In both your examples, you can have tremendous diversity, craftsmanship and sophistication within a quite narrow range of parameters.

You could say "artistry" (bold statements, individual expression, etc) has been replaced by "design" (sophisticated choices based on following existing trends and extended them just the right amount, standing out not too much, not too little, etc).

I think it's just a statistical problem.

Target A: you want your song to be liked by 10 thousand people

Target B: you want your song to be liked by 1 billion people

I don't think there is less art in a massively popular song. It's just a different kind of art.

Technically you could say thins, but in reality I would say there is definitely 'less art'.

Katey Perry is a product, not an artist, listening to her reminds me of walking into a nice, clean, new McDonald's.

Sure there is 'art' even in Product Marketing and Segmentation ... but funny enough, most of this music does not last.

I have nothing against great and hyper-specialized production, but it's usually done in an industrial manner.

The same thing is often done with food ingredients: there are people hired by processed food manufacturers to get the 'ingredient mix' just perfect for taste - and this tends to commoditize products across the board.

The article makes a good case for this, i.e. why hyper specialization and product orientation leads to less diversity.

Example from another industry: as films become more 'global' - they have to be more bland and generic, and 'lowest common denominator'. International audiences don't 'get' American cultural cues.

Do you know why the Transformers movies make absolutely no sense? There is basically no plot. Just 2 hours of a long, ridiculous action sequence? Because they are catering to 'everyone' and 'everyone' is borderline illiterate, and doesn't grasp cultural references outside of their little region etc. etc..

Katey Perry to me is the 'Transformers' of Music.

And how McDonald's brand tag line for that time was 'lovin it'?

That was coordinated.

A huge star, worked with a mega fast-food brand so that the song / brand tag line would be literally the same thing. That was a brilliant but kind of shady move by both parties, but it shows the 'absolute corporatrization' of the music industry. Literally the music is there to push fast food. That goes way beyond using a hit song to sell cars - it's literally the creation of pop-stardom in alignment with marketing objectives of a major brand.

The fact that can happen right in front of us, while so many people are apparently unaware - or don't care - is pretty funny and sad.

Again one could take the 'it's still art' line ... sure, a kind of 'art of sneaky marketing' maybe, but it's more than fair to say that this will significantly compromise creative aspects of the music.

Big labels are the same as Big Hollywood and Big Corps - they are in the business of entertainment in a way.

And it's not to say that McD's is entirely crap, nor does it mean that Timberlake is not talented, it's just that it's corporatized. Timberlake came up inside Disney, a professional by his mid-teens. Not so much the path of the artiste ...

No, and having researched it just now, from it's chart performance, I doubt all that many people outside of Belgium did even within a few months of its release, except for the part actually used in McDonalds commercials.

> A huge star, worked with a mega fast-food brand so that the song / brand tag line would be literally the same thing.

The song was written as a jingle, based on a pre-existing advertising campaign in Germany, before Timberlake became involved; AFAICT, his involvement was a straight take money to do cross-promotion deal.

A lot of people complain about the narrowness of modern popular music. It's a serious if subjective problem for them. The OP is all about ways to objectively statistically measure a problem that many people subjectively previously complained about.

The implication of the word "art" have generally involved fundamentally unique personal expression. There's expectation that grasping a piece of "true art" will involve something fundamentally surprising.

In contrast, beautiful design certainly involves skill, the designer may even have more skill than the artist. But the implication of design is that you won't experience surprise, just a better version of what you already are familiar with - the sensation of a more beautiful diamond ring or a book laid out more cleanly than you've previously seen.

All of modern pop music produced to earn money, perhaps. Otherwise, there are many music styles apart from pop, and many artists who don't use samples at all.

Thats the problem. Why are we treating music like an industrial product? (The answer is money)

It was only the advent of recorded music that allowed individual performers of popular music to gain specific audiences (with free jazz performers of 1930s being perhaps the first popular recording artists noted for producing "works of art").

So music as just a product, in ways, isn't by itself new or evil. Now one can take issue with the characteristics of our modern music.

For discussion of the history of pop music, I'd recommend

Elijah Wald's How the Beatles Destroyed Rock 'n' Roll

http://www.elijahwald.com/beatlespop.html

Have to disagree with you there. The most immediate counterexample that jumps to mind is Wagner. Hugely popular and audiences went to a Wagner opera not looking to merely be entertained but for the artistic merit of his works.

I'm sure someone with a background in musical history can cite many examples even further back, my point being, I think there's been a constant gradient of music For Dance vs. music For Art, I don't think it's fair to say that one or the other is in any way particularly novel. (Victorian era music, for example, was a wide spread including everything from operatic virtuosos, to public house performances for dancing)

To your other point however, I certainly agree that music as a product is not new, that concept dates back long past even the eras of our classical masters.

It's not really some simplistic generality. The larger point is audio reproduction and the increased production of commodities is what allowed the uniqueness of a kind of musician to be their selling point, once a musician was "selling himself/herself" rather than being a paid player.

I was hesitant to talk about Mozart/Bach/the other greats because I don't honestly have a deep understanding for how music was societally perceived back then/what the delineations were between pop/"high culture"/dance/"artistic" music (e.g. what the isomorphisms are to the modern day, if there even are any), whereas the earlier 1900's were not so far different from the parent's 1930s claim.

Classical music was pop for it's time. People danced, drank, and even had massive riots when a controversial composer came to town.

However if we really want to compare the most popular pieces of each time, we really can't look at the "art classical". Most "art classical" wasn't even the most popular back then, from what I gather (though occasionally an "art classical" composer did make a popular tune that became well known).

It's difficult to find "top sales" lists of the old sheet music songs (which is probably the best parallel to modern record charts), but one someone put together for the US (https://thetop100songsofalltime.com/top-100-songs-of-the-189...) has, for the link example of the 1890s, mostly popular short tunes (in the 1890s, "tin pan alley" style).

Of what I recognize (there's a lot of songs on this list that frankly seems to have disappeared over time), there's some that probably would be the dance of its time. I wouldn't say all I recognize is "music to dance to" mainly because there are definitely some ballads among the tunes, as well as some Sousa marches, and songs which are probably more "sing-alongs". I'm guessing that most of these songs aren't exactly "works of art" in the way the original poster intended. :) But they were light entertainment for the time (ala pop today), and that's fine. Modern pop music also has some ballads that do not necessarily function as dance music, too.

I think the biggest difference between music then and music now, is that the dominant way to make a living was to compose sheet music for other musicians to play. Recordings quite literally changed all of this.

http://mentalfloss.com/article/55247/3-dirty-songs-mozart

Chopin, for example, wrote 59 marzukas, which is music for a traditional Polish dance of the same name.

Beethoven wrote many dance songs, especially waltzes.

Albeniz, especially wrote music derived from traditional music. Suite Espanola is a wonderful exploration here.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Suite_Española_No._1,_Op._47

I could go all night on this topic, but the point is that, although we don't recognize the music as dance, it was to the people of that time.

The individual artist or producer which want's to have a number one song is not driven mainly by money. The drive is just wanting to be the best. And being the best in such a competitive field requires having a highly polished product.

I see I get some downvotes for saying this, none the less it's true. And I say this as an former full-time now hobby musician/songwriter myself.