Repetition Equals Money

"REPETITION EQUALS MONEY"

Arch and I agree that, for the most part, repetitive pop and country music sucks.  Turns out that repetitive music is the best-selling, the most palatable to the masses, and is mostly confined to three genres:  hip-hop, pop, and country.

This article by Colin Morris, "Are Pop Lyrics Getting More Repetitive?", is amazeballs.  It quantitatively analyzes the repetitive quality of song lyrics and how much of them could be removed to represent (basically) an original-to-repeated ratio, which the author calls Compression.  Seriously read this s**t right now.

https://pudding.cool/2017/05/song-repetition/

This is right up the alley of my experience with discourse analysis and quantitative linguistics analysis of writers from my undergrad courses.  A simplified example of it would be that an author using passive language about body parts, like "her eyes rolled away from him while her mouth began to relax apathetically," might have depression and sexual hangups manifesting as a loss of agency in their characters expressed as body parts out of their control.  It seems far fetched, but many authors have statistically significant repetition in their writing that both defines their writer's voice and reveals things about their personalities (such as Flannery O'Connor and Edgar Allen Poe).  Concepts from this discipline were later applied to FBI profiling in order to reveal character traits from written correspondence from criminals in the hopes of narrowing their demographic.

At this point, it's obvious that I'm a data points guy and I'm probably boring any readers.  But how does this relate to music?  Someone like Rihanna (the most repetitive artist in the whole dataset, which likely means the whole frigging world) is not likely smart enough to know that her lyrics (if she even wrote them) are more marketable, palatable, and profitable by being basic and unoriginal.  But her producers and songwriters certainly the hell are.  We have all become familiar with the aftertaste of this tried and true formula from "the big four" music production groups.  Universal Music Group, Sony Music Group, Warner Music Group, and EMI Music account for 88% of the market share of music production (wiki article here).  It's an ever-accelerating process of writing short, easy, unoriginal songs, making them 30-50% chorus, and then pressing them for release on an ever-shortening timeline.  

I won't go so far as to say non-repetitive lyrics guarantee quality music or that repetitive music is all bad (Prince wrote an incredible song called "Joy in Repetition"), but it's a correlated data set for sure.  The greatest rapper alive (in the Snobs' opinion), Eminem, is "consistently non-repetitive" (read the article's conclusions below).  It puts him in a league of his own and shows that he has original thoughts bubbling out of him.

The final thought is "how will we explain this to our kids as they grow to appreciate music and how will we instill in them a love for creative, original, dynamic music?"  I believe strongly that there is a relationship between intelligence, a hunger for originality, and a hatred for cookie-cutter media.  Hopefully that means that we will raise smart kids, play "Holla Back Girl" or "Who Rule the World" to them, and watch them wince in discomfort as their ears get violated with crappy music.

Thanks for staying the course through this verbose monstrosity.  I need to write the next one drunk to avoid this from happening again.  Eschew swill, thirst for culture, and blast the good stuff.

Brad

Conclusions from Morris's article:

"People have described 1989 as the album where Taylor Swift fully transitioned from country singer/songwriter to popstar. This data adds some flavour to that claim. 4 of her 5 most repetitive songs are from 1989.

Madonna has a long, consistent legacy of highly repetitive music. Interestingly, her two least repetitive songs are arguably the only two that don't belong to the pop genre: they're both from the musical Evita, and written by Tim Rice and Andrew Lloyd Weber.

Rappers like J. Cole and Eminem tend to be consistently non-repetitive.

Is it any wonder Rihanna won the title of most repetitive artist in the dataset? Over half a dozen of her songs sit on the far right of the distribution (including, appropriately, Pon de Replay)."