Why I don’t like mainstream pop music?

Abhinava Phukan
Sep 9, 2018 · 3 min read

There are various genres of music such as western classical, jazz, pop, hip-hop, etc. Nowadays, pop music is dominating the industry, and despite their various styles with their beats, I still can’t bring myself to like it much even if it was a hit record and I could find only the 80s 90s pop and very few of today’s pop music likable. Why do I feel that way?

“shallow focus photography of man shouting using microphone” by Vidar Nordli-Mathisen on Unsplash

I will be using a certain YouTube video to reference a particular point holds very true to me at least.

Courtesy: thought2 from youtube

Here, the YouTuber thoughty2, stresses on a certain point:

Everything sounds the same

This point is very accurate and here are a few reasons why:

  1. The choice and variety of instruments: If we look back in the music made 30–40 years ago, the range of musical instruments used were vast, and each had its quality of sound (this is known as ‘timbre’). Here, the musicians had to play its instrument very well and paid a lot of attention on how to give its nuances such that the music they produce with their instrument resonates well with their song to capture their audience. However as years pass by, this quality making has gone down a lot. Nowadays, computer-generated music is heavily used where all instruments sampled in the form of data, and the very same data is used to produce music. Since the computer can only store discrete sets of data well as analog ones would consume a lot of space, the nuances of the instruments are missed out hence reducing the quality of the produced music. Regarding its choice, hardly any other instruments were used as most music production comes from a keyboard and drum sampler where repetitive patterns are made to catch the attention of the listener.
  2. Structure of the music: If we look back in the 60s 70s and 80s music along with classical, jazz, video game, and film music, it has a well-defined structure and how music is played with giving each section its meaning to fit a particular theme. Whereas in today’s pop music, it does not have that proper definition of that structure where lyrics gets too repetitive and uses only four chords without much variation and the same drum pattern all over again making it sound very pale and tasteless. Hence, the theme is not clear to the audience, and people tend to like it because of its familiarity.
  3. Another reason to facilitate this is the modern technology. As thoughty2 mentioned, ever since Steve Jobs’ invention of the iPod, you could store as much as songs you wanted. This led to a massive influx of manufactured songs from the music industry that became available to buy from the iTunes store.

Even though we should be making progress with better quality music but instead of progressing we are making a reversion. The reason it is reaching popularity is by how they present the outside cover to the audience either by shoving it into our ears through playing it on the radio or the shopping malls all the time or have a celebrity who worked on TV shows or movies (eg.Selena Gomez) become a singer out of nowhere as a poster boy/girl as thoughty2 mentioned and other forms of niche tricks like abusing the auto-tune and loudness thus brainwashing us into liking the song. But that is a thing for another day since it is my opinion on why I don’t like today’s pop music and not why mainstream music is not good. In conclusion, it all depends on the person on what kind of music they prefer, and it’s not my position to judge that and so, the above states my very reasons not to like mainstream pop music. Off I go to listen to some Pink Floyd …

Sources:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oVME_l4IwII — thoughty2

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