John Seabrook and the Modern Song Machine
Ever noticed a certain “sameness” to the pop songs you hear nowadays? A similarity in their structure, feel, and the voices you hear on the tunes? You’re correctly clued in.
.. The pop music running the airwaves today, those songs you seem to know but aren’t quite sure how you know them, are created in an interesting and deliberate way. Depending on your stance, the result is either horrifying or fascinating.
The method is called track-and-hook songwriting, and employs an entire industry of sub-specialists whose job is to put together pieces of a Frankenstein beast that ends up as a monster hit. Like many other industries, songwriting has been changed immensely by the Internet: With attention spans shorter than ever and avenues for music consumption unlimited and mostly free, hits are more important than ever, not less.
.. Chris Anderson, of The Long Tail fame, predicted that the Internet would lead to less hit-domination and more exploration of individual passions, writing in 2005: “If the twentieth century entertainment industry was about hits, the twenty-first will be about niches…This is not a fantasy. It is the emerging state of music today.”
.. The songs are engineered precisely to hook the listener as soon as possible and then re-expose them to a hook over and over. Attention spans are too short to allow “dead space” in a song:
.. “It’s not enough to have one hook anymore,” Jay Brown explains. “You’ve got to have a hook in the intro, a hook in the pre, a hook in the chorus, and a hook in the bridge, too.” The reason, he went on, is that people on average give a song seven seconds on the radio before they change the channel, and you got to hook them.
.. In today’s pop world, vocal quality no longer carries the importance it once did, nor does writing meaningful lyrical content.
.. Moneyball-style, the engineering of musical addictiveness takes an old pop-music concept — giving listeners heavy exposure to a song so it becomes familiar — and uses that to predict which songs will be hits