>> "I wonder how this affects the writing of songs."
It depends on why you're writing the song I guess. If you're writing a pop song you want to get to the top of the charts following that formula is probably essentially (although it obviously doesn't guarantee success). Just listen to some of the top pop songs - they clearly have a formula. The problem is that when everything follows the formula you can't listen to much of it because it gets boring.
I'd say if you're writing a song you want to last, something that will potentially go down as a classic, forget about formulas a write what you think sounds good.
> ... how will humanity ever learn to be creative if everyone keeps doing the same thing over and over
this charted for the yearly top 100 selling songs over the last ~80 years would clearly show the dumbing down of popular music.
The Standard Songbook contains music that everyday people sang and danced to, but has a creative variety of chord progressions.
> most genres are more formulaic than people want to believe.
The biggest crime is copyrighting the best intro chord sequences in the 1960's, and since then everyone has to make slight variations or they would be called out for copying. We can't make good music today due to copyrights...
>Some genres are formulaic by design, but the draw for so many others is the human experience and the inventiveness.
Those genres are safe (for a while), but they're also a puny portion of the market. American pop music is totally going to be replaced by AI. It's been nothing but awful, formulaic crap for the last 25 years, so there's no way that AI-generated music could possibly be worse.
> Why can't performers just stay the same forever, producing a never-ending sequence of similar but distinct works?
Because they're artists. Even the record company-manufactured acts consider themselves artists.
On a human level, they're already performing the same pieces of music thousands of times - in rehearsals, concerts, recordings. It must get incredibly tedious after a while. You want them to write the same type of music all their lives as well? You monster! :-P
> There’s only so many notes and very few chords used in pop music.
At the risk of sounding like a grumpy old man, I find very sad the fact that pop songs have become nothing more than 4 chords just repeating over and over, with a thin veneer of inconsequential melody over them, serving a never ending stream of banal lyrics. Is this really the best of what award-winning musicians like Sheeran et al can do? I mean, they don't even bother changing the harmony for the chorus, and where has the bridge gone?
> pop songs seem to be becoming extremely short sicne only a snippet is needed to blow up
That is approximately what happened during the punk-rock era.
A bunch of musicians were tired of overly-complex neo-classical jerkoff that was popular in the age of Deep Purple, Pink Floyd and Jethro Tull and just decided to write three-chord songs with a catchy melody and get rid of all the complexity.
Perhaps this is an introduction to some kind of neo-punk era? Probably not, though.
> I hate how people decide something is an inevitable eternal cycle that started in the 20th century. Recorded music hasn't been around long enough to think that platitudes like this actually have any meaningful content.
Maybe, but doesn't the same complaint exist about other media, too? 'Kids these days and their [books|music|art|clothes|dance styles]'
> But it is extraordinarily difficult to have such a mastery of composition and understanding of what music is already familiar to people
The problem with this argument IMHO is that if it were true, one would in fact be able to just bang out hits by developing such mastery. But music hits get popular primarily on the basis of luck, survivor bias, branding, etc, not strictly based on artists' composition skills. There are plenty of very talented one-hit wonders, and even criticisms that popular music is "manufactured" (implying that it is relatively easy to just follow some vague formula of 4/4, II-V-I chord progressions and lyrics about love and end up with something that resembles a hit).
>The lyrics to this song are like the anthem of Holden Caufield... a wry, disillusioned, antisocial, anticonsumption, post-war love song. Anyone who ever thought otherwise, is a turd who only loved this song because it was Top 40 and reminiscent of some lost High School dance, despite the fact that the song itself is completely anti-pop.
Thanks for the most cliched and tired interpretation of the song that could be...
> The average person listening to Taylor Swift is thinking about Taylor Swift, and not what they're listening to.
I think this is a grand oversimplification. Personality certainly _contributes_ to pop stardom, but the music is still #1. Before anyone knew who Taylor Swift was, they connected with her through one or more song.
> A lot of creative detail goes into the production, arrangement, and the vocal performance. Not the MIDI file.
Of course, but even having an autonomous "songwriter" that could write _a_ hit would be a gamechanger for music (though obviously most immediately applicable to top 40 / pop)
> You need a model of mind to do that last one
I disagree. Machines already produce what would otherwise be considered "experimental" music, you just need some deep reinforcement learning to know what has mass appeal.
Incredibly reductive and facially absurd considering there is no way to formulaically make a hit song.
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