The Insincerity of Modern Pop

By: The Ballad - 6/30/2022

In the realm of the modern music scene, pop music seems to have garnered nearly just as many detractors as it has true fans. If you Google, “Has pop music declined?”, there seems to be a never ending stream of articles and discussion threads about just how much people seem to hate what modern pop has become. However, pop music continues to consistently bring in the most revenue, as well as play a much more important role in the general cultural landscape of society, then any other genre. Are all these grievances because of a decline in the actual quality of the music itself, or is it more so the lack of substance and sincerity of these new artists? And what does the future of this rapidly evolving music industry look like?

To understand what pop was, and what it has become, we need to really define what the word “pop” means. Simply put, it just means “popular.” It really does not encompass one single genre. Back in the 1930s and 40s, jazz and swing was considered the pop music of the time. In the 50s and 60s it was rock and roll. But now in the modern day, we have this sort of totally new genre which has taken the abbreviation and used it to name itself. It is very possible that this new genre will be given a whole new name after it falls out of the zeitgeist in the next 10-20 years, however, for the time being, the best anyone can really do is call it, “early 2000s music” or “music of the 2010s.” It can’t really be given a proper genre because it still hasn’t matured; it blurs too many lines. That is why it just gets labeled with a general term such as “pop.”

Now, the reason that this genre has appeared within the last 20-25 years is a result of natural progression, influenced by the new technologies introduced to the industry. Namely, the internet, and all the digital audio tools that were made, as a result. While these technologies are very useful, and make music production much simpler, they have the potential, like most new technologies, of also being abused. This new generation of artists and producers have now overused them to the point that the songs that have saturated the industry now come across as very inauthentic and substanceless. Back in the days where recorded music had to be tracked onto physical mediums such as reel-to-reel tapes and vinyl records, the limitations of these physical recording methods caused the musical and technical proficiency expectations for musicians to be much higher because obviously the resources were literally limited. There were only so many blank tapes and vinyls that could be acquired at once, and so the ability for artists to be able to give their best performance on the first take was paramount back then. The result was more authentic, maybe not 100% perfect, but more importantly, humanlike performances.

However, now that digital tools are so widely available to everyone, this has made physical recording mediums obsolete; with the DAW (digital audio workstation) becoming the new standard. These DAWs such as Logic, Pro Tools, Reaper, Ableton, Studio One, etc. have made the world of recording music available to anyone with a computer, an audio interface, and an internet connection. Gone are the days where you had to have a ton of money, high musical proficiency, and industry connections in order to record anything that would even come close to being distributed by a label. Everything can now be produced by just one person, and then distributed with a third party service like DistroKid, CD Baby, and TuneCore to put all the songs onto different streaming platforms.

While this has really opened up the industry to anyone who wants to make and share their music, giving everyone the ability to post anything they want also has the side effect of bringing the average quality down over the years. You might think it would balance out because the really proficient, talented, and timeless performers of this current generation also have access to these services, however, the amount of truly talented and inspired musicians that could actually make a difference in the industry get drowned out by the masses of rappers and indie artists trying to get their big break on platforms like SoundCloud. If this was the only issue with this new technology, it wouldn’t be nearly as much of a problem as its become. The real culprit doesn’t seem to be the random kid trying to record something in his room, but more the giant record labels that are using these technologies to shape the industry.

For better or worse, these labels are companies; businesses, whose main objective is to make money, first and foremost. Because of new digital production tools such as Auto-Tune, and the ability for music to be so easily edited through cutting and copy-paste, the demand for big label musicians to actually be able to play and sing proficiently has dropped dramatically. The record labels now hire people who are pretty performers more so than actual musicians. The performance, the dancing, the spectacle, of the things happening on-stage is front and center, with the actual music just acting as background noise. And because of the very skewed contracts that these big label artists sign, the labels own basically everything they make, and dictate exactly what the artists release. They don’t want to take any risks at all, thus dramatically killing the spontaneity and artistry from these songs. It’s no wonder that much of pop music has lost any sort of authenticity, with consumers now listening to streaming playlists which have been curated by major labels to include these hyper addictive, easily digestible songs that don’t challenge people’s preconceived notions of what “good” music is. It seems quite the struggle to find really any super unique characteristics in these songs. Any unusual dissonances? Any super weird time signatures? Any non-pitch corrected vocals? Any unique, out of the ordinary instruments? Any virtuosic solos? The examples I’ve heard seem to be few and far between.

Now, it’s all well and good to complain about things that happened that we don’t like, but it’s already all in the past now. How is the industry going to change in the next decade, and even further into the future? Obviously this is all going to be personal speculation, but there are reasons behind everything that I’m going to say. We have a to take a quick detour from the music discussion in order to understand what is going to happen to it here in the near future, but we’ll come right back.

With the advent of the internet, it brought along with it a lot of potential. But like anything, not all of that potential was positive. Social media platforms, though first introduced around 1997 with the start of SixDegrees.com, didn’t really start to gain mainstream attraction until around 2003 with Friendster. Myspace and Facebook were soon to follow; garnering millions of users in only a few years. The issue with these platforms, which would eventually be exacerbated by the biggest platforms of today, is that they were made purposefully addictive since their inception. During a House committee hearing in 2020, former Facebook executive, Tim Kendall, told Congress that the company intentionally made its product as addictive as cigarettes. The “objective is to get more people to pay attention to your product and to pay attention longer each and every day.” In short, what these apps do is overload your brain with dopamine through different features such as likes, comments, reactions, photos, tagging, etc., in order to cause your baseline level to slowly increase. In order to get the pleasure that you want from all the different videos, likes, posts, etc., you have to consume more and more because your tolerance has gone up. And the only way to break this cycle is to do what’s called a dopamine fast, where you abstain from these quick sources of pleasure in order to return to a healthy, natural baseline.

But, how is this related to music? Well in this respect, the culprits seem to be the most popular social sites of today, Instagram and TikTok. Because of the incredibly limited time you have to make content on these apps, this causes the dopamine that hits our brain to start coming in even faster then it used to on Facebook; eventually leading to the goldfish-like attention spans that so many people nowadays have. In order to get any sort of significant amount of views on a video, you have to grab the viewers attention immediately so that they don’t just keep scrolling. This has caused the music used in these videos to be vastly exaggerated from what any normal sort of song would sound like. Often the soundbites that get used in these addictive videos are the catchiest parts of popular songs, which have then been pitch-shifted either up or down, as well as sped up or slowed down to exaggerate whatever is happening on-screen. They have also been extremely compressed, making everything loud, and removing all dynamics from the audio. I don’t think anyone truly thinks that these short soundbites are replacements for actual songs, however I do think that they are the dangerous starting trend for a music industry which is eventually going to prioritize even more digestible songs, with catchier, overly exaggerated hooks above everything else.

This isn’t the end of it though; far from it. What if I told you the music industry in the very near future isn’t going to be dictated by humans any more, in fact it’s going to be dictated by robots…

Now that might sound crazy, and it’s supposed to a little bit. More accurately, the industry will be controlled by artificial intelligence. If we follow down our logic train that music industry execs only care about profit margins, then in that respect, we have take AI into consideration. In fact, AI is becoming so good, multiple mega-corporations and their AI programs, such as Sony, with their “Flow Machines” project, as well as Google’s “Magenta,” have begun analyzing thousands of different songs in an attempt to recreate something that is on the caliber of what humans can do.

It seems a safe prediction that AI will become so natural and easy to use, that almost every single chart-topping hit in the future will have been written and curated by AI owned by the record labels. They will literally have to take no risks in what songs they put out, because the AI will have already factored in all the aspects of songs it has determined people to enjoy the most, and then write songs to accommodate for them. It will also be able to write songs in a much shorter amount of time than humans can, as well as probably mix and master them so that every little thing sounds as pleasing as possible to the average human ear. It could potentially make human input in the songwriting/creating process, totally obsolete.

In fact, there may even be no need for real human performers in the future either. Hologram technology has also been getting better, with legacy acts like Michael Jackson, Whitney Houston, and 2Pac all already giving performances to sold out venues. Why would AI generated artists, curated and created to be perfect for the newer generations, not be able to sell out arenas? Especially in this new coming era of Virtual Reality with things like the Metaverse; I think it is entirely possible and probably likely.

I guess the question at the end of the day is, can this train be stopped? Personally, I think there is hope, and in no way should we give up. There are more people then we realize that long for the days of real musicianship. Maybe with a new generation of a few key artists, there can be a revival, and real, passionate, human music may yet find its way back into the culture. But without that big cultural shift, the likelihood that anything is going to change any time soon, is slim. But we should never give up, because it's our story, "and we will eat it in the final act if somewhere between here and the final act, we don't stand up on our hind legs and howl."