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Comment by lwelyk | Hacker News Reader

I wasn't aware there was an objective 1-to-1 correlation between the complexity of music to its quality.

There's not but it's a good heuristic. In pop music the average entropy is much lower, not only because the songs are simpler, but because they are more alike.

Are you quoting that "Measuring the Evolution of Contemporary Western Popular Music" paper? Anybody who knows about music disagrees with its methods. Here's a good rundown by a classical composer: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VfNdps0daF8

Since you're not required to listen to pop music, the average entropy is utterly irrelevant. If you prefer more complex music there is a huge amount out there, probably more than you can listen to.

Average artwork has always been garbage throughout human history. But I still found a few good paintings to hang on my walls. As long as you can get what you want it doesn't really matter what else is out there.

> Since you're not required to listen to pop music,

Is there a trick I'm missing to avoid this in {Ubers, grocery stores, bars, ...}? If so I'd love to know about it! Note: am blind, so can't constantly wear earplugs.

Okay, but you know that "good" and "worse" and subjective, relative terms? Just because you have your own reasons for something doesn't make them "objective", you just don't like modern pop music.

Ok, so since it is all "subjective" then you have to concede that a song which is just 1 hour of a single note being played is equally good.

Or maybe, instead of devolving into absurdity we can just say that there are come qualities of being better or worse that most people can agree on.

Of course, you can simply bite the bullet and say "yep. The song with 1 note in it is subjectively just as good".

> there are come qualities of being better or worse that most people can agree on

Maybe, but enough people like modern day pop music, so by that criteria it is good.

The only heuristic that matters the quality of pop music is "do people like it" and it's almost a tautology that pop music in any given time period passes it.

If people preferred more complicated music, then more complicated music would be popular and more of it would get made.

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