Is the pop music paradigm going to die someday?
 

By that I mean:

- Dominated by 2-to-5 minute "songs"
- Verse-chorus structure (usually, with variants)
- Repeating melodic lines
- Rhyming lyrics (usually)

Music, of course, doesn't have to have any of those. But it's basically dominated popular music for well over a hundred years (and maybe longer).

Will the most popular music of some era in the future someday (finally!) feature something besides that? What that would be I don't know, just something - anything! - besides that particular form.

When 200 million or whatever songs get written following that particular pattern, after a while just about every variant and niche is going to get thought of and filled in and anything new will sound like something already done (probably many times). So wouldn't you think they'd finally give up on it and move onto something else?

But maybe not?

Oh no not rhyming lyrics.

pop music will never die !!!!

That's an interesting idea. I suppose if you look at the history of music, the pop format has been around quite a short period of time. Currently I feel our attention spans are going in the direction of shorter music not longer, but maybe at some point in the future we would go back to exploring longer pieces more.

I do feel like music in general is running out of fresh ideas, I guess there are just so many variants in sounds and tempo you can think of. So who knows what the future of music is!

God, I hope so. Dull as donuts.

Yes. Everything will die someday.

Oh yes say all the critics
Poetry to music must someday end
Or music itself will be condemned

Pop music paradigms will die because of the music world fragmenting and popular music becoming indefinable rather than your open ended parameters shifting.

Here's one thing I was thinking ...

Instead of putting poetry to music, put prose to music.

In other words, imagine putting, say, Charles Dickens' A Tale of Two Cities to music:
I think if you did that, it would almost force you to eliminate some of the other things I listed (notably, repeating melodies and verse-chorus).

I wouldn't be surprised if somebody's done something like that already, but imagine it becoming the most popular genre. I think it would end up being far more interesting than the current pop music paradigm.

I hate most spoken word so consider yrself vetoed

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.

.

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 ...

I just checked that out, hadn't heard of it before.

It's sort-of what I was thinking of, but not quite. He's more like reading something with some music in the background. What I was thinking of was you would sing a very long melody to the words of the story.

I was thinking of starting another thread on the idea sometime.

I'm reminded of a related fun musical fact shared by an old friend of mine. He stated:

I ****ing love this story! Mozart sets up the first Pirate Bay in history! :laughing:
You're right. Of every 10 people who say "I'm into or enjoy music" maybe 2 or 3 at most can talk knowledgeably about it and really care about the artists other than just something to entertain them for short spells. You'll have, no doubt, among all the millions who cried when say Bowie died, millions more who either didn't know him (too young) or didn't get that affected by his death. People like them just move on, or occasionally hear his music again after he's passed and it makes no impression on them. I still tear up a little when I hear a Bowie song now. Reminds me he's no longer here, and the world is that little bit poorer.

Nah, virtuoso worship is relatively new and folk music (as in amateur music, not the genre) is as old as music itself.

the comment about amateur music is definitely true, but are you sure about virtuoso worship? Like, how new is new and what qualifies as worship? I'm reading a book about medieval Japan and they seem to find virtuoso musicians pretty important. And there's the Greek myth about Orpheus of course

By worship I meant more like seeking virtuosity as the norm as opposed to favouring stronger compositions (not that they're mutually exclusive but you know what I mean). I think it was largely driven by increasingly formal performances in concert halls begging more novel displays, so I had Paganini and Lizst in mind as the starting point for that. You're right that being rightly impressed by virtuosos isn't new and I'm probably doing a eurocentrism right now though lol

Well ... yeah sort of. But that creativity was largely within the fairly narrow format I described in my OP.

You could also say there was an explosion of musical creativity in the early 19th Century when the Romantic era was ushered in by Beethoven, when polyphonic music became developed in the Middle Ages, and all kinds of other pre-industrial eras. So I'm not sure explosions of creativity have all that much to do with democratization.

Incidentally, I don't know if this fits the bill, but Hostsonaten wrote this verbatim from the Coleridge poem...

That's pretty close, but it's still a poem. And the melodies still repeat.

Anyway I want to get away from that specific thing because, as I said, I've been thinking of doing a separate thread on it.

I can't think of a single Beatles song that doesn't follow that format ... except maybe Revolution #9, which doesn't really count. :D

The format you describe is too loose, if anything.

A Day in the Life has repeating melodic lines, (loosely) has rhyming lyrics, and I suppose it doesn't have a chorus but does have verses. The middle section with Paul singing is the only thing particularly different about it, and even then, is not all that uncommon. Lots of pop songs have a section in some part of the song that's different from the rest of the song. They're really more like an elaborate bridge.

Compared to the entirety of all music, the format in my OP is pretty strict and narrow IMO.

Actually, an incisive prose-like style is much more interesting to me than stuff that rhymes.
Mark E. Smith anybody? Nearly all of Robert Wyatt's own songs...

... and I could sing this all day:

Pop music will evolve over time, but I do think it will happen slowly and that the changes from the current format won't be large. At least not until something very dramatic happens to society.. talking western society here in broad terms.

To repeat something I recently wrote in a different thread, a song is made out of various musical traits. It could be distorted guitar, a 5/8 time signature, the break or whatever you call it in Skrillex-songs and so on.

Many of these traits are competing against eachother. What they're competing for is our love and attention. Let's say time signatures.. Music in 4/4 competes with music in 13/8 and other time signatures, possibly also a mix of time signatures within a song. What happens is if the audience finds music in 4/4 more appealing than music in 13/8, then music in 13/8 won't be commercially viable and so will become more obscure. This means that generations growing up will mostly listen to music in 4/4 and will be shaped by that, causing somewhat of a reinforcing feedback loop. While music in 13/8 will still go on existing, it won't have anywhere near as high an influence on society as songs in 4/4. These frequencies/ratios between traits can probably become quite stable for long periods (talking decades or more).

And so it goes for various traits in various genres, whether we're talking harmonies, timbral palettes, instrumentation and so on.

Going up a level, songs compete against other songs. From this perspective, it's about having the right combination of traits for what kind of song it is. The "right" traits make for more competitive (successful) songs. Over time, pop gets distilled into a kind of music that features the most competitive ("right") traits.

What you might ask then is are the "right" traits going to change? Broadly speaking, there are two things that determine what the "right" traits are:

• Nature - we find some things naturally appealing and other things not. I don't think baby crying is ever going to become a very prominent sound in pop music.
• Culture - you know what this is

If culture changes - and so the environment that those traits exist in changes - then that might in turn change what we (on average) consider "right" musical traits. I do think that the traits that we have now are quite distilled to what's "right" for our current nature/culture, but perhaps there's some unfound innovation coming or perhaps society in a hundred years will be very theocratic and lay down some hard rules for what sort of music is allowed or not. Who knows?

Yeah I agree, that was really interesting. Too bad more bands don't do that.