Why Does All Music Sound the Same; An Explanation

Thanks lowrider, great article.

In the context of contemporary pop music as heard on large radio stations, I would say yes, it does all sound the same.

I saw an article about that hit pop song "Meet Me In The Middle". It indicated that it had a whole team of writers and was written from the ground up to be a radio hit with demographics and stats being primary criteria.

I don't have any problem with this per se. I don't have to listen to that sort of pablum or that sort of radio station. (A pop station plays in one area of my workplace and in an 8 hour workday you can hear the same song as much as 5 times).

Where I do have a problem is when this sort of production/engineering carries over to where it does not belong. I think about bands that are serious musicians making high quality music outside of the mainstream who still produce loud highly compressed DR CDs.

Alabama Shakes, Gary Clark, Jr and Tedeschi Trucks come to mind. Really talented, serious, thoughtful musicians. Heck, Tedeschi Trucks have their own studio and their CDs still show significant  DR compression compared to hallmark production quality artists like Steely Dan and Mark Knopfler.

I don't know what the answer is. I just hope that serious musicians will seek to stand out not just on the quality and craft of their art but also in the production quality. None of the artists I mentioned above are ever going to see significant radio air time. And I don't get the impression that it costs any more to show discretion with the loudness settings. I'm assuming that issue is driven by executives or new/young/lazy engineers.

Say what?

Just watched a clip from a video interview of Mark Knopfler regarding his "Tracker" album. The setting is his studio with its large analog mixing board. Very little computer stuff to be seen other than his laptop. He indicates that this is where he records. Maybe that is why the SQ of his stuff is so good.

However, he did not say specifically how the music was produced/engineered so I can't say for sure what the process was.

Music is all about dynamic range. Nothing else matters. So you’re right! It all sounds the same.

There may be more similarity in how pop recordings and even most recordings in general are produced these days, especially if the target is radio play, but they still do not all sound the same. That’s just another untrue extreme generalization.

Some are done much better than others and there are many differences.

So yes the dynamics may all have more similar characteristics than in the past but some are still done really poorly, others quite well, and everything in between.

No doubt the actual content of pop music these days is very similar in a desperate attempt to appeal to a broader and more diverse audience than in the past  as are the cookie cutter "artists" that perform them.