I open Spotify’s top 50 currently most played songs and press play. My ears are met with exactly what I expected: a monotonous playlist of almost identical songs. Identical beats, identical melodies, identical robotic auto tuned voices. It’s like a record player stuck on repeat. According to the BBC, yearly CD sales have declined by almost 100 million from 2008-2018. Musicians throughout the country are struggling to find work. In less than 20 years, the music industry has gone from a thriving enterprise to an absolute mess. For many people, myself included, it begs the question:

 

Why?

 

To begin, we must first look back. Ending the 1970s through to the 1980s, it became evident that the future of commercial music would involve more and more quantized and electronic instruments, and far less live instruments played by actual people. In 1970 the charts were filled with anything and everything: pop, country, rock, soul, blues and much more. By 1985, the same was true, although there was a noticeably large amount of synth-driven pop ballads. Fast forward another 15 years, and it simply felt like people were running out of ideas, which is even more evident in today’s music. Artists are recycling the same chord progressions, the exact same boring drum beats and the exact same vocal sounds. It feels like a record stuck on repeat. 

 

Some may argue that modern music has simply evolved from the past– it is an exploration of new cultures and genres. However, I would argue that this does not excuse the blatant lack of variety within pop music. Medium.com claims that the average song length decreased by more than one minute from 1990 to 2020. Social media sites like TikTok encourage shorter and shorter songs– otherwise they simply won’t fit in the small time allowance for each video or reel. Furthermore, the endless scrolling has deteriorated our attention spans. Dr Gloria Mark found that, in 2012, the average human attention span was half that of 2004. People literally can’t sit through a three or four minute song, let alone an eight-minute song like Stairway to Heaven. As a result, artists create shorter and more repetitive songs to appeal to the masses.

 

To conclude, we need to stop this madness. We need to take back our charts. By continuing this spiral of decline, we may well see the end of music’s popularity altogether.