Why popular songs have so many writing credits

For Tedium, Chris Dalla Riva examined why the number of credited songwriters per song appears to have increased so much over the past decade:

Between 1960 and 1980, 48 percent of number ones had at least one common person get both a songwriting and production credit. Between 2010 and 2020, that percentage had risen to over 99 percent. Songwriting just isn’t what it used to be. And I don’t mean that in a condescending way. I mean that we are using the same word to describe two very different things.

It’s not about a decline in skills and instead about a change in process.

Tags: , , ,

Generating music from text

Researchers at Google built a model that generates music based on brief text descriptions:

We introduce MusicLM, a model generating high-fidelity music from text descriptions such as “a calming violin melody backed by a distorted guitar riff”. MusicLM casts the process of conditional music generation as a hierarchical sequence-to-sequence modeling task, and it generates music at 24 kHz that remains consistent over several minutes. Our experiments show that MusicLM outperforms previous systems both in audio quality and adherence to the text description. Moreover, we demonstrate that MusicLM can be conditioned on both text and a melody in that it can transform whistled and hummed melodies according to the style described in a text caption. To support future research, we publicly release MusicCaps, a dataset composed of 5.5k music-text pairs, with rich text descriptions provided by human experts.

I’m not entirely sure I like where this road goes, but the results are impressive.

Tags: , ,

Stable Diffusion to generate spectrograms to convert to sounds

Stable Diffusion is an AI model that lets you enter text to generate images. Spectrograms visually represent sound. Seth Forsgren and Hayk Martiros combined the two for Riffusion, which lets you enter text and the model generates a spectrogram that is converted to audio.

Read more about the process here.

Tags: , , ,

Decline of key changes in popular music

Chris Dalla Riva analyzed key changes in songs that made the Billboard Hot 100, between 1958 and 2022. Key changes are near non-existent after 2010. The most interesting part is why:

Thus, if you changed the key of “Juicy,” Biggie wouldn’t necessarily have to change how he raps, but if you changed the key of “Over the Rainbow,” Judy Garland would have to sing different pitches. If you picked the wrong key, those pitches might be outside of her vocal range. In short, key doesn’t matter as much in hip-hop.

As hip-hop grew in popularity, the use of computers in recording also exploded too. Whereas the guitar and piano lend themselves to certain keys, the computer is key-agnostic. If I record a song in the key of C major into digital recording software, like Logic or ProTools, and then decide I don’t like that key, I don’t have to play it again in that new key. I can just use my software to shift it into that different key. I’m no longer constrained by my instrument.

See also the increasing similarity of Billboard songs.

Tags: , , ,

Money distribution for streaming music

From the listener perspective, we pay our monthly or annual fees and just turn on our music streams. The path those fees take from our wallet to musicians is less straightforward. For The Pudding, Elio Quinton does a good job of visually explaining where the money goes (and some of the better ways you can support artists).

Tags: , , ,

Money distribution for streaming music

From the listener perspective, we pay our monthly or annual fees and just turn on our music streams. The path those fees take from our wallet to musicians is less straightforward. For The Pudding, Elio Quinton does a good job of visually explaining where the money goes (and some of the better ways you can support artists).

Tags: , , ,

Examination of songs after virality on TikTok

Vox, in collaboration with The Pudding, looked at what happens when a song goes viral on TikTok. It heads down the TikTok-to-Spotify pipeline, which signals money to be made and draws labels to take advantage.

Tags: , , , ,

Visual deconstruction of popular songs

Nate Sloan and Charlie Harding, for NYT Opinion, look at how the structure of songs have changed to fit with the current methods that people consume media:

It’s inescapable that today’s aspiring artists and songwriters must operate, for survival, in a landscape of streaming services and social media. From Spotify to TikTok, the goal is to create music that will grab a listener’s attention from beginning to end. You’re not just competing against other creators. You’re also competing against everything else that takes up our time: podcasts, TV, apps and more. So to keep streaming consumers engaged, it is increasingly common for songs to begin in medias res — with a hook, followed by a hook and ending with another hook.

Put your headphones on and turn the volume up for maximum effect. The combination of the songs, visual breakdown, and words work well together to help you understand song structure.

Now I know why my brain is often confused when I hear a full song, instead of a looping chorus on TikTok.

Tags: ,

Comparing live music recordings against the studio versions

There’s something about hearing music live no matter how many times you’ve heard a song record in the studio. Maybe the acoustics are different. Maybe the musicians play a favorite song differently. Maybe the musicians feed off a big crowd’s energy.

For The Pudding, Kat Wilson and Kevin Litman-Navarro quantified these differences between studio and live versions. The result is the Live Music Jukebox, which lets you pick an artist and see which songs differed the most.

I was just lamenting over returned concert tickets from 2020. I guess this’ll have to do for now.

Tags: , ,

Defining ’90s music, based on song recognition

In search of songs that define music in the 1990s, Matt Daniels and Ilia Blinderman for The Pudding look for songs that that Gen Z still recognizes. Also, the songs that are mostly foreign to the younger generation:

In 1999, “Wild Wild West” was the song of the summer. Yet it is fading far faster than any other ’90s hit with comparable starting popularity. Twenty years ago, it was inescapable. Maybe Millennials are still too sick of it, even for nostalgia rotation. Perhaps it wasn’t even that great of a song to begin with, artificially inflated by Smith’s celebrity and cross-promotion with the film Wild Wild West.

Sorry, Will Smith.

The results are based on data gathered by The Pudding in an interactive survey.

Tags: ,