You're Not Imagining It. Western Music Is Getting Simpler.

The next time someone tells you “they don’t make music like they used to,” you can hand them a peer-reviewed study instead of an eye roll. A team of Italian researchers has confirmed what millions of listeners already suspected: Western music is getting simpler, more repetitive, and more homogeneous.

The study, published this month in Nature Scientific Reports, analyzed roughly 20,000 compositions spanning four centuries — from 1600 to 2021. Researchers converted each piece into MIDI transcriptions and modeled them as networks of note transitions, measuring how many distinct notes a composition moves between and how uniformly those transitions occur. The verdict: across all six genres examined, including classical and jazz, melodic and harmonic structures have grown steadily more alike over time, with declining complexity.

Co-author Niccolò Di Marco, an assistant professor at the University of Tuscia, offered a more generous reading. Classical music “may not be becoming less complex, but rather differently complex,” he told Euronews Culture — “shifting away from harmonic and melodic intricacy toward other dimensions that are harder to quantify.”

He has a point. The study only measured pitch transitions, leaving out rhythm, timbre, texture, dynamics, and just about everything else that makes music actually sound like music. A critique published in the Substack newsletter Evenings with the Orchestra noted that less than 2% of the music analyzed from 1950 onward was classical — meaning the data thins out precisely when composers started experimenting with graphic scores, electronics, and indeterminacy.

But the broader trend line holds. A separate 2024 study from Queen Mary University of London identified a similar simplification pattern in chart-topping songs. And the streaming era’s economics — skip rates that punish slow builds, algorithmic curation that rewards familiarity — incentivize exactly the kind of repetition the Italian team documented.

None of this will stop anyone from complaining that modern music all sounds the same. But now they can complain with citations.

Sources

Decoding the evolution of melodic and harmonic structure of Western music through the lens of network science — Nature Scientific Reports
Classical and jazz music are becoming less complicated, study finds — Euronews
The Numbers Lie — Evenings with the Orchestra (Substack)

Discussion (6)

Okay but the article itself notes that less than 2% of the post-1950 sample was classical. The dataset practically gives you this result by design. Hard to take the 'four centuries of decline' framing seriously when the composition of your sample changes completely halfway through.

18 ↑

debra_s

@PJ fair point about the 2% thing but the Queen Mary study found basically the same pattern with chart music specifically right? different dataset same result. the trend is probably real even if this particular study has gaps.

4 ↑

MikeR84

Its the streaming services fault plain and simple. Artists only have 15 seconds to hook you before you skip so of course everything sounds the same now. Songs don't even have guitar solos anymore.

7 ↑

nothingburger

This is a nothingburger. They converted everything to MIDI and measured note transitions. You're reducing entire orchestras and synths and production to pitch data and acting surprised when the answer comes back simple.

11 ↑

vkrishnan

This is consistent with a broader pattern in cultural evolution toward compression and predictability. The network analysis approach here (modeling note transitions as graphs) has precedent — see Serrà et al. 2012 in Scientific Reports, which found decreasing timbral and harmonic diversity in pop music over roughly the same period. What's genuinely new is the four-century temporal range. The streaming incentive point at the end is important but probably understated. When skip rates directly affect revenue, the selection pressure toward immediate familiarity is enormous. This isn't just an aesthetic trend, it's an economic structure producing predictable aesthetic outcomes.

23 ↑

katie_from-philly

I KNEW IT. I've been saying this for YEARS and my husband keeps playing the same 5 spotify songs on repeat and I want to scream. Music used to make you FEEL something. Now it's all designed by algorithms to keep you scrolling. We're being lobotomized one playlist at a time and nobody cares.

14 ↑

Sources

Discussion (6)

More Stories