How Lead Singers Lost Their Spotlight in Modern Music

And what that says about our society

Pavle Marinkovic
The Riff
Published in
5 min readAug 22, 2024

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An image with Dall-E

There’s something different about the music we hear now, but it’s hard to pinpoint exactly what.

Music’s essence has changed, and one of the most significant shifts has been in the vocals. Legends like Elvis, Aretha, and Sinatra dominated in the past, and many say it’s not like it used to be.

And no, it’s not just about nostalgia.

Let’s look at this shift, and you’ll see what happened to music’s soul (i.e., the human voice) over the years.

The rise and fall of the lead vocal

A couple of researchers from the University of Oldenburg in Germany wanted to see if the importance of lead vocals has changed over time in popular music.

They dug deep into over 700 songs from 1946 to 2020, aiming to see if the mix of vocals to the accompanying instruments — what they call the Lead-Vocal-to-Accompaniment Ratio (LAR) had shifted across decades. They covered various genres and decades to comprehensively understand how music has evolved.

Next, they analyzed each song’s audio mix and focused on this balance (lead vocals to the rest of the music). In other words, they were trying to figure out how loud the

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