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.