When we look back in 20 years time, what are we going to remember about 2016?
The year that every beloved celebrity passed away? Pokémon GO, perhaps? For me, it’s the year that every single song sounded so damn similar that they blurred into one massive musical nightmare.
These days you could listen to any mainstream radio station and be easily mistaken as thinking that the same song has been on repeat all day.
But as we’ve known for quite some time now, pop music nowadays is unoriginal for a reason.
Researchers found out that over the last 50 years music has been slowly losing any individuality whatsoever after record labels found a formula that people like.
In fact, hundreds of recent pop songs feature the exact same chord progression, which these guys proved:
However, this latest phenomenon gives us even more evidence of why millennial pop music is so damn samey.
Musician and product manager Patrick Metzger was the man to discover that many chart-topping songs released in recent years have been using the exact same whooping, melodic sequence.
He dubbed it the ‘The Millennial Whoop’, describing it as a sequence of notes that alternate between the fifth and third notes of a major scale, before quickly returning to the fifth note.
As Quartz noted in the video below there are countless examples of this ‘Milennial Whoop’, with the likes of Katy Perry, Chris Brown and Kings of Leon all harnessing its power.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rZsTN_yi-rw
R.I.P. original music, we will miss you.
