It’s quite weird that all pop music nowadays sounds so similar to each other. Same beats, similar lyrics, similar themes of sad love confessions and breakup songs that don’t care. I believe that popular music producers are experimenting less with the power and sheer diversity of music styles and genres.
First off, time signatures. Especially in pop music, you usually just hear the infamous “common time” 4/4. It seems perfect in a variety of ways. It’s an even amount of beats. It’s a simple, not complex meter. It’s catchy and easy to bop to. However, that simpleness is its downfall. When almost every song can be catchy in the same way, how can popular music producers stand out of the crowd? It’s like a school of fish, all staying together, where the ones who go outside get eaten by the various predators that lurk around the ocean. In some of my recent musical scores, I have used 11/8, 15/8, and even 7/4 in order to relay the type of emotions I want to invoke. Only using 4/4 is one of the ways that popular music is hindered greatly in originality.
Secondly, many melodies are just rehashes of previously viral sensations. One blatant example of this is “Betty (Get Money)” by Yung Gravy in 2022. It clearly rips from “Never Gonna Give You Up” by Rick Astley, which is not only a poor use of the great song that was, but it just talks about getting money and women, which isn’t the main theme of “Never Gonna Give You Up” in the first place. It’s sad how popular this became (probably because it used those samples” because it just shows the music industry that people are willing to be fed the same music over and over again.
How could we fix this? We could talk about it more openly, as I am doing with this post. We could also shun those who blatantly reuse old samples without doing enough to truly make it original. But what will really change their minds? Stop listening to blatantly unoriginal music. They only get money from sales to shows, sales of digital music copies, and views and ad revenue, outside of merch and other incomes. By not listening to unoriginal music, we can show them that we won’t listen to the same stuff over and over again, which will broaden their ideas and lead to better music for all, even the uninformed.