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Comment by somenameforme | Hacker News Reader

The issue is that one could reasonably argue that about 95% of pop music is was already formulaic slop. Not just pejoratively, but much of it was even made by the same people. Everybody from Britney Spears to Taylor Swift and more modern acts are all being driven by one guy - 'Max Martin'. [1]

Once you see the songs he's credited with, you instantly start to realize it's painfully formulaic, but most people are happy to just bop their head to his formula of highly repetitive beats paired with simplistic and easy to sing 5-beat choruses.

[1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Max_Martin

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Max Martin is considered incredibly good at what he does.

https://youtu.be/DxrwjJHXPlQ?si=m-A6M8xrad5MrQqZ&t=151

Adam Conover discussed ad bumpers from the 1990s and 2000s. These were legal requirements for children's programming from the FCC. They're a compliance item, yet they were incredibly well made and creative in in many cases:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0vI0UcUxzrQ

Because people at the top of their game will do great creative work even when doing commercial art and in many cases, will do way more than is perhaps commercially necessary.

So much of this AI push reminds me of the scene in 1984 where they had pornography generating machines creating completely uninspired formulaic brainrot stories by machine to occupy the proles.

Max Martin is a stand out talent.

You can take a thousand people and give them baseline technical skills for any medium. If you're lucky a few people out of your thousand will have a special kind of fluency that makes them stand out. from the rest.

Even more rarely you'll get someone who eats the technical skills alive and adds something original and unique which pushes them outside of the usual recycled tropes and cliches.

Martin is somewhere between those two. He's not a genius, but he's a rock solid pop writer, with a unique ear for hooks and drama, and stand-out arrangement skills.

Fascinating! The last sentence could also talk about the famous book.

You're saying 1984 is completely formulaic brainrot?

No not that scene, I just failed at the joke. The commercial music scene was formulaic in the 80's and earlier already. Popular culture porn.

> The issue is that one could reasonably argue that about 95% of pop music is was already formulaic slop.

The existence of some handmade slop does not justify vast qualities of even lower quality automated slop.

Said handmade slop dominating Billboard does.

Also since autotune technology got good, a lot of them can’t even sing.

I much prefer the huge amount of music written/performed by Nile Rodgers instead.

I do argue that, actually. I mostly avoid manufactured corpo-pop.

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