I'm sure there could also still be instrumentals.

Why not just explore avant-garde music that exists in spades instead of waiting for pop culture to do it for you?

I do, to some extent. Plus, the majority of my music listening these days is classical music, which easily is outside this paradigm.

But complaining about modern pop music wasn't the point of this thread. It was just wondering if the pop music paradigm that's been around for more than a hundred years is ever going to come to an end. Or at least fade down to a trickle, largely overtaken by something else and reduced to an archaic niche.

Will people ever get tired of it and feel it's run its course? Or is there something about 2-5 minute snippets of music with singers singing rhyming lyrics in verse-chorus structures so ingrained in the human psyche that it will never die?

Instrumental music can be (and already is) popular.

I don't see these open ended parameters going away since they have the capacity for so many different ideas. I don't see that as a threat to new approaches either.

I think a lot of people - perhaps the majority even - prefer not to work at their music, which is to say, think about it too much. Ask someone what say an Ariana Grande song is about, or how Kelis explores the human condition and many - not all of course, but many - will look at you blankly and say stuff like "oh I just like the music X plays/sings/writes/delete as appropriate" or "it's good to dance to" or "I like having it on while I do other stuff." The very definition of wallpaper music. When you have that kind of attitude, it's going to be very hard to change people's minds to make them actually not only listen to, but want to listen to music properly.

Most of us here think as music not just as something we turn on in the morning as we get breakfast or dance to at night, but as something that's important to us, something we want to explore and understand better. Something we may wish to write about, or read about, and which may lead us in its turn to other music of a similar nature. Your average pop fan will allow themselves to be spoon-fed whatever is in the charts, whatever their friends are listening to, and that's about it. Ask them to try something different, they'll just look at you most likely.

I always remember watching the fans before an Ed Sheeran concert being interviewed, and not one of them could give any coherent answer as to WHY they liked his music. Couldn't even name a song so far as I could see. When you're that de-invested in the music, then basically pop pap is all you want, and as long as the majority want that, then that's what they'll be fed.

How far into the future are you talking about?

I have no idea. I'm just wondering if people think it's going to die or at least fade away sometime in the future - ANY time in the future.

I think Trollheart touched on the main reason why it might not die above: Most people probably don't want to think too hard about what they're listening to, and 2-5 minute snippets of music with rhyming lyrics and repeating melodies play easily into that desire. It's basically a simple musical format that appeals to a large mass of people who don't care about getting too sophisticated with their musical tastes.

If he's right (and I wouldn't be surprised), if the pop music format I'm talking about is to fade out and die someday anyway, it would probably require that the masses decide to get more sophisticated with their musical tastes.

Whether or not that can happen, I don't know.

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Might as well lock the thread.

I think, to more effectively term what you're describing, you're not actually referring to "popular" music. Classical was once the predominant popular song form, not that long ago in the history of global culture. The properties you named are instead more accurately befitting of what I'd term "commercial music," which has only existed for a very short time and is most likely on the decline.

When FM took over and dominated the musical landscape in the 20th century, and MUZAK operated the majority of commercial spaces, there was a very narrow scope of musical style available to the general public. And as this was the chief means by which people gained musical exposure, it was considered the cultural norm. During this age, freeform stations and pirate radio DJs became beacons of light exposing listeners to strange and wonderful sounds outside the status quo of “commercial music.”

However, more recently, as streaming has come to replace broadcast media, there is a greater opportunity for nuance and variety. Everynoise dot com demonstrates the growing shift in the popular music paradigm, to use Spotify data as just one example.

Perhaps, in this digital age, the heightened availability of music and the dissemination of control from the hands of a few commercial corporations to the discretion of the listening populace will usher in a new era of musical literacy and diversity.

I am hopeful for the future.

Technically you're right about the term "popular" music. Whatever you want to call what I described is fine with me.

I was thinking, I'm wondering if you could trace the dominance of the paradigm I was talking about to the advent of recorded music? Prior to that, to enjoy music you had to either play it yourself or go to some sort of concert to see professional musicians (or at least good amateurs) play it. That is, all music was live. I would think that would largely leave the composition and performance of music to people who had some modicum of music skill and education. But once recorded music came along, some person or group of people could record something once, and that one performance then got listened to thousands or millions of times. This made it easier for amateurs to make their own music, so you could call this whole paradigm "the amateurization of music." It's kinda like other things: Once it becomes mass-produced it also become democratized and more consumable by the masses. Like, the McDonald's of music. The shorter and simple format is simply more palatable to the masses whose musical skills, education and sophistication mostly aren't on the level of the professional musicians of yore.

But I think I'd have to think that through some more ...