Plain English with Derek Thompson - The Science of How Music Hits Have Changed in the Last 60 Years

Episode Date: February 24, 2023

How does technology shape art? Why has songwriting become more of a visual skill in the 21st century? Why are today's hit songs shorter than songs from any period since the Beatles? What happened to the guitar solo intro—and the classic rock genre in general? How did rap and hip-hop take over the charts? Derek welcomes the musician, writer, and data analyst Chris Dalla Riva to discuss the subtle and not-so-subtle ways that music hits have changed since the 1960s. If you have questions, observations, or ideas for future episodes, email us at [e-mail]. You can find us on TikTok at www.tiktok.com/@plainenglish_ Host: Derek Thompson Guest: Chris Dalla Riva Producer: Devon Manze Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

When you're lost in the darkness, look for the pod. Specifically, the Prestige TV podcast on the Ringer Podcast Network, where we're breaking down every new episode of HBO's The Last of Us. On Sunday nights, grab your battery and join Van Lathen and Charles Holmes for an instant reaction to the latest episode. Then head back to the QZ on Tuesdays for a deep dive with Joanna Robinson and Mallory Rubin. From character arcs to video game adaptation choices, story themes to needle drops, we'll parse every inch of this cordyceps-coded universe.

Watch out for mouth tendrils and follow along on Spotify or wherever you get your podcast. Today, the science of how music hits have changed in the last 60 years. Starting with an old favorite. Losing My Religion by REM was released in 1991 off the album, Out of Time. As you can tell from the first few seconds of the song, it sounds very little like most of today's biggest hits. And this episode is all about why music sounds the way it does in this century.

So why even begin with losing my religion? Well, the answer comes down to that year it was released. 1991. It might be the most important year in the history of pop music in America, or at least more humbly, I would argue it was the most important inflection point in the history of pop music in America. Some of you have heard me tell this story before.

It's one of my favorite stories from my last book, Hitmakers, and it goes like this. In the 1950s, Billboard started publishing the Hot 100 list, which is the most popular songs in the country, and the Billboard 200, which does the same thing for the most popular albums. For many decades, these lists were a lie. Billboard didn't have many ways to truly measure what albums were being sold in stores or played on the radio, and instead they relied on an honor system. They would ask record stores and DJs to self-report. the most popular musicians of the moment. The problem is that both parties had reasons to lie.

The labels would often pressure radio stations to play hand-picked hits. This tactic was made famous by the so-called payola scandals. And the record stores had their own bias. It was a bias toward churn. So when vinyl records were scarce, and a record store had sold out of, let's say, ACDC, if they had a bunch of Bruce Springsteen or REM in stock, then it was rational for them to tell Bill Bill.

Oh, yeah, you won't believe how many people love this new record by Bruce. Like, they wanted to get rid of their inventory. So for many years, Billboard was not telling us the truth about American music. It was holding up a funny mirror warped by label preferences and the finitude of record store inventories. And one of the biggest implications of this structurally dishonest system was that the charts were often overcounting songs from the genres the labels preferred. like rock and roll, which meant they were undercounting genres that they were more indifferent toward, like country or rap, hip-hop.

But the year losing my religion came out in 1991, this changed. Nielsen released SoundScan, which used point-of-sales data from cash registers and stores, so the record stores couldn't lie anymore. And Billboard switched from trusting radio stations self-reports to monitoring airplay through a third party. So suddenly, the charts had become a more honest reflection of the songs Americans were actually listening to.

So when the methodology changed, how did the charts change? Well, before 1991, a country music album had never debuted leading the Billboard 200. But almost immediately after this change, REM fell down the charts, and Garth Brooks, Rope in the Wind, spent eight weeks as the most popular album in the country. The next year, 1992, rock showed that it wasn't entirely dead. Nevermind, by Nirvana, one of the most popular, famous alt-rock albums of all time, hit number one, and it stayed there for two weeks. But the handoff from rock to country was already underway. Garth Brooks in 1992 held the top spot on the Billboard 200 for 17 weeks, eight times longer than Nirvana.

And the best-selling album of 92 was headlined. by this earworm, which is not exactly the most stylistically innovative act of songwriting in production. That's Akey Breaky Heart by Billy Ray Cyrus off the album Some Gave All. As you can hear in that clip, it's sort of a twangy mix of Southern rock in Nashville. But Akey Breaky Heart was groundbreaking for its time in the early 1990s because it wasn't just an instant smash hit. Some Gave All was the first time.

in American history that a country album was the most bought album of the year. We're not done. The most significant legacy of 1991 was not the rise of country. It was this. And as you're about to hear,

this is a stylistic change that is not exactly the dulcet tones of REM. It takes in the blood, I heard it when she screamed to drop because the sun caught the slug. Relate this to no choice and listen to this straight-up man

before they ban the voice. That's Appetite for Destruction by the rap group NWA. In the summer of 1991, NWA made history by releasing the first rap album to ever hit number one on Billboard. And in many ways, this is the most influential legacy of the Billboard chart changes. This was the glimpse of things to come, because for the next 30 years, rap and hip-hop would take off and become by far the most popular genre of music for the next. few decades. So that's the end of the Billboard story. And ever since learning about it, I have always been fascinated by this way of thinking, like understanding the historical and technological forces that shape the music that we listen to and love. And today's guest is Chris Dallariva,

a musician, a writer, a data analyst with Audio Mac, who has produced some incredible essays on the subtle and not-so-suttle ways that music kits have changed in the last 20 years. waves that go far beyond the rise of rap and hip hop to the way songs are written, how choruses sound, how keys have changed, and why some careful music listeners have gone from saying, huh, all these songs have the same chord progression, to, huh, all these songs have the same rhythm. Ida blast with this episode, and I hope you do too.

If you're liking what you hear on this podcast or the rest of our episodes, please give us five stars on Apple Music or Spotify and leave a comment or a positive review. It always goes a long way and we appreciate it. I'm Derek Thompson. This is plain English. Chris Dalariva, welcome to the podcast. Thanks for having me, Derek. So in the last few years, you have been a fount of fascinating work on how pop music is changing and how the sound of hits is changing. And I want to pick up where I left off in the open

and ask you about 1991. How would you describe the significance of 1991 and the sea change in the sound of music since then? Yeah, so 1991 is interesting because at the end of the day, it was just an accounting change from Billboard. We went from surveying record stores to actually looking at point of sale data. And what we saw from that was first that America's tastes were very different than we thought hip hop and country especially were much more popular than had previously been known. And secondly, our tastes were much stickier. What I mean by that is things started staying at the top of the Billboard Hot 100 for longer periods of time. For example, between 1960 and 1980s, 80. The longest there was a number one was first for nine weeks. That was first established in

1960. Hey Jude matched that in 1968. 1978. 1977, it went up to 10 weeks. Olivia Newton John's physical matched that 10 week. So over 20 years, you have the record move up a single week. Then in 1992, Boys to Men gets it to 13 weeks with end of the road. And then over the next three years, it goes 14 weeks and then 16 weeks. The 16 week record wasn't broken. And it was matched by Despacito and then it was broken by Old Town Road a couple decades later.

But we saw very quickly that our tastes were very sticky. We wanted to keep hearing the same thing over and over again. Yeah, it's like the old Billboard Guard had like throttled the accurate reflection of American taste. It wanted everyone to think

that we liked, you know, maybe hair bands or rock music a little bit more than we actually did. It wanted us to think that we liked hip hop and country a little bit less than we actually did. It wanted us to think that our tastes were changing week to week and month to month a little bit more than they actually are.

And suddenly, I just think it's so interesting, yes, that this billboard methodological change really overturned what we think of as American taste in music. One of the really interesting things that it did, one of maybe the most important things that it did, is it launched an era of hip-hop. How would you, in your...

your own words describe the significance of the rise of hip hop in this way. So hip hip hop is sort of the, I don't want to think about this teleologically, but it's going to sort of sound like that. It's the end of a long journey of American popular music shifting from an obsession with melody to an obsession with rhythm. Paul Simon talks about this in an interview where the interviewer asks him, your current work is so much more concerned with rhythm, the melody is that you're feeling that melody is no longer important. And Simon says, we're long out of the age of melody, long out of there, and we probably won't be going back into it.

And in a way, he is right, because hip-hop is obsessed, it's obsessed with rhythm. And this is a trend that, again, like I said, it started decades before where first you have ragtime music that's much more rhythmic. Then you get to rock and roll. There's a great quote from the Chuck Berry song, rock and roll music where he says, just let me hear some of that rock and roll music. It's got a backbeat, you can't lose it. And that's sort of a summary of what's going to happen as the decades go on.

You know, James Brown with funk, very, very rhythmic music. Disco, again, very rhythmic. And then again, like I said, sort of the culmination of this is some of the most rhythmic music we've ever had, which is hip-hop, and its various incarnations. And that's not to say this is worse than more melodically focused music. It's just to say it's different. No, I mean, in many cases, for many people, it might simply be better. One way that I think about this, because we had talked offline about what's the best way to represent this shift from melody to rhythm?

Like, you know, Paul Simon, by the time he said this, he was an aging white guy. You and I are white dudes talking in front of mics. I don't want to make it sound like we're saying that, you know, music today doesn't have a melody. But one way I think, one thing that I think really captures what you're talking about is that in the 20th century, the most common musical memes were melodic memes. You have this chord progression of C, G, A minor, F that served as the backbone of like every hit or every other hit for 50 years.

I mean, maybe the best example, Devin, pull up the famous Axis of Awesome four-cord song. Do you recognize this? Yeah, that is Don't Stop Believing by Journey. Very original song. There's a few more than fit. Check it out. My life is brilliant.

My love is pure. I saw an angel of that I'm sure. That's just two songs that are similar. Forever young. Three songs. No one's not. I won't hesitate. No more.

No more. It cannot wait. I'm young. Okay. So their point, obviously, is that all of these hits from the 1960s, 1970s, 1980s, they were riding on the same melody, right? The melody was the meme. But in the 21st century,

the most notable musical memes are rhythmic rather than melodic. So Vox did this fantastic analysis of triplet flow, triplet flow as a meme in rap. And I think a couple songs can really illustrate this. Devin, play a cut of Cardi B, Bodak, Yellow. Now,

compare that to Panda by designer. Devin, hit that. And you can hear this. Da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da. Even Snoop Dogg caught on to this and made fun of it in a podcast interview. Devin, can you play this last clip? So this might be a way of captioned the dynamic you're pointing to. that melody is dead. Like, that'd be absurd to say. It's that the locus of musical memes has shifted

somewhat from melody in the 20th century to rhythm in the 21st. Yeah, totally. And it would be absurd if we were trying to say that melody was dead when someone like Adele is still massively popular. I mean, that music is melodic. And it's also not to say that her music doesn't have a rhythmic component the same way that hip-hop still has melodic components. It's just that, as you're saying, the memes or the things that have come to define these genres are either more melodically or more rhythmically focused. Another great example of this is, as you were saying, there are certain chord progressions back in the day that basically every band would have their take on. There are certain samples, usually rhythmic samples, that tons of hip-hop artists will use. People often say the most sampled hip-hop song, the most sampled piece.

of all time is this thing called Amen Brother by the Winstons. There's a very famous drum break and funky drummer by James Brown. Tons and tons of hip hop artists have had their own take on that. And again, it's using, as you, to use what you're saying, a rhythmic meme that's sort of used again and again as opposed to melodic or harmonic memes. Another thing that happened in 1991, as you've mentioned, the biggest hits spent more time on the charts, the 10 songs that have spent the most time on the Hot 100 were all released after 1991. I mean, that's incredible. Does that mean that the 10 best songs in the issue of music were all released after 1991? No, of course not. It's just the way that the charts reflect our

tastes mean that our preference for familiarity is more accurately captured by the charts. What do you think is happening there? Yeah, and that's something that's interesting where there's a discontinuity in the data and it makes it look like behavior has changed radically but in reality it probably didn't there's this old story about the guy who apparently started

like pop radio and he said he was I'm probably going to get this story a little bit wrong and most of it's probably apocryphal but he was dating some girl who worked at a restaurant and they should be working all day customers would be coming in playing the most popular songs on the jukeboxes

and then all the customers would leave and while they were cleaning up, he thought it was funny that the waitresses would just start playing the same exact music on the jukeboxes. They wanted to keep hearing the same songs over and over again. And it's not like suddenly in 1991 we just became addicted to the same songs is that this was just a more accurate reflection

of what people's tastes are actually like. And as we've moved to the streaming era, there's another discontinuity because in 1991 it was still based on sales. It was how many copies of the macarena were being sold. But now the charts are based on how many times are those songs being spun? And what we see from that is still there are some changes in how the charts are working, but still we are hyper addicted to songs. People can keep listening to these songs over and over again, and they stay at the top of the charts for long, long periods of time.

It goes back to, there's a musicologist named David Huron, who I believe is at the Ohio State University, or at least was last time I looked into this particular quote. And he said 90% of the time we are listening to music. We are listening to a song that we've already heard. I mean, repetition is built into, it's sewn into the very DNA of music. You have to repeat a rhythm in order to get a verse for a chorus. Chorus are repeated within songs, songs repeated within playlists, playlist, replaylists, when we go on drives. It's fractal repetition all the way down. So it makes sense that, you know, in a world of, you know, a vinyl and of CDs, we were buying the album once, but we were wearing it out,

listening to it a thousand times. Now with Spotify, we have the ability to publicly record every single spin. So there's no more private spins. When I click on whatever, Despacito for the 10,000 time, those 10,000 spins of Despacito

or those 10,000, turns are all recorded when you look at the song on your Spotify and see a 1.3 billion plays of this song. It's all transparent. Yeah, definitely. And that's part of me. You know, you always wish that we had this data going back is like when the Beatles, I want to hold your hand was a number one back in the 60s. Was it, was it that people were buying that record a lot and then never really listening to it that much? Or were they actually spinning it that much? Given the longevity the Beatles, I'm just going to assume that they were playing the record a lot too. But we really don't know.

And it's something that streaming, now that our charts reflects streaming, it's a more accurate representation of ultimately decades ago what the charts were after, which is what is the most popular record right now. Yeah, I remember when I was writing my book, Hit Makers, I talked to someone who said, It's possible that the most heard song of all time is Brahms Lullaby. Like, because if you're a mom who sings that song to your children, as my mother sang it to me, well, 365 days times, I think I got a lullaby until I was like eight years old.

I mean, you are now talking about thousands and thousands and thousands of days listening to this song and then repeating it in your own head, maybe as you're falling asleep. I want to connect what we're talking about here, the idea that technology changes music habits to the idea that technology also changes what songs sound like. You've observed that average song length has gone down rather significantly in the last few years with the rise of streaming, and average intro length has gone down too.

Tell us what's happening here. So starting in, well, I'll go back a little bit further, starting in the early 60s, songs were relatively short and they were somewhat constrained, or not somewhat, they were constrained, at least on a single, by how much sound a vinyl a 45 could hold. Because if you try to pack more sound on there, the groove's got to get smaller. There's really a physical limit to how much sound you can get on there and have it still sound good. As vinyl technology improves over the decades, we see hit singles get longer and longer. And it sort of plateaus at some point in the 1980s, and it stays pretty steady. But then throughout the 2000s, we start seeing song length shrink. And in the

2010s, it sort of plummets. I think over the last decade, the average length of a number one hit has declined by about 10%. And the reason for this is largely streaming. It's mostly a fine, whereas back in the day, there was a physical constraint. Now there's a financial incentive. You need someone to listen to your song for over 30 seconds if you want to get paid and musicians like to get paid. So the goal is to make sure someone gets to that 30 second mark. And given that there's so much content out there right now, podcast, television shows, you've got to get to your point quickly.

And that's why we've also, in my opinion, seen song introductions shrink to. People want to get to the point. We want to hook them fast. And actually, introductions have shrunk at a much faster rate than the overall song length. So shorter intros are not just a function. Is it just me or do more songs today begin with the chorus? almost immediately. You think about an older genre, like classic rock.

Those songs had 30 seconds, 60 second, 90 second introductions and, you know, guitar solos, and then the verse comes in, and then the song is like several minutes old by the time you hear the first chorus. I feel like it's the opposite today. Am I way off base? I can't say for certain if the chorus is the first section that appears, but the economist actually wrote an article a couple years back, sort of that had a similar tone to the one I just worked on them about introductions,

where choruses are also appearing more quickly in songs. So, yes, what you're saying is largely correct. There's certainly a reason why there's a saying in the music industry, don't bore us, get to the chorus. You want to catch people's attention as quickly as you can. And typically, you know, the chorus, the thing that's going to be repeated over and over again is going to be the thing that sticks with you.

So if we hit you with that quickly, hopefully you're going to stick around, at least for 30 seconds. Yeah, you know what, it's funny. I just pulled up the economist piece right now. So what it looks like is, and let me try to do the terrible podcast radio thing of describing a graph on a podcast. But basically, in the 1960s, there were a ton of songs that began with the chorus.

She loves you by the Beatles. Hard Day's Night gets you right into there. You've lost that love and feeling by the righteous brothers. In the 1960s, beginning with the chorus seemed pretty common. But again, but as you mentioned, as the technology improved, songs got longer. In the 1980s, 1990s, it looks like very few songs

are beginning with the chorus. The power of love begins with the chorus. Because You Love by Celine Dion, I guess she enjoys beginning with choruses. But you have more songs like Together Again by Janet Jackson, Hotel California by the Eagles, which have really, really long intros

before they get to the chorus. And then again, you see, in the last 15 years, songs like Dynamite, we don't talk about Bruno, Bad Habit by Steve Lacey, which just came out in the last year, these songs are basically beginning with the chorus. So it does seem like we are going back to the 1960s

in just the same way you described, right? That you had shorter songs, faster past the chorus in 1960s, technology allows for more languorous music in the 70s, 80s, 90s, and now we're right back. Yeah, it's definitely an interesting trend. And the thing that I find almost most fascinating about this

is if you were just looking, at the data with no context, you know, it looks, it's parabolic. It starts low, goes high, and then comes back down low. And you might think that there is some intimate connection between the music of the 60s and the music of today. But it's really very different things driving those trends, and which I think is part of a much larger trend that we're sort of dancing around here, where artists are often reacting to external circumstances. Artists are trying to solve problems. This is something David Byrne from the Talking Heads mentions at the beginning of his book, How Music Works. And I actually might quote a passage

from that if that's okay. Do it. Yeah, that's great. So he says, I had an extremely slow, dawning insight about creation. That insight is that context largely determines what is written, painted, sculpted, sung, or perform. That doesn't sound like much of an insight, but it's actually the opposite of conventional wisdom, which maintains that creation emerges, of some interior emotion from an upwelling of passion or feeling, and that the creative urge will brook no accommodation, that it simply must find an outlet to be heard, read, or seen. This is the romantic notion of how creative work comes to be, but I think the path of creation is almost 180% from this model. I believe that we unconsciously and instinctively make work

to fit pre-existing formats. And I realize I misspoke there. It meant 180 degrees from this model. but Byrne gives great examples one thing he points to is music from the middle ages that sort of have these talking about long, languorous melodies.

You're imagining somebody singing in a church and a lot of people think like, oh, they just didn't understand how to make more complex harmonies or more complex melodies. And he says, no, they were actually solving,

they were making the perfect music for those spaces. Those spaces have huge amounts of reverb because they're so big. So if you were singing very quick melodies with complicated harmonies, it would sound terrible because what you had

sung a few seconds before would still be hanging in the air. And throughout Byrne's book, he sort of talks about lots of different musical movements from jazz to hip-hop and how artists were reacting to certain technology or the certain spaces that

music was being created in. And we're seeing that with how song-length has changed over the decades. I love that. It's a very Darwinian theory of culture, not only in imagining a theory for how culture evolves step by step, but Darwin's survival of the fittest wasn't about fittest as in most strong. It was about most fit to the local environment.

So a monk song is most fit to the cathedral built in 1300. A Beethoven or Mozart opera is most fit to that audience. Meanwhile, a faster song that gets straight to the chorus is much more fit to a streaming environment. So I take that interpretation as it's been pretty intelligent and also fairly Darwinian. I also have the thought sometimes of like, you know, where we, the Atlantic published a piece about Kanye West, who's had quite a journey in the last 10 years since we published the cover story, but it was called American Mozart, I believe. And I remember when I saw that headline

just having like a little daydream of like it's such a lovely thought like what would Mozart be doing now? Or conversely, you know, what would Rihanna be doing in the mind of Rihanna be doing in you know 17th century, 18th century Austria? I mean, clearly

these people, Puccini, Beethoven had an extraordinary talent for melody. I mean, they were amazing hit makers of their time. Opera houses around the world and concert halls around the world wanted to perform their work. But it's weird to think, you know, what that mind pulled forward 300 years might produce.

The other sort of less sophisticated aspect of this thought is like, where are all those dudes with classic rock voices and hairband voices today? Like those guys screaming and upper registers like mixing their high tenor? Like, are they just shit out of luck? Are they not even trying? or were they in some bar in Tennessee like doing you know poison cover band stuff

I don't even know I mean it's probably a little bit of all that my one friend has a joke that if Beethoven were around today he'd be making movie movie scores he's Max Richter Hans Zimmer yeah yeah exactly yeah and that's one thing that I

think about a lot is I hear a song and I'm saying I'm sitting at my desk working and I'm like I'm not really into that but it's a super popular song sometimes I'm like maybe I'm just not hearing it in the right context It's like if you're listening to club music when you're sitting using Microsoft Excel,

shocker, it might not hit you the right way, but if you're out at a bar and you hear that same song again, it might make a lot more sense. Like context, I agree with a lot of Burns point. I mean, you know, I don't think he's completely throwing away the notion that people don't have any inspiration,

but context is very, very important when we try to understand what's popular. And I know from your words, with hitmakers, you're probably intimately familiar with this idea. I want to get to your next awesome observation because it really surprised me when I saw your piece on this. And this is the trend on the increase in writers per song. So last summer, I think the right way to set this up is last summer, the artist Diane Warren, posted to Twitter on August 1st, 2020, the question, quote,

how can there be 24 writers on a song with a little eyes rolling back into the head? head emoji. And it was a reference to Alien Superstar, the song off the new Beyonce album Renaissance. And you looked into this. You used that question as an inspiration to look into, wait, how can there be 24 writers on a song? The average number of writers in a song in the 1960s, 1970s, 1980s was two. But something happened after 1991. The average number of writers per song tripled. What happened? Yeah, so this is, it seemed like her question

was coming from a disingenuous perspective. Diane Warren's very successful. She has tons, she's written tons of number one hits. And the answer she got on Twitter was people were like, well, there's samples in the songs, and if you sample or

interpolate the element of another song, legally, you have to credit the writers of those songs. And if now since we're decades after sampling, has become popular. If you sample a song that's been sampled, you very quickly get a lot of writers on that song. So I went and looked into this,

and I realized that even if you remove the sample and interpolation credits from Alien Superstar, you're still left with 17 songwriters, which is still a lot of songwriters. So I wanted to explore, still, how do you go from 2 to 24 is a big jump. 2 to 17 is still a huge jump. And samples and interpolations post-1991, when hip-hop became more popular, and that's a genre that really relies on those, that explains part of the rise.

But there are other pieces of the rise that I think are more important. First of all, over the decades, copyright terms have gotten longer. Currently, for a songwriting copyright, it's the life of the author or songwriter plus 70 years. When copyright was first established in the United States, well, at the beginning of the United States, it was 14 years, and then you could extend it another 14. Over the centuries, it had been extended a couple times. It was 28 years, and you could extend another 28. That's still 56 years. Life of the author plus 70 years is an absurd length of time.

I did the math once, and if Taylor Swift lives the life of an average, the lifespan of an average American woman lives to like 77. her descendants will still control the copyright to you belong with me in like the 2130s because of that you have to be really careful about accidentally making something that sounds like an older song because somebody could come and sue you and then they're going to get a credit on that.

To avoid those lawsuits, you'll often see artists just preemptively credit songwriters for previous work that sounds similar even if it wasn't an inspiration because they don't want to go to court. We saw this last year or two years ago with Olivia Rodriguez's song Good for You. Two members of Paramour were added as songwriters on that song

because they said it bore similarity to the Paramour song, Misery Business. Personally, I think it's a stretch to say they deserve a songwriting credit. I mean, there are similarities, but it's a shot. I actually disagree. I love Olivia Rodriguez, but I heard that song and I was like, Olivia Rodriguez just interpolated misery business. Like, I love both those

songs and it's a great interpolation, but I listened to it and it was immediately like, I think I've heard this one before. But the point is taken that you've got, you get not only more samples and more samples of samples, you have a more litigious culture, which means a lot of people are adding songwriting credits just defensively. What else is happening? Is there like a more expansive definition of songwriting that is also creating a scenario where more people are able to piggyback on the songwriting credit? Yeah, and I think this is the most important part. The way a lot of people make money on songs over time is you get a songwriting credit, you're going to collect a royalty. If you just play on a song, that's not necessarily the case. If you just produce a song,

that's not necessarily a case. So everyone wants to get a piece of that pie. So again, part of it is connected to this litigiousness to financial and incentives, but just as you said, the definition of what songwriting has changed. And this is one of the, I think, the largest changes in popular music over the last 60 or so years. If you go back to the days of Lennon McCartney, any of the songwriting duo, you can think of, Bernie Taupin, Elton John, Bert Baccarat and Hal David, you had them writing a song, they handed off to a producer, and the producer is going to decide how we're going to record. the song. What's the instrumentation going to be? Do we need to create any orchestration?

That doesn't exist really anymore because recordings and recording software is so ubiquitous. I can sit in my bedroom right now and record a professional quality song. So the songwriting and production processes are no longer divorced from one another. Max Martin, who's the most successful songwriter and producer of the last 20 years said when he was accepting the polar music prize writing and producing, I don't really know what's what anymore. The old sort of way of here's a song and you record it and produce it, it doesn't really work like that anymore.

It's kind of married together. We don't even think of the abstract idea of a song and the fixed idea of a recording as separate anymore. Whereas for decades we did, songs were a song didn't belong to a single person. It belonged to the writer, but tons and tons of artists would cover that song. We would often see within the same year, multiple artists recording a hit song. In the late 1950s, there was a number one hit called The Three Bells.

It got to number one by a band called The Browns. During that same week, a different version got to number 23 by another artist named Dick Flood. This seems bizarre these days. You imagine Lizzo has a number one hit, and then Ariana Grande records the same exact song and also charts, which is weird to our perspective because we can listen to recordings anywhere.

Basically, the song and the recording have become the same thing. And because of that, on the recording side, songwriting and production are the same thing. So part of the reason you see more songwriters is people who are producing, people who are creating rhythms, doing things that would typically just be credited as production,

are also getting credited as songwriters too. There's tons of overlap between producers and songwriters in a way that didn't exist 60 years ago. The last trend I want to talk to you about is the decline of key changes. So I was born in 1986, and maybe my favorite song from 1986 is Living on a Prayer,

which has a very, very famous key change. Devin, if we could sync that up. And also, the very next year, one of the most iconic pop songs for the key change was released by Whitney Houston. I want to dance with somebody. Now, it seems like the key change is basically gone. Beyonce's Love on Top, very famously,

has like seven or eight key changes. But really, there just aren't songs with key changes anymore. And you pointed this out in a recent article, and I thought it was such a fascinating observation. What's going on there? Yeah, so again, a lot of this is connected to digital production. I can record a song in my bedroom on Logic Pro or Pro Tools. And the way these digital audio workstations are laid out is you see all your tracks vertically.

And because of that, there is an incentive to write songs vertically, which doesn't lend itself to making music with keychain. is Joe Bennett, who... Can you just pause? What is vertical songwriting mean in this case? Yeah, so we can... If we think of two types of songwriting, vertical songwriting and horizontal songwriting, horizontally songwriting,

and these are not terms that are widely used, but it's a good way to... It's a good mental model to imagine this. Horizontal songwriting is think you're writing the song section by section. I'm going to write a verse. I'm going to write a chorus. I'm going to write a chorus.

I'm going to write a bridge, so on and so forth. If you imagine sitting in, in a room by yourself playing the guitar, that's probably how you're going to think about the song. You're going to think section by section. Whereas if I'm using a digital audio workstation, I might make a loop, you know, a four-bar loop, and I'm going to have that play throughout my entire song. So the way I'm going to create intrigue is by stacking and unstacking elements vertically. Maybe during the verse, I add some other, I add a couple synthesizers during the chorus.

I add more. And then during the bridge, I pull one or two of those away. The way that the digital audio workstation lays out music physically, it makes it, so you're incentivized to stack elements like that. You don't have to immediately think,

okay, I'm going verse, chorus first. So, Chris, just to help me understand vertical songwriting, can we tee up a song that is just a classic, example of vertical songwriting, just throw one out. Throw out a hit that's a classic example. Probably break your heart

by Tio Cruz from about 10, 15 years ago is a great example. Okay, Devin, can you cue up break your heart and then walk me through what you're talking about in terms of vertical songwriting?

Now I may not be the worst of the best, but you've got to respect my honesty and I may break your heart but I don't really think as anybody as bomb as me. So you can take this chance in the end,

So as this song plays, you're really going to hear just the same chord progression throughout the whole song. But what you're going to notice is as we go section to section, the producers and tile crews are really just going to add and remove synthesizers to try to draw you in. So I think the pre-chorus is coming here. You're an staccato thing there. Drumbeats change a little bit here. You still hear that arpeggiating synthesizer in the back that you're going to hear throughout most. the song, but they've layered in more and more synthesizers, again, just adding and removing elements vertically.

It's almost like, okay, I think we can wind down to how that was fantastic. I listened to that song a thousand times with my kickball team in 2009 to reveal way too much about that particular year. What I think of this, like, when I'm imagining your metaphor of vertical songwriting, it's kind of like a sandwich. It's like, I can see, like, looking at the computer screen. It's like, okay, here's my BLT. and the BLT is going to get us through the verse.

But then I'm going to layer in some avocado for the pre-chorus. I'm going to layer in the avocado, and then when we hit the chorus, I might take out the avocado and I'm putting in something else. I don't know, where I'm running out of sandwich metaphors. Turkey. And so you have the same basic vertical sandwich. But by taking away and adding certain textures and instruments and synthesizers, you're queuing the audience to sort of expect different things from that part of the song.

And so you can think of it as just sort of stacking rather than writing it linearly. Yeah, that's a good way to put it. And it's not to say that decades ago, it's like since the beginning of time, when you get to a chorus, you know, you're probably going to hear some different elements or different instrumentation. It's just a bit more subtle with how the digital audio workstation is laid out. another thing you might notice when you're hearing that is all of the melodic phrases in the verse were very, very short melodic phrases. You can almost see them building them around these short little loops. Whereas if you take another song that I think was popular around the same time like, hey there, Delilah, that's built around like one very long melodic phrase that you would associate with music from decades before.

And that's something that was probably composed, again, to use this terminology horizontally, where, the lead songwriter of the plain white T's is thinking verse chorus rather than I have a loop and now I'm going to build intrigue by adding and removing certain elements to the production.

I am not a musical genius so this question might not be particularly intelligent but is there a way in which 21st century pop music genius in an age of vertical songwriting is almost as visual as it is audio. Because what you're describing, when I imagine what you're describing,

I can imagine like a really smart producer, almost producing visually, saying we need a downbeat here, we need staccato syllables for the chorus in order to syncopate against the arpegating synth. And that kind of intelligence seems almost more visual than audio, to me, even though ironically, of course, we're talking about pop music. It's the first got, so I record music, and this is something I've seen in myself is I used to

typically write, again, just sitting in this chair that I'm sitting in now with a guitar, record a little voice memo, and then go produce later. But then when I got this software on my computer, I noticed I was doing exactly what I'm trying to describe. And it's hard, if you've never done it before, is building little loops and then writing over those loops, this more vertical approach. And it is a very visual process. And the first guy I ever recorded with, I remember I was just like staring at the screen.

I was like, that looks like it's off. It looks like we came in a beat early there. And he was like, you don't make music with your eyes. He's like, even if it is a beat early, if it sounds good to you, then forget about it. But it is a much more visual. There is a larger visual component that just couldn't have existed 40 years ago.

when we didn't have these beautiful visual displays. So it's a very keen observation. So putting it all together, you have these changes since 1991 that have made hit songs shorter. The trip to the chorus is faster. There is a shifting emphasis toward rhythm over melody. People play these songs more.

They're more likely to hit number one multiple times in a year, stay on the charts for a longer period of time. They have more songwriters and they're less likely to have key changes. Is there some big picture trend in the evolving shape of pop music in the 21st century that you want to talk about

that we have not hit in the last few minutes? I think one other interesting thing with the musical keys is that it's not just that there are less key changes, but the keys that songwriters choose to work in are different. For decades, the keys of C and G were like the most popular keys. And that's because if you pick up a guitar,

it's the easiest to play. Yes, the easiest to play. No one is picking up a guitar and they don't know how to play it that much and they're playing an F sharp. When we're making most of our music and computers, we're more key agnostic. It's easy to change keys if you're building everything with a MIDI synthesizer. And what you see between 1990 and 2020

is that it's more of a uniform distribution for key selection, whereas previously there was a strong favoring towards certain keys. And that's in this, when I've talked about the decline of key changes, I try to situate it in this larger discussion that a lot of things related to keys, key selection has changed. And this piece about the actual selection of keys, I think it's brushed under the rug,

little bit more, but I find it just as interesting. And it's due to the same, the same sort of technology that's inspired the decline in key changes. Well, look, you have answered a very important mystery for me, which is why do I have to, when I play or learn a new hit song for my wife and the piano, I always have to, I have to transpose these complicated keys back into C major, because that's the only key that I can actually play with any kind of facility on our little keyboard. But there we have it. That's the reason. It's because, computerized songwriting gives people this this key agnostic attitude toward music. That's fascinating. I had no idea that we'd seen that kind of evolution.

Yeah, I mean, obviously, if you're very dexterous on the keyboard, you're going to be pretty much agnostic to keys. But, you know, a lot of people who are writing songs on piano are not Beethoven. You know, they know how to play the piano little. They know how to write a melody and C is, the key of C is very easy to work with in that case. As a Coldplay fan, you definitely don't have to tell me. me that facility with the piano is not necessarily important for becoming one of the bigger bands in the world. And before you even have an opportunity to make fun of me for my fandom and Coldplay, Chris, thank you very, very much. I really appreciate all of your intelligence

and data breakdowns. Yeah, thanks for having me, Derek. This is a lot of fun. Thank you for listening. Plain English is produced by Devin Manzi. If you like the show, please go to Apple Podcast or Spotify. Give us a five-star rating. Leave a review. And don't forget to check out our TikTok at Plain Plain English underscore. That's at Plain English underscore on TikTok.