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Specifically I mean pop music. What you find on the radio, what is most heavily promoted, what gets the most streams + sales.


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In your world, but pop-radio and top-40 still drive a majority of music sales.

This is really fascinating. I'd be curious to know how different genres compare, especially pop music.

And I've genuinely heard of none of those :)

I was more thinking of music where few people would argue that the Top 40 or top YouTube hits represented the tracks with the most "quality".


The more popular that gets, the more it will approximate Top 40 radio, pretty much by definition.

Pop music’s doing great. Just not the mainstream stuff, as usual.

About that mesmerizing signal: just take a look at the pop music industry.

The result of that is what is played up and down the charts, learned from what sells 'records', and embedded into almost anything new to be more and more refined to the taste of the majority/masses. Also the stuff playing in supermarkets to make you buy more.

You say “music characteristics hadn’t much to do with it” but then you list a number of specific characteristics that make music more likely to work on radio. That suggests the opposite of “any music will do”. Only music with very specific qualities will do.

Or maybe you just meant to say you don’t like pop?


Or how much advertising and promotion it takes to make a successful pop song.

The same holds for fast-food and pop music.

Nirvana was not just popular among the posters friends. Pop radio play is a narrow way to measure popularity.

I guess it would depend (like the advertising) on what kind of demographics the population consists of. Pop music, because it is specifically designed to appeal to a broad spectrum of people, would have terribly nonspecific demographics. The weirder the genera, the more specific the audiance (usually), and thus higher "CPM".

Where's the sweet spot? Serving music has got to cost much more than serving a jpg ad, but maybe less than or equal to a flash ad (depending on the song and ad of course). I could very well be wrong about that though.


Congratulations, you just described 99% of pop music.

Tried and true: every once in a while I look at Billboard Hot 100 and other ratings. The top pop artists are not necessarily awesome but often further down the list is good stuff not in high rotation on the ‘trending’ lists.

I think it's pop music, but then my tastes are pretty obscure.

Does the author mean mainstream "on the radio" pop, or the plethora of music we not explore and listen to on music services? I've venture to say the Top 100 lists occupy a smaller proportion of today's listeners thane ever before. We are unconstrained. And melody is out there.

Except that anything else is just other pop music EDM or hip-hop also.

Which came first: the Top 10 hit, or the media blitz to convince you that it's what everyone else is listening to?

Pop music has always been bad. But it’s also catchy and prints money. What were you expecting to find?
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