swingbaby,

there are a couple of factors that shaped modern pop of these days, in particular:

  • If you want to remember something new, you need a structure in which you can integrate that new thing (synapses). The more different synapses you already have for a specific topic, the easier you can remember new things of that topic. The average listener / the mass has built up a relatively low number of music-related synapses. Therefore the mass needs simple melodies and simple progressions to be able to adopt a song (this has almost always been the case, so this first factor is not very specific for nowadays). Only if the mass adopts a song, it becomes POPular => Pop
  • Within the last two decades, it became more and more difficult to find melodies that don't violate any copyright. So the music producers even more resign from distinctive melodies.
  • The internet made it easier to rip a high number of songs, so that more and more people refused to pay money for songs.
  • Digital music software with all those ready-to-use-loops made it easier for people with a low knowledge of music theory to produce songs, and social networks made it easier to distribute them. So from that side, the market has been flooded for a while, so that many people from the mass have built up synapses for that stuff, which was mostly made upon a low overall number of quite simple progressions.
  • Streaming platforms then made almost every professionally produced song cheap and very easily available, so that radio and TV don't generate a commonly shared knowledge of music anymore. And with tools like Spotify's Release Radar, people don't get out of their own music-clouds anymore. The lowest common denominator for a song to reach into the majority of these clouds is ... a low number of quite simple progressions.

This all more and more merged together then. So now, many professional music producers say to themselves: "Why making at least medium creative songs, if that takes quite long to do, enhances the risk for very expensive copyright lawsuits and will currently not be adopted by the mass as much as simpler songs - and that all while the mass would even prefer to do illegal things than to pay the small amount of one appropriate dollar per song?"

Even artists who perform relatively simple music, often don't listen to that genre privately. That counts not only for Pop Music, but e.g. also for some Rock musicians or some Country musicians.

Many people's usage of vocabulary like "Cool" derives more from what a person grew up with than from some objective criteria. And "Modern" is often not more than what the mass adopts currently, but doesn't automatically stand for a high degree of creativeness.

I agree on one thing: If PG wants more customers, it should get better known among younger people. That includes more styles etc. which the kids are used to (many of them? - well, at least superficially, since there are not sooo many essential differences between those songs, as explained above). But it also includes a couple of other critical aspects.

Last edited by MoveToGroove; 10/09/21 10:21 PM.
BiaB UltraPak+ 2026; Windows 10
Bass: Intermediate; Piano: Beginner
I came to this forum in order to suggest feature improvements for non-professional musicians like myself that use BiaB mainly as a playalong tool and as a learning tool