If You’re A Musician In 2024, You Want To Hear This

Okay,

this

will be an interesting video. I think a company contacted me a few months ago. It's called Chart Cipher and what they do is use Ai and compile trends based on Billboard charts, but they're trends over years and years. but you can see what's happening in music now and these are some really interesting things because they talk about song themes, how many words are in the titles, things like that, nerdy things that I really think are interesting, so one of the first things. here's the main genre trend chart, you'll notice it says hip hop at 27% and pop at 27% are the top two genres right now, next up is country at 20% and then rock with 19% and R&B with 9% Latin. is at 6% and then at the bottom here is dance or electronic music, if you go to the next graph,

this

is where it gets interesting because then you look essentially from 2019 to 2023, so the last four years what are the trends and you'll see Keep in mind that the most important thing here is hip-hop music, which has actually gone down a lot on the charts, it went from 53% dominance and then to 58% in 2020, but now it's down to 27%, so hip hop is going down its path. is represented on the charts, people are less interested in hip-hop music.

I would say pop music has stayed relatively the same 30% 22 or 23 and then it goes back to 27, so you know, it fluctuates between 30% and 23%, let's say, but 27 last year and then things that are on the rise are really country and rock seem to be on the rise, it says right here from 2022 to 2023, the country has gone from 8% to 20% of its representation on the Billboard charts, that's 150%. % increase which is huge. I've noticed this when doing Spotify's top 10 countdowns: there are a lot of country songs on the charts now that there never were before. Rock is up from 12% to 19%, it's a 58% increase which is great and like I said, hip hop is down 37% as you can see here.

I think people are getting tired of hip-hop. I noticed that Trap overtakes that drum sound you used to

hear

here constantly on the charts when I started doing these top 10 countdowns a few years ago, it's really gone away. I think people are just bored of it and then if that's going to go down, something will replace it and it looks like rock and country are going up, well, in the graph below. What I think is interesting here is the prevalence of Instrument Trends, so it says here that almost all streaming hits mainly contain drums and bass, of course we know that the prominent use of guitar reached the highest level in more than a decade, this is partly due to both. country and rock on the rise, as we just said in the last segment, conversely, piano use has been on the decline.

Okay, it's pretty interesting. If you look at the chart, you'll see that this instrument prevails here with the bases in this mauve color, whatever it is. is a little purplish, so the drums are in yellow, the guitars are in red and the piano at 16% is in green, okay, so to put it more succinctly, the use of guitar in songs that are in the charts from 2022 to 2023 has increased by 56%. and piano usage is down 41% now I guess people aren't taking piano lessons actually that's kind of a joke because piano is all medium anyway okay next chart I think is really interesting is this Tempo Trends in the last 4 years or from 2019 to 2023, it seems that songs are getting slower, there has been an increase in songs that are slower than 79 BPM by 23% and songs that are between 100 and 119 BPM have decreased by 24%, so when I think about the charts we've

hear

d over the last few years it seems like the songs have gotten slower or at least they're all mid-tempo songs.

The only song that comes to mind is that Olivia Rodrigo song, that, uh, bad idea, that song. is the only one I can think of that was in the top 10 recently and is kind of an uptempo rock song. The next thing I find fascinating is the song length Trends. Now there's a really interesting article in the Washington Post about a week and a half ago. about how songs are getting shorter and shorter and were actually shown since the 1960s when songs were routinely under 3 minutes and then peaked in the 1990s and early 90s actually with over 4 minutes and are now back under 3 minutes most of the time.

The songs on the charts are 2 minutes long, it's really interesting because I was taking my daughter Lila to school and she said to me, can you play some new songs? So I start playing new songs. We were listening to that song hungrily on the McCrae tape, 2 minutes and 20 seconds and then the next song we heard was 2 minutes and 15 seconds, then 2 minutes and 18 seconds, she said it's all songs under 3 minutes . I said yes, and then I said, "You know, all the early Beatles songs are also under 3 minutes." I start playing the red album, album 62 to 66 and really all those songs are less than 3 minutes Love Me Do 2 minutes and 20 seconds Please Please Me 2011 de meu 157 She Loves You 222 I Want to Hold Your Hand 226 all my love and 209 Can't Buy Me Love 213 Ticket to Ride 311 amazing songs, even like Nowhere Man 244 Michelle 242 uh in my life 227 girl 231 Pocket Writer 219 these are short songs, the difference between those short songs and short songs today, although I like that song greedy plays McCrae but there's nothing in it it's a verse and a chorus and then a verse and a chorus and then some kind of brid it's not even a bridge I don't even know what it is like a breakup verse and a chorus and then he just doesn't do anything in the chorus, he doesn't even do a double Horus at the end, whereas The Beatles had multiple bridges in these songs, they had intros, they had solos, they had everything and they fit all these things together in these incredible songs. that you'll be able to listen to for the next 60 years or so, after watching the Beatles songs, I said, Lea, how long do you think it smells like teen spirit?

She says I have no idea so we look it up, it lasts 5 minutes and 1 second. So I started comparing other songs from that era Jeremy 518 Black Hole Son 518 also Wow Man of the Box 445 Tonight Tonight by Smashing Pumpkins is 4:14 Plush by sdp is 513 These are long songs twice as long as current songs, are they? because? Back then they were such long songs, first of all, they were much better written songs, and secondly, there was no Internet to get people's attention, no social media, no video games, nothing to distract people's attention. and make them

want

to swipe.

Not Tik Tock, no. YouTube shorts, no Instagram people could sit there and just listen to music. I find the graph below really interesting because when I look at the graphs, I noticed that the songs have less swear words. 61% of the songs on the Billboard charts in 2023 have no swear words, 32% have them, and only 7% have them frequently, so a really interesting trend is that songs that don't use bad words are at the same level as in 2014. I don't know what that means, you can make your own conclusions about it. I'm not sure why, but it's probably related to some of the other things I've cited today.

I'd love to hear your thoughts on this if you think it's an interesting topic to cover in CU I. I love this kind of stuff. I'm always thinking about things like why popular music is changing. Is it changing for the better? Is it changing for the worse? I think this last Countdown top 10 I did, people have gotten a little better. We're using more real instruments, less swear words, a lot more diversity in tempos and rhythms, things like that, no fast songs yet. I love to hear what you think, hit the subscribe button, like it, leave a comment, thanks for watching.