocelli and Brightman, and even some very nicely crafted music from some older video games.
Basically, as soon as rap came out, music lost me. I do not even know what to call “popular music” of today.
It’s almost like you can hear the decline in our culture in our music from decade to decade. We are in a dark ages now I fear.
Who says you have to be lazy and listen to mainstream? I no longer know what mainstream is besides hip hop and Nashville. With Internet you can find all kinds of offbeat, left field music that suits your taste, and I have done it and been doing it for years, focusing mainly on Americana, which often enough is not too loud and almost entirely accoustic.
What are you talking about! I just found Amy Winehouse! To bad she died from booze and drugs. : (
But there is more talent like her rising up.
Sun Ra had synths in the early 60s;
What’s happened in the last 20 years?
Listen to SHARON JONES the older black woman with the SAME live band
Between the compression and digitization, and the widespread heavyhanded use of autotune, most current “pop” music sounds jagged, screechy and fake on top of all that. They’re “entertainers” not musicians and it shows.
That’s not to say that there aren’t plenty of talented, actual musicians making great music today, it’s just that you have to make an effort to find them. Thank goodness for iTunes and Pandora.com, otherwise I’d have retreated into an analog cocoon by now, lol.
The music business killed itself. Filled with frustrated musicians who never made it big calling the shots, passing judgement and dictating what you WILL like is a remedy for disaster. Musics greatest moment was in its infancy
Pop music today is manufactured, not written. It is assembled, not arranged. It is executed, not performed.
I think it was the Pink Floyd at Pompeii film that has Roger Waters discussing the moog synth they were working with on Dark Side of the Moon. Something about how any monkey could operate one and “make music” but that they were striving for something more out of it.
Certainly there is at least one programmed loop on DSOTM and its sequence was revealed on the Classic Albums documentaty about that album.
Synths in and of themselves are not “bad” (although a real piano has richer sounds and require the musician to play soft or intense, there is no faking it) but so much mainstream music today is just looped beats and processed singing. Bleh.
with a handful of companies owning all movies, tv shows, and music recordings published between 1930 and 2012 and the ever extension of "copyrights", they won't be going broke anytime soon. They'll continue to make billions and billions off of works whose production costs were long ago paid off.
IF they didn't have that nest egg to keep making bank off of, Hollyweird/NYC/Nashville would have to be more responsive to the market demands.
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