How generic were the charts over time?
One common argument I see on here goes like, "there has always been bad music in the charts." So I wanted to find out if this is true and I did a little project in the past days:
I selected several years with a random number generator from 1960 onwards. For each of these years I then took the songs from the Billboard Year-End Hot 100 (for recent years also marged with the Spotify Top 50) and put them all into one database. I then listened to the songs in randomized order, rating each song whether it is generic or non-generic. You can see the full ranking here.
Generic: A song is generic if it doesn't have any characteristics that distinguish it from the bulk of the other songs of its time. If a song has one or more interesting/unique features (chords, vocalization, melody, lyrics, rhythm, etc.), I don't consider it generic.
These are the results (based on the top 100 for each year):
| year | % generic | ⌀ rating |
|---|---|---|
| 1962 | 69 % | 5,7 |
| 1970 | 44 % | 6,3 |
| 1978 | 52 % | 6,1 |
| 1985 | 52 % | 6.0 |
| 1991 | 53 % | 5,6 |
| 1998 | 78 % | 5,5 |
| 2001 | 68 % | 5,7 |
| 2007 | 56 % | 5,6 |
| 2013 | 60 % | 5,6 |
| 2020 | 74 % | 5,6 |
| 2021 | 75 % | 5,7 |
This data is of course rather subjective. You would rate the songs differently. But since not many of you will have scored a thousand songs in bulk by blandness, just take this data as my 'informed personal opinion' for now.
So if we take this data at face value, there seems to be a significant increase in generic chart music that happened somewhere in the middle of the 90s (from ⌀ 50% to 68%). However, the charts were also quite generic in the early 60s. So it seems more that the time between late 60s and early 90s was somewhat special for whatever reason (technology? culture? industry?).
However, music as a whole has become a lot bigger (what is now considered alternative music was more or less part of the mainstream in the 70s) so that the share of generic music has also grown. But if more music is released nowadays than ever, wouldn't you expect the best, non-generic music to rise to the top? Are the charts generic because not everyone listens to the same stuff as everyone else so that there are more opportunities for formulaic music to prevail?
Today's music has the disadvantage of being late to the party, so that most of the low-hanging fruits have already been plucked. On the other hand, modern music can draw from all different styles of the past, it doesn't have any limitation, it can borrow from any genre and instrumentation, it's like one big open buffet. So why are the charts filled with the same old trap/electropop?