If you've noticed that popular music has become more boring and predictable over the course of the last few decades, you're not alone.
What has evolved in the music industry since the late 1960s and early 1970s as a cultural onslaught to encourage rebellion, sexual experimentation, and drug use has taken a sharp turn toward banal lyrics, uninspired melodies, and mind-numbing predictability.
A scientific study has confirmed that it's not your imagination: Music is becoming louder and blander.
It brings up a fascinating question: Is there a political agenda behind it?
Ever since Plato's Republic, pundits like those in the Academy have pointed out there is an extremely strong influence of music on politics.
And therefore, I said, Glaucon, musical training is a more potent instrument than any other, because rhythm and harmony find their way into the inward places of the soul, on which they mightily fasten, imparting grace, and making the soul of him who is rightly educated graceful, or of him who is ill-educated ungraceful; and also because he who has received this true education of the inner being will most shrewdly perceive omissions or faults in art and nature, and with a true taste...
Plato goes on to advocate that the mournful Lydian modes and the soft, “relaxed” Ionian and Lydian modes are to be banished, while the Dorian and Phrygian are kept — one for courage in hardship and war, the other for moderation in peace.
Apparently, Persians didn't want the effeminacy of the Athenian subcultures to flourish too vibrantly, lest the Persians return and lay waste to that Mediterranean jewel of a city.
So, what are we to make of the U.S. music industry ramming insipid music down our throats seemingly designed to turn us into head-bobbing zombies?
You could go the route of Mike Benz, who has provided essentially a doctoral dissertation worth of connections ranging from USAID money to top music execs (like YouTube's Head of Global Music Lyor Cohen, who was at Warner Bros. and pioneered hip-hop music to "Sir" Lucian Grainge of Universal Music Group and his brother Elliot Grainge of Atlantic Music Group).
If you're not going anywhere for a few weeks, you're welcome to start here and then follow the rabbit holes wherever they lead you.
USAID and The Rap Game (Part 1) https://t.co/MgsNR8aUgZ
— Mike Benz (@MikeBenzCyber) September 8, 2026
The Benz connection of USAID and the rap game went viral in part because of the music genre's sudden disappearance from the Billboard Top 40.
Rap music is DEAD. USAID collapsed & all of a sudden, rap music disappeared from top charts. https://t.co/KOJzW9K4p1
— Tim Pool (@Timcast) July 20, 2026
Billy Corgan of Smashing Pumpkins has pushed a theory that the decline of hard rock music was a top-down decision. I encourage you to watch this short video to appreciate the schism between rock music listeners' loyalty and its disappearance in mainstreamed culture.
So, let's briefly explore the "why" behind it all. The deep theory. The question about whether there may be a hidden agenda behind it.
What we might conclude is that there are major themes in Western music that may lead to deleterious social effects when the music industry pushes them to an extreme.
According to this cocktail-napkin thesis, each one of these themes may become conducive to anarchy, anomie, atomization, or the loss of agency.
Anarchy is loud, obnoxious, and stirring. It is punk rock like the Clash and the Ramones (even ironically), which has been "commoditized" modernly, so to speak, by the likes of Green Day.
Anomie is disconsolate, somber, and sad (although sometimes bitter). It is reflective of Joni Mitchell and Fleetwood Mac through Alanis Morisette, and more recently, Adele.
Atomization is lonely and angry, but it can be rebellious. Think of Black Sabbath through Soundgarden ranging to Emo Rock like My Chemical Romance and Fall Out Boy.
Loss of agency? Well, that's the commercialized pop rock that is cranked out on industry demand, like Taylor Swift and Olivia Rodrigo.
Such pop music has the effect, intentional or not, and beneficial or not, of switching one's mind off, or occupying it with vain subjects.
Anyone who has complained about the "popification" of modern country music will understand this general point.
Obviously, this argument strips away nuance, variety, and taste, which vary tremendously between these artists.
This isn't to claim these musicians knowingly adopt any general theme beyond their personal expression of their artistry. What we are talking about here is zeitgeist.
This is an ad hoc theory that draws on themes that can loosely be gleaned from works on totalitarianism ranging from Hannah Arendt to Eric Hoffer. Whether or not any of it is intentional is a matter of debate.
But anyone who has questioned how the most free-spirited radicals of the 1960s "flower power" generation turned into big-government-supporting Boomers must be wondering if their 180 degree turn on such political matters was somehow molded by mainstreamed culture.
That brings us to where we are now. We are in a "conformity" epoch. A period of "normalization," as fans of Yuri Bezmenov might say.
What we find is there is a trend among mainstreamed music to become more homogenized, less creative, and anti-individualistic, as will be explained below.
A 2012 study by Spanish researchers found that popular music had grown louder and increasingly repetitive over the previous half-century. Published in Scientific Reports, the study examined songs released between 1955 and 2010 using the Million Song Dataset.
Researchers identified a steady decline in musical variety, including fewer changes in chord progressions, melodies and the range of sounds used in recordings.
"We found evidence of a progressive homogenization of the musical discourse," Joan Serra of the Spanish National Research Council told Reuters. "In particular, we obtained numerical indicators that the diversity of transitions between note combinations - roughly speaking chords plus melodies - has consistently diminished in the last 50 years."
The study also documented a rise in what researchers called "intrinsic loudness," meaning newer recordings tended to sound louder even when played at the same volume as older songs.
What I find fascinating about all of this is that something I read by Theodor Adorno that stuck with me. Adorno was a neomarxist scholar of the Frankfurt School and an influential CBS Radio theorist, whose Princeton Radio Research Project was funded by the Rockefeller Foundation.
Adorno, and I must be careful here to point out he is complaining about these things, unironically discusses repetition in music and its anti-individualistic effects in his essay, "On Popular Music."
The whole structure of popular music is standardized, even where the attempt is made to circumvent standardization. Standardization extends from the most general features to the most specific ones. … This inexorable device guarantees that regardless of what aberrations occur, the hit will lead back to the same familiar experience, and nothing fundamentally novel will be introduced.
Listening to popular music is manipulated not only by its promoters but, as it were, by the inherent nature of this music itself, into a system of response-mechanisms wholly antagonistic to the ideal of individuality in a free, liberal society. … The composition hears for the listener. This is how popular music divests the listener of his spontaneity and promotes conditioned reflexes. … Popular music is “pre-digested.”
It is unavoidable that whenever I read a Marxian theorist complaining about anti-individualism, I am reflexively bound to giggle. We are talking about coercive collectivists, after all. Individuality is the enemy of the socialist state.
Adorno elsewhere complains about "pseudo-individualism," which is apt in some ways, and lacking in others.
The necessary correlate of musical standardization is pseudo-individualization. By pseudo-individualization we mean endowing cultural mass production with the halo of free choice or open market on the basis of standardization itself. Standardization of song hits keeps the customers in line by doing their listening for them, as it were. Pseudo-individualization, for its part, keeps them in line by making them forget that what they listen to is already listened to for them, or “pre-digested.”
Pseudo-individualism is indeed an appropriate term to describe the AI-driven music that we are hearing in fits and bursts modernly.
It is my point that popular music is so mundane and repetitive, thanks to our Big 3 music industry titans (Universal Music Group, Warner Music Group, and Sony Music Group), that there is modern AI music that is actually more creative than that which is being produced by "artists."
Here is an example of a recent AI-generated song that has some interesting elements (guitar solos, e.g.) that are not quite characteristic of the Dark Minimal Techno music I often listen to when writing my fiction books.
The reason I listen to techno when I write is because it shuts off parts of my brain and allows my creative brain to work. Draw your own conclusions.
