When Did Popular Music Become Standardized? A Statistical Analysis

There is an overload of music. 60,000 songs are uploaded to Spotify every day. Over 20% of those don’t get streamed even once. The ubiquitous access to almost every piece of recorded music in history has led to a paradox of choice, promoting passive and playlist-driven music consumption and creating winner-take-all effects for the biggest artists.

This problem is almost impossible to fix in a culture that relies heavily on algorithms. The algorithm is, by definition, a repeating pattern that always looks backward. It does something in the future based on what worked in the past.

So the algorithm that recommends music or videos on a web platform will never deliver a totally fresh and new expe... See more

Billboard's 2024 year-end analysis: 82% hit songs now use one of just four melodic structures that have previously proven most successful by the algorithm. Spotify's year-end data: the average similarity score between Top 100 tracks reached an all-time high.