So, it's official. A large-scale scientific analysis of thousands of popular songs from 1955 to the present has confirmed that songs charting on the Billboard Top 200 in the current decade contain more overlap between instrumentation, recording production, lyrical content, and melody than ever before -- in other words, apparently your parents are right: Top 40 really does all sound the same! And remember, chart pop has been trending towards breadth for a long time now -- including house, post-dubstep, pop-rock, hip-hop, and R&B as major subgenres -- but it turns out that these are just disguises for the same damn song. What's more, the mixing on chart pop is ubiquitously louder than ever before. It's not that people are turning their volume up higher; they don't need to anymore, because the music just is louder. Yes, we all already knew pop music was a market commodity designed to move records (er, downloads), but this study is pretty disheartening nonetheless, as it reveals just how unsophisticated our collective tastes have become -- and how easily we can be duped into falling for songs that are identical in so many respects. Oh, and we're all going deaf. Yikes! Read the full report over at Reuters.
In related news, tune into "Not Guilty," WRMC's only all Top 40, all the time radio show, every Tuesday from 10 to 11 pm, all summer long!
