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Re:The Musical Diversity of Pop Songs by cma on Sunday June 03, 2018 @10:41PM (#17224142)
> Underlying issues are partly commercialization, but also - 'visualization'. Remember 'video killed the radio star?' - well YouTube is the new MTV and 'how it looks' is as important than 'how it sounds'. Pop stars now generally are more attractive.

You had opera and musicals long before MTV and Youtube. And people mostly didn't hide their faces during live performances before or during the current period of recorded music.

Re:The Musical Diversity of Pop Songs by sonnyblarney on Monday June 04, 2018 @12:12AM (#17224550)
Opera and Musicals are inherently visual. And Opera singers are not necessarily pretty.

Nobody cares what the pianist looks like :)

To be fair: Taylor Swift and Beyonce - if you see them totally without makeup, are not super attractive, they look in the range of fairly normal. Also there's a double standard for men and women to some extent. Top male artist right now is Ed Sheeran and he is one ugly mofo, then again, to my point - he's highly talented ... when he's not writing pop tunes 'designed for a mass audience' he does some cool stuff. On Charlie Rose he basically admitted he writes a lot of stuff for commercial purposes, it's a business.