Spanish researchers created a program called The Million Song Dataset that broke down the lyrics and melodies of pop songs between 1955 and 2010 and determined that your Grandpa is right about kids these days: their music is too loud and it all sounds the same. Through a complex algorithm, researchers determined that pop music has gotten steadily louder over the years, but also more boring—with less diversity between chords, tones and timbres. Whereas early songs had clear deviation of different instrumentation, instruments used in modern pop tend to sound more alike. Essentially, a piano and a guitar sound more similar in a Lady Gaga song than they do a Brian Wilson song. What this means is, modern pop is just louder and blander than pop used to be. When questioned, modern songwriters explained that they could really only do so much with lyrics like, “Tik tok on the clock/But the party don’t stop” …
