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https://cs.brown.edu/courses/cs100/students/project11/

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Introduction

Our dataset includes the top 100 songs between 1964 and 2015, as published in Billboad's Year-End Hot 100. The dataset features 5100 songs and includes ranking, song name, artist, year, lyrics, and source for each song. Source #1 is metrolyrics.com, source #2 is songlyrics.com, and source #3 is lyricsmode.com. Lyrics for 187 songs were unavailable. The songs are ranked from 1-100 for each year. The song titles, artist names, and lyrics are included without capitalization or punctuation.

Hypotheses

We explored several hypotheses while analyzing this data set. Specifically, we looked at the differences among word count, average number of unique words per song, top 15 words used, popular two- or three-word phrases, and sentimental words for each decade. We were more interested in learning about trends behind the lyrics rather than trends behind artists or song names. Our null hypothesis is that regardless of the decade, the word count, average number of unique words per song, top 15 words used, top bigrams and trigrams, and proportion of sentimental words will remain the same. Overall, our alternative hypothesis is that the word count, average number of unique words per song, top 15 words used, popular two-word or three-word phrases, and proportion of sentimental words changes each decade.

The first hypothesis we are testing is that the top 15 words, top two-word phrases, and top three-word phrases have changed over the decades, with more profanity and less sophisticated words with each passing decade. However, we also hypothesize that common themes in songs will stay the same.

The second hypothesis we are testing is that the number of unique words will decrease each decade, indicating that songs are becoming more repetitive.

The third hypothesis we are testing is that the proportion of positive sentiment words and negative words are different in each decade, so we can accurately predict a song's decade with a decision tree based on how similar its own proportion of positive or negative words is to a particular decade.

Methodology

Original Plan

Looking at our data set for the first time, we wanted to mainly do text analysis on the song lyrics. We wanted to determine how popular words, phrases, and topics changed with each decade. To visualize the data, we would create bar charts and word clouds. We also wanted to determine average word count for each decade and look into song repetitiveness over time. Finally, we wanted to determine how sentiments and the way people talk about certain topics change over time (i.e. how lyrics about love have changed.) However, we weren't able to do so because understanding how a certain topic is discussed would require looking at the full song instead of individual words or phrases.

Visualizations

Data Cleaning

The data was mostly straightforward, but it required some cleaning and separation into different data sets. First, we omitted the "NA"s and blank spaces from the dataset. Then, we created vectors for each decade, filtering the appropriate years into the appropriate vector. Using this, we created separate datasets for the song lyrics of different decades. We created a list of new stop words, such as "dont," "im," "youre," "ill," "gonna," "aint," "ive," "youll," and "wont." We then combined this custom list of stop words with the default of list words. Then, we removed the stop words from each decade's dataset. Finally, we separated the lyric words into one word per row.

The data also includes two different variations for artist collaborations. Newer songs include the word "featuring" before featured artists, while older songs just have a space between two artists. However, we did not clean this data variation because it did not affect any of our visualizations or models. In addition, we did not correct spelling errors or derivatives, such as "night" vs. "nite" or "thingll" instead of "thing will" because it did not significantly affect our results.

Results

1960's

First, we created a vector called "Sixties" and included the years of the 1960's, starting with 1965 (the first available year of data). Then, we created a separate dataset called "Sixtieslyrics" and filtered the "songs" data frame for rows that included the years in our "Sixties" vector. Because our "Sixties" vector only includes five years, our data and visualizations are not representative of the entire decade.

Then, we created another dataset called "Sixtieswords" in which we separated each word in the lyrics column of our "Sixtieslyrics" dataset into a separate row. After, we created a data frame that included both the default list of stop words and a custom list of stop words. Before determining the number of times each word was used in the 1960s, we removed the words in our "stopwords" data frame from the "Sixtieswords" dataset in order to prevent commonly used words such as "the" from appearing in our word count data.

We also removed the words in our "stopwords" data frame before creating bigrams and trigrams. This prevents commonly used words such as "is" from appearing in our two-word and three-word phrases.

Our first visualization is a bar chart with a list and count of the most commonly used words in lyrics in Billboard's "Year-End Hot 100" for the years 1965-1969 only.

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Analysis of Billboard's Top 100 Songs and Lyrics (1964-2015)

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Our dataset includes the top 100 songs between 1964 and 2015, as published in Billboad's Year-End Hot 100. The dataset features 5100 songs and includes ranking, song name, artist, year, lyrics, and source for each song. Source #1 is metrolyrics.com, source #2 is songlyrics.com, and source #3 is lyricsmode.com.

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https://www.tymmi.com/7-ways-the-music-industry-has-changed-over-the-past-decade/

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A decade kind of went by in a blur because 2012 doesn't seem like a long time ago. But the overt changes of those past 10 years are apparent in the music industry. In 2012 we were obsessed with Katy Perry's bubblegum pop album Teenage Dream, Kesha's TikTok, and Rihanna's Love The Way You Lie.

We used to go hopping shop to shop looking to buy a physical copy of Beyoncé's Lemonade. 2012 was a year of some of the best and most ambitious pop and rock albums of all time. This was because several artists from various genres were busy crafting some of the best work that would cement their reputation in the music world forever.

Many younger people like Generation Z aren't even slightly aware of vinyl or 8tracks. The music industry has made tremendous changes since 2012, and most of it is because of the advancement of technology since the 1990s. If you're interested in finding out how the music industry has evolved in the last ten years, read ahead to find out!

Technology has globally changed how music consumers listen to music. iPods and CDs are completely obsolete, and it's all about streaming music and surprise album releases on Spotify. A long time ago, the artist's music career entirely depended on the traditional record labels.

The creator and the consumer predominantly relied on the record label to create and release music. But the power dynamics have now completely shifted. Gone are the days when the artistic impression of the artist was censored because the record labels were profiting off of the artist. With popular music streaming sites, music consumers can now access music on the go.

Ten years ago, people had to pay almost 99 cents on iTunes to listen to a song. But streaming apps like Apple Music, Spotify, and TIDAL have transformed the music industry.

The consumption of music wasn't the only thing that was revolutionized with the advent of technology, but reading and playing music has also changed substantially. Musicians don't have to purchase volumes of sheet music just to create a single.

Even young artists can now easily look up lessons online if they're looking to play music. There are thousands of helpful tutorials and people willing to guide on YouTube teaching musical instruments for free. Another advantage of going digital is easily having access to lyrics online! Remember the days when you had to go over a song again and again so that you could write down the lyrics? You can easily sing along to any song now by simply Googling the song lyrics.

Remember when Beyoncé took the world by storm by releasing her critically-acclaimed fifth album without marketing it? This unprecedented and unconventional way of releasing an album turned out to be highly successful as queen B sold almost 5 million copies globally. She even earned a Guinness World Record for having the fastest-selling album ever released.

These days, several singers like to release an entire album without signing up for any promo content to market it. Taylor Swift, for one, had mastered the art of surprise-dropping albums when she started to re-record her versions of previous music and released Taylor's versions of Red and Fearless.

Ever since famous K-pop boy bands like EXO and BTS started to accumulate millions of fans worldwide, a more diverse range of artists appeared on the top charts. A by the Annenberg Inclusion Initiative showed that since 2012, 47% of the credited artists in the 900 top pop songs are people of color.

Technology and social media provide more chances and inclusivity to artists from different ethnicities and give them a platform not everyone had before. Like the Puerto Rican artist, Daddy Yankee's song Despacito has over 7 billion views on YouTube.

Previously, artists stuck to one genre of music and stayed committed to it throughout their music careers. But now, artists collaborate together and create cross-genre music that is melodic and catchy. DuaLipa collaborating with the popular K-pop band Blackpink and Lil Nas X, creating the famous "Old Town Road" with Billy Ray Cyrus, are examples of the cross-genre style.

Before 2010, artists did not have the right platform to make political and cultural statements and fight injustices. But today, many artists are making important and relevant statements that help marginalized communities, empowering them and helping their movement.

For example, Donald Glover released the viral music video for This Is America, where his alter-ego Childish Gambino uses astounding imagery to illustrate the violence committed against black people in the US.

Then Taylor Swift released her single You Need To Calm Downin the middle of Pride month. The lyrical genius herself wrote about the blatant homophobia and the discrimination against the LGBTQ community.

In previous times, when bands went through break-up and singers started to embark on their solo journeys as artists, their music careers suffered a lot. But now, when videos go viral in a few hours, many people like Zayn Malik from One Direction and Normani from Fifth Harmony are very successful music artists and receive a lot of support from their fans.

Are You Looking To Be A Successful Musician?

Many people give up on pursuing their dream of being musicians because they want to conform to old traditions and have a more "practical" career. This is not the case at all. Music careers are far more successful in today's day and age. With social media apps like TikTok and YouTube, many young musicians find a way to become viral sensations quickly. All it takes is hard work and your complete dedication to your career! If you think you have hidden musical talent inside of you, then we are here to help you discover it.

At The Young Musician Music Institute, we aim to provide the best learning opportunities to artists of all ages. Our esteemed teachers are award-winning musicians well-known in the world of music and are providing top-quality music lessons.

Whether you're thinking of enrolling your child in toddler music lessons or looking for music diploma courses, we offer a wide range of music courses for beginners and advanced levels! Our music certificate courses are designed to help young musicians find their footing in the ever-changing world of music. Our music institute in Abu Dhabi, UAE, is affiliated with the Trinity College of London, and this is why we prepare our students for the competitive Trinity music diplomas.

Our institute has nurtured the talents of hundreds of students who are all successful musicians and educators. We believe in the outcome-driven teaching strategies involving our students in performance-based music education. We also organize seasonal concerts to give our students exposure and enhance their performance caliber.

Get started on your music career today by signing up for our music courses now. Whether you're looking for drum lessons, guitar lessons, violin lessons, singing lessons, or piano lessons, we have it all! Visit our website or contact us to learn more about our institute.
Musicians Who Changed the World
Heading to your next music lesson? Here are some notable musicians who'll inspire you.

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7 Ways the Music Industry Has Changed Over the Past Decade

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A decade kind of went by in a blur because 2012 doesn't seem like a long time ago. But the overt changes of those past 10 years are apparent in the music industry. In 2012 we were obsessed with Katy Perry's bubblegum pop album Teenage Dream, Kesha's TikTok, and Rihanna's Love The Way You Lie.

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https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2013/10/131015123654.htm

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The explosion in music consumption over the last century has made 'what you listen to' an important personality construct -- as well as the root of many social and cultural tribes -- and, for many people, their self-perception is closely associated with musical preference. We would perhaps be reluctant to admit that our taste in music alters -- softens even -- as we get older.

Now, a new study suggests that -- while our engagement with it may decline -- music stays important to us as we get older, but the music we like adapts to the particular 'life challenges' we face at different stages of our lives.

It would seem that, unless you die before you get old, your taste in music will probably change to meet social and psychological needs.

One theory put forward by researchers, based on the study, is that we come to music to experiment with identity and define ourselves, and then use it as a social vehicle to establish our group and find a mate, and later as a more solitary expression of our intellect, status and greater emotional understanding.

Researchers say the study is the first to "comprehensively document" the ways people engage with music "from adolescence to middle age." The study is published in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology.

Using data gathered from more than a quarter of a million people over a ten year period, researchers divided musical genres into five broad, "empirically derived" categories they call the MUSIC model -- mellow, unpretentious, sophisticated, intense, contemporary -- and plotted the patterns of preference across age-groups.

These five categories incorporate multiple genres that share common musical and psychological traits -- such as loudness and complexity.

"The project started with a common conception that musical taste does not evolve after young adulthood. Most academic research to date supported this claim, but -- based on other areas of psychological research and our own experiences -- we were not convinced this was the case," said Arielle Bonneville-Roussy from Cambridge's Department of Psychology, who led the study.

The study found that, unsurprisingly, the first great musical age is adolescence -- defined by a short, sharp burst of 'intense' and the start of a steady climb of 'contemporary'. 'Intense' music -- such as punk and metal -- peaks in adolescence and declines in early adulthood, while 'contemporary' music -- such as pop and rap -- begins a rise that plateaus until early middle age.

"Teenage years are often dominated by the need to establish identity, and music is a cheap, effective way to do this," said Dr Jason Rentfrow, senior researcher on the study.

"Adolescents' quest for independence often takes the shape of a juxtaposed stance to the perceived 'status quo', that of parents and the establishment. 'Intense' music, seen as aggressive, tense and characterised by loud, distorted sounds has the rebellious connotations that allow adolescents to stake a claim for the autonomy that is one of this period's key 'life challenges'."

As 'intense' gives way to the rising tide of 'contemporary' and introduction of 'mellow' -- such as electronic and R & B -- in early adulthood, the next musical age emerges. These two "preference dimensions" are considered "romantic, emotionally positive and danceable," write the researchers.

"Once people overcome the need for autonomy, the next 'life challenge' concerns finding love and being loved -- people who appreciate this 'you' that has emerged," said Rentfrow.

"What we took away from the results is that these forms of music reinforce the desire for intimacy and complement settings where people come together with the goal of establishing close relationships -- parties, bars, clubs and so on.

"Whereas the first musical age is about asserting independence, the next appears to be more about gaining acceptance from others."

As we settle down and middle age begins to creep in, the last musical age, as identified by the researchers, is dominated by 'sophisticated' -- such as jazz and classical -- and 'unpretentious' -- such as country, folk and blues.

Researchers write that both these dimensions are seen as "positive and relaxing" -- with 'sophisticated' indicating the complex aesthetic of high culture that could be linked to social status and perceived intellect, while 'unpretentious' echoes sentiments of family, love and loss -- emotionally direct music that speaks to the experiences most will have had by this life stage.

"As we settle into ourselves and acquire more resources to express ourselves -- career, home, family, car -- music remains an extension of this, and at this stage there are aspects of wanting to promote social status, intellect and wealth that play into the increased gravitation towards 'sophisticated' music," said Rentfrow, "as social standing is seen as a key 'life challenge' to be achieved by this point."

"At the same time, for many this life stage is frequently exhausted by work and family, and there is a requirement for relaxing, emotive music for those rare down times that reflects the other major 'life challenge' of this stage -- that of nurturing a family and maintaining long-term relationships, perhaps the hardest of all."

Adds Bonneville-Roussy: "Due to our very large sample size, gathered from online forms and social media channels, we were able to find very robust age trends in musical taste. I find it fascinating to see how seemingly trivial behaviour such as music listening relates to so many psychological aspects, such as personality and age."

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music; social psychology; psychology; k-12 education; arts and culture; media and entertainment; popular culture; stem education

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Musical ages: How our taste in music changes over a lifetime

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Research shows that musical tastes shift as we age are in line with key "life challenges." Teenage years were defined by "intense" music, then early adulthood by "contemporary" and "mellow" as the search for close relationships increases, with "sophisticated" and "unpretentious" allowing us to project status and family values later in life.

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https://www.nbcnews.com/better/lifestyle/musicologist-explains-science-behind-your-taste-music-ncna1018336

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A musicologist explains the science behind your taste in music

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Nolan Gasser, musician and musicologist, knows why you can’t quit 80s music.

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https://serious-science.org/musical-taste-9601

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Neuroscientist Diana Omigie on what musical taste is, how our musical preferences are formed and what can change them

articles | September 5, 2019

What is musical taste?

It is interesting that the term musical taste is tied to the term aesthetics. Musical taste is often paired together with musical preferences. Most people understand musical taste as one's preferences in music: particular genres, styles, music bands. Psychologists study the topic by presenting participants of their experiments with questions like "On a scale of one to five, rate how much you like rock music?"

One can imagine that this information would be enough for scientists to infer what people's musical tastes are. But it is worth bearing in mind that the idea of taste has a long history that dates back as far as the 17th century: David Hume and many other philosophers were trying to understand how people put value on aesthetic objects. They suggested that people do not reason their way to beauty, they taste it. The idea was that we humans have innate aesthetic sense that allows us to judge whether something is beautiful.

Even though musical taste is a very loaded term, in the context of research, contemporary view on the term is merely what one judges to be good, one's attitude towards different musical styles or composers.

What is aesthetic sense?

The field of aesthetics is very old: it has started with philosophical aesthetics and later when psychology emerged, came psychological aesthetics. Aesthetics and the way people put value on sensory information were among the first things that interested psychologists, although the topic was shortly forgotten. The interest in aesthetics arose again in the 1960s and soon became a rich and dynamic research area.

Empirical aesthetics tries to understand why people like what they like and why they consider something beautiful. What I am trying to emphasize is that whenever we make some value judgments on something that we consider an aesthetic object which could be an artwork or even just a landscape, it is so broad that it is difficult to define even what the remnants of empirical aesthetics is.

People implicitly have a sense of aesthetics, we all have attitudes, preferences and tastes. They dwell greatly on beauty, but now the focus of our research has shifted to other value judgments such as originality. We are trying to understand how people make value judgments on things that are there for sensory and cognitive pleasure.

Why do our preferences differ so much?

There are many different reasons for this. For instance, there are supposed to be cultural and social reasons: social scientists have talked a lot about how your background and where you have been raised can play a role in the phenomena. You might like classical music because you were being dragged to it all the time in your childhood, or you might not like it for the very same reason. The idea is, the things to which one was being exposed in childhood can later influence what one values.

Some people have suggested that aesthetic preferences depend on the things a person was exposed to at different stages of development. For instance, the contrast between pop and rock music. You may get attached to the music that you listen to during your teenage years. During these years music becomes very important for emotion regulation and presenting yourself: "this is what I like". In the teenage years, changes in hormone levels start to occur and this is the time when music can have quite an important role in your life. You cannot help but value that type of music for the rest of your life, and this is how it is forming your taste to some degree.

Some people say that musical taste is tied to the expertise effect: the more you know about different musical styles, perhaps the more you will like it, the more you will be curious and want to learn more about it. For instance, there was a suggestion in the literature that if you were a musician you would generally like Bach more than the next person, you would like classical music more. But what they found, and what we found, in the study that I was involved in with colleagues in Germany, was that this is not the case with musicians playing only classical music all the time. If anything, they just seem to have very omnivorous taste, they like a lot of things and part of that is because musicians learn how music works, they learn how to listen, analyze and interpret music. They can apply this to any genre or style that they hear. Inevitably, learning about styles becomes very rewarding and, therefore, what we found in our research was that musicians like pop music, rock and everything else just as much as everyone. But they do happen to like classical music more than someone who is not a trained musician.

We asked some musicology and non-musicology students to fill out the questionnaire that my colleagues did (I was involved in the analysis). We tried to find the clusters in these groups of students, we had over a thousand participants. We found that there were many rock lovers, whom we called 'conventional' listeners: they liked pop music as well as classical music. There was another group that seemed to like everything and consisted mostly of musicology students, we called them 'the engage listeners'.

So, in a way, taste is influenced by everything: from what we are exposed to at certain points in our life, to our social class and expertise.

Who was the first to study musical taste?

As I have mentioned, the term is old and complicated and it came into the dictionary around the same time as aesthetics. But basically in musical preferences and psychology research a lot of work has been done by Rentfrow, who came up with a questionnaire that allows us to determine participants' preferences in music. That was not in the 17th century, but rather in the last few decades.

Does your research focus on musical taste?

Musical taste is not my primary area of research.
I was happy to be involved in the research where we were looking exactly at musical taste, although it inevitably feeds into every experiment that we do. We tried to make our experiments as ecologically valid as possible, which is quite tricky sometimes. In our experiments, this kind of research is implemented when we present our participants with stimuli that they might care about (and if they do not, we want to know about it). That would be one way in which I would have to think about their musical preferences and tastes to get a full picture of the listener.

What remains unknown about musical taste?

One thing that would be interesting to know about musical taste is how flexible it is. I have mentioned a study that shows that musical taste depends on what you listen to at a specific time of your life and how much you are exposed to different music styles. Another interesting thing to study is whether one's tastes are formed early in their life or whether there are ways in which one can change their tastes later on.

In German, there is a concept of 'Schlüsselerlebnis' - the key moment. The idea behind the term is that these key moments can change your taste, so at some point, you may think: "This is beautiful music, I am only going to listen to this style for the rest of my life". This can happen in our early decades rather than in the later ones in our life. Nevertheless, it would be interesting to see how often this happens when we get older and set in our ways.
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Neuroscientist Diana Omigie on what musical taste is, how our musical preferences are formed and what can change them What is musical taste? It is interesting that the term musical taste is tied to the term aesthetics. Musical taste is often paired together with musical preferences.

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https://no-taste.com/no-taste-blog/pop-music-changed-90s-2867/

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Pop music as we know it has stagnated more in the last couple of decades than ever before, and in the last 30 years music hasn't really changed. This may seem a ludicrous statement, but is there any truth in it? Well yes - quite a lot actually.

The 90's - and specifically 1990 - was 30 years ago. And compared to previous changes of musical genres and tastes across the decades, this 30-year period hasn't provided anything significantly 'new'. There's an almost countless number of new artists continually staking their claim to be the next global superstar, though most fading to oblivion before their existence is even known. But the ones who do succeed and break through - well, they're not exactly re-inventing the musical wheel.

This isn't necessarily a bad thing however - the diversity of today's artists that have become mainstream are contributing significantly to our eclectic tastes of music at present. And the artists who have had a longevity of success - think U2, Jay-Z, Madonna - have contributed significantly over the past couple of decades, even going back into the 1980s. But, since the 1990s, although we have such diversity in the genres of music we listen to, these genres and how they sound have remained relatively unchanged.

As a general rule - but obviously this wouldn't apply to everyone - when we cease education and start work (in our later teens and early twenties), the amount of time we spend listening to 'new' music starts to diminish. This in turn stagnates the continuation of appreciation towards new music. It somehow makes the person believe that music they listened to in their later teens and early twenties is current, no matter how many years go by.

The decades you spend in your later teens and early twenties will tend to determine your favoured music era for the rest of your life, e.g. if you're a '90s' child, you're always going to think that artists such as Alanis Morissette, REM, East 17 or Oasis sound current. Oasis... current? Their debut album 'Definitely Maybe' was released in 1994, twenty-six years ago. But, their music is still comparable to current guitar bands today.

Think about some of the songs of the 1990s. Think of Nirvana's Smells Like Teen Spirit, released in 1991. If you heard it now for the first time it wouldn't sound dated. Robbie Williams' Angels released in 1997. Underworld's Born Slippy in 1996, Faithless' Insomnia in 1995. One of the best-selling singles of all time, Whitney's I Will Always Love You, released in 1992. All Saints' Never Ever and Notorious B.I.G's Mo Money Mo Problems, both also released in 1997. To hear any of these songs for the first time today, it certainly wouldn't be a surprise to also be told that the song had just been released yesterday.

Dance music, girl groups, boy bands, pop, indie, rock, hip-hop, R&B - all of these genres were around in the 90s and they're still around now. And with such similarities. Little Mix - love them or loathe them, they're undeniably the most successful girl band of recent years. Is their sound so much different to that of the Spice Girls and All Saints from the 90s. One Direction and their breakaway solo artist Harry Styles. Think Take That and Robbie, or Boyzone and Ronan Keating. The 1975 could have been around in 1995 and Blur's End of a Century may well not sound too dated in 2094 - almost at the end of another century, and 100 years after its release date!

Rejected band name: The Curry Women.

Up until now, never since the 1950s when the term 'popular music' originated has there been a period of time over three decades where music has stagnated; a period over three decades where the music we listen to hasn't really changed. Think of the 1950s to the 1980s, the 1970s to 2000s, the 1960s to the 1990s. It would be inconceivable to listen to a selection of music from the 1950s and 1980s and consider that all of the music could be from the same era. The same could be said from listening to a selection of music from the 1960s and 1990s, or the 1970s and 2000s - under no circumstances could it be contemplated that you were listening to music from a similar time period. Listening to a selection from the 1990s and present day.... well it possibly could be. Couldn't it?

When I was a child, my music taste growing up could have been easily influenced by songs from the 1950s, 60s and a few from the 70s, those of which my parents listened to. The music from those decades was a constant fixture of my early years, emanating from the 'tinny' speakers from the ginormous teak stained 'radiogram' that took up a large portion of the living room. But this music sounded so dated to me.

Madonna, Michael Jackson, A-ha, Duran Duran... to me growing up, these were the fresh sounding artists, sounding so different to their contemporaries from the decade before. Many 1980s artists were obviously still producing new music into the 1990s, their sound and voice adapting to the market tastes of that new decade.

We're still patiently waiting for this to come back into fashion.

As a child growing up, I was critical of music from past decades, and maybe wrongly dismissive of its sounds and significance. But that's being a child I suppose, developing your own opinions, acquiring your own tastes, fitting in with what your peers listen to, and sometimes simply wanting to annoy your parents by not agreeing with them!

But there was such a difference in music from the 1980s compared to that of the previous decade. Then a gradual transition throughout the 80s into the 1990s. I know that whilst listening to the music being played by my parents - predominantly 1960s with a little 50s and 70s thrown in for good measure - my thoughts will have been along the lines of "what the hell is this rubbish?", or "how old???"

Although I still may not enjoy listening to music released before the 1980s, I am appreciative of music prior to this decade and accept that it's certainly not 'rubbish'.

It is different these days though; a child listening to their parent's 1990s or 2000s music most likely isn't going to think that it sounds dated, because it doesn't. It's normal now for parents and children to share musical tastes, listen to the same artists, and go to gigs and festivals together for shared experience and enjoyment. In the past this would have been a rarity.

See Also

Does this mean that we've reached the 'pinnacle' of musical genres and styles; has music plateaued, in that although there's much diversity and choice of music available, this music availability is likely to remain stable for years and decades to come? Quite possibly, yes. It's not necessarily the case that music can't get any better - new generations will always consider that their current music is the best! And that's 100% true - to any current generation their music is 'the best'. No doubt music will change, but it will probably be a steady progression over the years and decades rather than dramatically significant and noticeable - most likely we won't still be appreciating Busted over the forthcoming millennia as their No.2 single Year 3000 prophesised, but it's going to be some time - years and further decades - before the 'popular music' we listen to sounds very much different to what it is now.

Although music itself hasn't changed significantly since the 1990s, the way in which we purchase and listen to music most certainly has. Or has it? CDs were increasing in popularity during the 1980s but we were still using cassettes into the 1990s - remember making those mix-tapes? Downloading music digitally became an available option in the late 1990s and there's no disputing the fact that it has progressively become the preferred method of purchasing music since then. And we all have easy access to digital devices both at home and in our pockets, to enable simplistic access and control for playing our music. Though, despite the ease of purchasing and playing digital music, music is still sold on CD more than 30 years since this format was first introduced. And vinyl as we're fully aware is also having a bit of a renaissance.

A mysterious artefact from a bygone century

It's this fundamental change as to how we listen to and purchase music that's resulted in the current stagnation of the music itself. Because of the high quality of sound available, and the simplicity and ease of use that digital music provides, where's the motivation to strive for improvement and change?

The technology available to music artists now - for everything associated with the music industry in fact - for the recording process, editing, manufacturing, distribution on digital formats - everything has advanced so much compared to what was available those three decades ago. Remember 80's synth, and those ostentatious keyboard guitars?

The quality and reproduction of music we have at our disposal now has helped with the quality of the sound not being at all dated throughout the recent decades.

Maybe we've almost reached the best that we can possibly achieve for the quality of sound that is recorded and reproduced, and also the way in which we purchase and listen to our music. Hopefully we've not necessarily reached the pinnacle of musical taste and genres, so we may be listening to something completely different in the future - but when, who knows?

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Has pop music evolved since the 90's? If not... why not?

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Pop music as we know it has stagnated more in the last couple of decades than ever before, and in the last 30 years music hasn't really changed. This may seem a ludicrous statement, but is there any truth in it? Well yes - quite a lot actually.

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https://www.makeuseof.com/tag/the-evolution-of-music-consumption-how-we-got-here/

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Spend ten minutes walking down almost any street in the world, and you'll see a familiar sight: a young person walking down the street with Apple's iconic white earbuds firmly planted in their ears. They might be bobbing along to the beat, or they could be keeping their head down, just trying to get to work through the crowds.

The rise of the iPod, the music-playing mobile phone, and a number of streaming media platforms all point toward a single, simple idea: music is important. It's important to people on an individual level, it's important to the human race on a societal level, and it's hugely influential to the state of technology. The devices we use to listen to music help shape the technological landscape of the day.

But how did we get here?

When did those white earbuds become synonymous with young people and their portable music player of choice, the ubiquitous iPod? Was the iPod the first MP3 player? How did people listen to music before the Walkman? And where did it all start? The answers to these questions tell us not only about the history of music consumption technology, but also about how people have related to music for the past 150 years.

Early Days: The Phonograph

Our story begins, as many do, with Thomas Edison. Before his invention of the phonograph in 1877, music listeners could only listen to their favorite songs when someone else was playing them, whether in a concert hall or at home. Music has been an important part of human culture since prehistoric times (some experts believe music to have emerged 30,000 to 60,000 years ago), but the phonograph completely revolutionized its consumption.

Before Edison's invention (the second iteration of which is pictured above), some inventors had managed to record music onto physical media, but 1877 saw the first machine that could both record music and play it back. Sounds to be recorded were transmitted through a recording stylus, which would create indentations on a round phonograph cylinder, and a playback stylus could read the recording and play it back through a diaphragm and the iconic horn.

The phonograph cylinders themselves were interesting devices -- Edison started with one that consisted of tinfoil wrapped around a metal cylinder. Almost a decade later, a group of researchers and engineers that included Alexander Graham Bell created a phonograph cylinder made of cardboard covered in wax that could be engraved with recordings.

Around the same time, Edison created an all-wax cylinder that could be shaved down to record new sounds (this cylinder could be considered the ultimate precursor to the CD-RW). And in 1889, pre-recorded cylinders hit the market. Over time, the wax used for the cylinders was hardened, increasing the number of possible playbacks from a dozen or so to around a hundred times.

In the 1890s, the transition to using flat-disc records began. The recording was etched onto a disc that would be recognizable even today as a record. Interestingly, the dominance of the record over the phonograph cylinder didn't come down to audio fidelity: the main advantage of the disc record was that it could be more easily mass-produced. By creating a master stamp, a number of records could be stamped in a short period of time, whereas each phonograph cylinder had to be recorded individually, significantly slowing the process.

Discs were first released in a five-inch version, then in a seven-inch, a ten-inch, and finally a 12-inch version in 1903. Around this time, interest in double-sided records started to pick up, and Edison realized that the cylinder was dying. He shortly switched to the Edison Disc Record (seen below), a 1/4-inch-thick piece of shellac that could only be played on Edison Disc Phonographs.

Shellac, the standard material of the day, wouldn't be replaced by vinyl, a lighter and more durable material, until after World War II. After a decrease in sales during the war, record sales got a big boost, with more and more families having phonographs with automatic record changers in their homes.

The transition to vinyl also coincided with the change of the industry standard from 78 rpm to 33 1/3 rpm, which allowed a much larger amount of music to be recorded on a single disc. A 10-inch, 78 rpm disc (the most popular size for a number of years) could only contain about three minutes of music, so long songs or collections were often split across a number of discs, each of which was contained in a sleeve that was bound into a book format with the other sleeves, leading to the term "record album."

A 12-inch, vinyl, 33 rpm record, however, could contain around 20 minutes of music on each side, and this longer-playing format began to dominate the market (it retained the "record album" moniker, as well as gained the title "LP" for "long-playing"). 45 rpm records also increased in popularity after the war, with most containing a single song on each side, earning them the name "singles." Extended-play (EP) 45s were also introduced, each of which could contain two songs on each side.

Beyond this point, the changes in record players were mainly in the hardware used to turn the disc and relay the sound -- belt- and direct-drive turntables, balanced tone arms, better styli, and so on. These innovations continue today with brands like Gemini and Stanton. The now-discontinued Technics SL-1210 is on display at the London Science Museum and described as one of the pieces of technology that have shaped the world we live in.

Taking to the Air: Radio

Although radio technology had been around since the early 20th century, it wasn't until later that music started to hit the airwaves. The early history of music radio is murky, but a college radio station in the San Jose area is purported to have broadcast music between 1912 and 1917, though it didn't start broadcasting daily until later.

During World War I (as well as World War II), the US Congress suspended all amateur radio broadcasts, meaning that many stations went off the air permanently. But 1XE of Medford, Massachusetts, was broadcasting music in 1919, shortly after the end of the war, and in the following years, more music radio stations began to pop up.

Unfortunately, they met with some resistance: many people believed that radio should only be used for two-way communication, and a New York station was even shut down by a federal inspector who stated that "there is no place on the ether for entertainment." If only he could see the means by which we transmit music today.

Commercially licensed stations started appearing around this time as well -- Pittsburgh's KDKA is arguably the first, with its inaugural broadcast of presidential election results in October 1920. After that, the popularity of radio exploded: between 1920 and 1930, a reported 60% of American families purchased radio receivers, and the number of families with radios more than doubled during the 30s, ushering in the golden age of radio (usually characterized as lasting from the 20s to the 50s).

In the early days, music wasn't the only thing broadcast on the radio -- in fact, a number of stations only started broadcasting music after they had been on the air for a time. News, sports scores, voting results, soap operas, lectures, weather reports, comedians, political commentaries, and stories could all be heard on the airwaves. Chicago's KYW broadcast opera six days a week, and didn't start broadcasting popular and classical music until the opera season was over and more programming was required.

1922 saw the first appearance of something that would change the future of music broadcasting: the first radio advertisement. One has to wonder how surprised the people at AT&T, the company who paid for the ad, would be if they could see the future of advertising on Internet radio and streaming services. They probably had no idea what they were starting.

Before it was considered acceptable to advertise on the radio, companies would sponsor musical programs, which had names like Champion Spark Plug Hour, Acousticon Hour, and King Biscuit Time. Classical music was often broadcast live, a practice that still survives on a very small scale today. Country music also became more popular during the 1920s and 1930s, with a number of popular country shows being broadcast.

During this time, the standard format for radio stations was the full-service format, which saw the station broadcasting not only music and other types of shows, but also news, weather reports, talk shows, and a wide variety of other things of interest to the local public. This could be mixed with a network broadcast, much like is done on public radio stations today.

The development of popular music is often attributed to the radio, and the rise of the top 40 stations in the early 50s has influenced how music radio operates even today. By allowing radio stations to run with less space, equipment, and staff than full-service stations, top 40 stations quickly became the norm, especially after higher-fidelity magnetic recording made it feasible to broadcast pre-recorded programs in the 1940s (before this, most radio shows were broadcast live for better sound quality).

Another significant development in radio technology also took place around the middle of the century: the invention of the transistor. After its invention in 1947, it was quickly integrated into radios, allowing them to be made smaller and portable, instead of the large, stationary ones typically associated with the golden age of radio. In the 60s and 70s, billions of these radios were built, making easily portable music a reality.

Taking It with You: The Tape

In 1958, RCA would change the future of home music consumption by introducing the RCA tape cartridge (pictured to the right of a later compact cassette below). Before this cartridge, magnetic tape wasn't a realistic option for home use, as reel-to-reel players were too complicated for consumers, especially compared to record players, which had been the de facto standard for home listening for several decades.

This was also the first time that acceptably high-quality audio had been encoded onto a magnetic tape medium for home use. Although the RCA tape cartridge introduced the possibility of 60 minutes of high-quality home listening on magnetic tape, it wouldn't prove to be a success -- it disappeared from shelves by 1964, largely due to low sales of players caused by a hesitance on the part of retailers and hi-fi enthusiasts to adopt the technology.

A number of competing systems tried to gain market dominance through magnetic tapes, but it wasn't until 1964 that home audio would unite around a new format: the 8-track tape. Bill Lear, of the Lear Jet Corporation, along with representatives from Ampex, Ford, General Motors, Motorola, and RCA worked together to improve the technology that had been previously developed for the 4-track tape, which itself had been an improvement on the 3-track model.

Other tape formats had already been available in the home market for a number of years, but the inclusion of 8-track players in many cars of the 60s and 70s led it to become the dominant format of the day, despite its initial 46-minute play-time format.

By the late 60s, all of Ford's cars were offered with an available 8-track player as an upgrade, and hundreds of tapes were released, with the catalogue soon rivaling that of vinyl. And while other 8-track formats came and went, the Lear tape held fast as the most dominant one. Although the reign of the 8-track was brief (it had been supplanted by Phillips' compact cassettes by the late 70s), it remains an iconic music storage method.

Once Phillips proved that their compact cassette tapes could carry high-fidelity musical content in the early 1970s, they began a quick rise to domination of the automobile music market. Their small size was a big count in their favor, as smaller tape decks in cars and homes were advantageous -- even soldiers in Vietnam appreciated the smaller size and greater portability of the medium.

Once manufacturers started making smaller, portable tape decks, the cassette's place in music had been cemented. Portable stereos became more feasible than they had been when the 8-track was the standard format, and adoption by the automobile industry ensured a quick rise in popularity.

An innovation possibly even more important than the cassette itself, however, was released by Sony in 1979: the Walkman. The introduction of the tiny portable stereo tape player helped even more of the music-listening public accept tapes as a viable home and personal music medium.

The Walkman, originally released as the Sound-About in the US, the Stowaway in the UK, and the Freestyle in Sweden, fundamentally changed how people listened to music; no longer tied to large home record players or large, inconvenient portable tape decks, listeners could easily take their music with them wherever they went. And because the first Walkman included two headphone jacks, music could be enjoyed with a friend.

In 1983, cassettes outsold vinyl for the first time, largely thanks to the Walkman and similar devices from other manufacturers. Continued innovation brought AM/FM radios, bass boost, rechargeable batteries, and auto-reverse to the Walkman, which continued to present a sleek face throughout a large number of iterations throughout the 1980s and early 1990s.

The Walkman name is so iconic that it's been used for a range of devices, from cassette players to CD players to video MP3 players, and is still in use today.

The Digital Age: Compact Disc

Although digital recording had been happening since the late 1960s, it wasn't until the early 1980s that the first commercial compact discs (CDs) appeared. Although discs closely resembling the eventual format had been demonstrated by companies in the 70s, the format of the CD was standardized in 1980, making it much easier for manufacturers to get into the business.

Before the CD, magnetic tape data (or the track on a record) was read mechanically, with a sensor turning a magnetic or physical pattern into an electrical signal. The use of a laser to read the data encoded on the disc was a huge leap forward in audio technology -- the laser was bounced off of the disc, and the reflections were read by a sensor which transmitted an electrical signal.

In 1981, ABBA's The Visitors became the first popular music album to be pressed to CD, which was quickly followed by the first album to be released on CD, Billy Joel's 52nd Street. Since then, musical releases have almost always included a CD release, with the format dominating the market in the late 80s, through the 90s, and into the early 2000s.

Error correction was built into CDs from very early on, one of the factors contributing to the format's popularity with audiophiles. Although diehard LP fans still praised vinyl (especially in America, where resistance to the CD was a bit more entrenched than in Europe), the ability for a CD player to dampen the effect of a scratch or fingerprint was a huge leap forward in audio technology.

And the skip protection introduced into later players would further enhance the listening experience by storing a few seconds of music ahead of time so that playback would continue uninterrupted in the event of a skip.

By the late 80s, CDs had exploded in popularity, with the cost of CD players coming down and an increasingly large number of artists converting their back catalogs to the new digital format. The 60-minute playtime of a CD combined with the high audio quality offered, as well as the reading laser's resistance to interference by dust or other particles, made the CD the primary musical medium for the next decade, with home and portable players quickly being adopted by listeners.

Although the CD has remained relatively unchanged in its lifetime, there were a number of slight changes to the format through the years. In 1983, the first experiments with erasable discs were revealed, paving the way for the later CD-RW (re-writeable), which superseded the CD-R (recordable) in the mid-90s. The cost of both the CDs and recorders able to write to them fell quickly, making these discs, at least temporarily, ubiquitous.

CDs also made a big splash in the computer industry, with CD-ROMs (CD-read only memory) debuting in 1985. Further refinements led to the creation of the Video CD, Super Video CD, Photo CD, DVD, HD DVD, and Blu-Ray discs.

The CD's musical reign didn't go unchallenged, though. In 1992, Sony announced the MiniDisc, a magneto-optical storage medium that combined the storage systems of magnetic tapes and optical CDs. Sony hoped that the smaller size and significantly better skip resistance would help the MiniDisc transcend the CD as the musical medium of the day, but it was not to be.

A few audiophiles criticized the near-CD-quality audio, and the MiniDisc also suffered from a lack of players and pre-recorded albums, the drastic fall of blank CD prices, and most notably, the emergence of MP3 music players.

Although the MiniDisc did have some advantages over CDs, it suffered from poor timing, with the solid-state revolution quickly making them obsolete. Sony stopped making MiniDisc Walkman players in 2011 and all other MiniDisc players in 2013, totally killing off the medium (though some diehards still defend it).

Electronic Music's Teething Years: The First MP3s

The history of MP3 is a fascinating one. It began in 1982, when Karlheinz Brandenburg was an electrical engineering PhD student at Friedrich-Alexander University Erlangen-Nuremberg. His thesis advisor issued him a challenge: find a way to transmit music over digital phone lines.

1986 saw the first real progress on the project, when more advanced technology was used to separate sounds into three sections, or "layers," each of which could be saved or discarded depending on its importance to the overall sound. Brandenburg and his colleagues took advantage of a bit of a psychoacoustic phenomenon called auditory masking to compress the file size of the recording.

Auditory masking is what happens when the human ear is unable to hear certain sounds; louder sounds or those with lower frequencies can mask other sounds, meaning that the obscured sounds can be discarded from a recording without a noticeable loss in quality. This led to the ability to encode files with decreased bitrates, resulting in smaller files that retained an acceptable amount of the quality of the original sound.

The Motion Picture Experts Group (MPEG), a group tasked to create worldwide standards in audio recording, was created by the International Standards Organization (ISO) in 1988. The standard that MPEG created included Layers I, II, and III, the latter giving the highest quality at low bitrates.

Work on digital encoding continued, but ran into problems, with voices being recorded in very low fidelity. After further experimentation with psychoacoustic models and data codecs -- and a close call wherein the encoding simply stopped working two days before submission of the codec -- MPEG-1 Audio Layer III was finalized in 1991.

MPEG-1 Audio Layer III (and MPEG-2 Audio Layer III, an improved format standardized in 1998) is a lossy audio data compression format, meaning that every time the digital file is uncompressed and recompressed, more information is lost. The compression algorithms for MP3 take advantage of limitations in human hearing to discard sounds that are not well perceived -- or not perceived at all -- by the human ear, resulting in very small music files compared to more robust lossless algorithms.

As the technology advanced, the encoding algorithms became more complex, allowing for things like average and variable bitrate encoding, in which more complex parts of the audio are recorded at a higher bit rate than less complex ones, resulting in higher-quality sound.

After realizing that this new format could be of great use to the growing Internet, Brandenburg and MPEG decided on a file extension in 1995: .mp3. It was around this time that Brandenburg was asked a telling question by an English entrepreneur: "Do you know that this will destroy the music industry?"

Looking back on this conversation, it seems likely that neither of them had any idea to what degree this would be true. But it didn't take long for it to become clear just how big of a shakeup this would case.

In the mid-90s, MP3 decoding software was cheap -- WinAmp, one of the most widely downloaded Windows programs of the era, was free (though it went to a freemium model where extras could be paid for). But encoding software was expensive, and formed the center of the business model.

(If the image above makes you yearn for pre-iTunes days of digital music, try making a portable version of WinAmp for a USB drive!)

Unfortunately for Fraunhofer and the music industry at large, an Australian student bought professional-grade encoding software with a stolen credit card in 1997 and distributed the core of the software as freeware. Brandenburg told NPR that it was in 1997 that he "got the impression that the avalanche was rolling and no one could stop it anymore."

The inevitable rise of peer-to-peer music sharing resulted in one of the most infamous companies of the Internet age: Napster. Although it was only around for two years, the invention of Shawn Fanning, John Fanning, and Sean Parker shook up the music world like no other piece of software before or since. Napster was a simple, free peer-to-peer (P2P) file-sharing service; it wasn't the first, but its focus on MP3 sharing catapulted it to almost 25 million verified users in February of 2001.

Although it was used by a wide variety of people, Napster is often associated with college students of the day; a number of universities blocked the service from their networks, and those that didn't reported huge amounts of traffic -- according to one 2000 article, some administrators reported between 40 and 61 percent of the traffic from their college networks going to Napster.

Of course, this free distribution of music couldn't last long before it was attacked by the music industry. The first big attack on Napster came from thrash gods Metallica in 2000: after they discovered that their single "I Disappear" had been leaked to Napster before it was released, and had even made it to radio, they filed a lawsuit against the service under the Digital Media Copyright Act. Dr. Dre quickly followed suit (no pun intended). The Recording Industry Association of America also filed a suit. As a result of these lawsuits, Napster shut down in 2001 and declared bankruptcy the following year.

Despite the attack and subsequent quick death of Napster, many other P2P file-sharing services sprung up. If you were in your late teens or twenties in the early 2000s, you almost certainly remember LimeWire, Kazaa, Madster, or Scour Exchange. It was not a good time for these services, and many of them were shut down with similar lawsuits.

Of course, P2P music sharing still exists today, with BitTorrent being one of the most popular formats in use -- especially because of its decentralized format, which can't easily be shut down. BitTorrent trackers, however, which help users find each other and the files they're looking for, can and have been targeted by lawsuits and taken down.

By this point, MP3s had moved off of the computer and into listeners' pockets. Different sources have different opinions what the first MP3 player was, but Audio Highway's Listen Up MP3 player, released in 1996, is a good bet. The 1997 MPMan, released by Saehan Information Systems, followed close on its heels.

These were relatively rudimentary systems by today's standards, holding six to twelve songs and displaying the current song on a small screen. The Diamond Rio, Archos Jukebox, Creative Nomad Jukebox, and a few others were released in the following years, but the market destroyer was yet to come: the Apple iPod, in 2001.

The first generation iPod was a monster, containing a 5 GB hard drive that held up to 1,000 songs and selling for $400 (interestingly, the first phone with MP3 capabilities, the Samsung SPH-M100, was launched the year before, in 2000). The mechanical scroll wheel and five-button layout became synonymous with MP3 players very quickly due to the iPod's popularity; its small size helped catapult it to the forefront of the MP3 player scene.

Over the next 14 years, continuing through to today, the iPod has gone through a large number of iterations, and seeing a significant decrease in size and weight, the introduction of touch-control scroll wheels, color screens, and a huge jump in available storage; the final iPod Classic (as it was called) had 160 GB of storage, 32 times that of the original.

In the years after the release of the first iPod, we'd see the release of a number of other models, including the iPod Mini, iPod Shuffle, iPod Nano, and iPod Touch. Other significant MP3 players would be released during the reign of the iPod, but none have come close to eclipsing the market dominance of Apple's sleek little player.

The Siri personal assistant, Retina display technology, cameras, video recording, voice control, Bluetooth, and Wi-Fi connectivity were all added over the years, continuing Apple's history of innovation. In September 2012, Apple reported that 350 million iPods had been sold worldwide.

Of course, where goes the iPod, so goes iTunes. It's no surprise that iTunes debuted in 2001 alongside the iPod as "the world's best and easiest to use 'jukebox' software." More important was the release in 2003 of iTunes 4, which included the iTunes Music Store, Apple's entry into the music sales business.

The ability to purchase a song or an entire album with a single click was obviously very appealing to users, and has remained so -- iTunes has been the single largest distributor of music in the United States since 2008, and the largest in the world since 2010, despite some backlash over digital rights management and a few legal disputes.

Despite the technological superiority and overall popularity of the MP3 format, the iTunes Store doesn't use this encoding; the songs sold are now encoded in Advanced Audio coding (AAC) format, which was standardized in 1997 and intended to be the successor to MP3. With more advanced encoding, higher quality at similar bit rates, and more flexibility, AAC is a superior format. Although MP3 is still prevalent, AAC has more industry support, and will likely completely replace MP3 in the near future.

The Streaming Revolution: Pandora

Though the title of "first music streaming service" isn't easy to bestow, Pandora easily takes the "biggest early music streaming service" label. Launched in 2005, it pioneered the style of music recommendation service that would grow to become one of the biggest trends in modern music.

Five years before Pandora became a reality, the Music Genome Project was founded in an attempt to "capture the essence of music at the most fundamental level." Pandora is the "custodian" of this project, which assigns values for up to 450 musical characteristics per song, depending on the genre: 150 for rock and pop, 350 for rap, 400 for jazz, and up to 450 for other genres, such as world music and classical.

These characteristics include things like "unique instrumentation," "mixed minor and major key tonality," "hard rock roots," "subtle use of strings," "lots of cymbals," "dirty organ riff," "thin ambient synth textures," "epic buildup / breakdown," "melodic songwriting," "groove based composition," "highly synthetic sonority," "tonal harmony," and just about everything else you could possibly think of.

These characteristics are assigned by human analysts, about 25 of which are working at a given time, coding two to four songs per hour, for about 10,000 songs per month. This information is fed into an algorithm to allow a user the ability to listen to songs that are similar to a given song, album, or artist (or, in the case of iTunes Radio, an entire music library).

Serving as a discovery engine, this technology has introduced millions of listeners to thousands of bands across the world and opened up a huge range of previously unavailable listening experiences. Of course, there are some criticisms of Pandora's recommendation engine, including a degree of homogeneity, especially after Pandora introduced the "thumbs-up / thumbs-down" rating system. Continued rating of songs would eventually create a very small pool in a particular channel that a user had created.

But this didn't stop people from using the service -- in April 2013, Pandora had 200 million users, and after their IPO in 2011, they were valued at $2.6 billion. Much of their revenue comes through ads placed on the service that listeners hear between songs, and is supplemented by an ad-free premium plan.

Pandora's rise to prominence wasn't easy; the idea of a service that allows listeners to hear music from tens of thousands of artists without buying a single album is an understandably controversial one. Pandora and other music streaming services have faced nearly constant battles over royalties paid to artists, usually with artists demanding higher royalties. With rights holders earning -- at most -- cents per play, it takes a very large number of plays through a streaming service for the artist or record label to make any money.

However, the degree to which artists suffer from lost album sales is debatable; Tim Westergren, founder of Pandora, stated in 2012 that a few artists are receiving payments of $1 million annually, with a couple pulling in closer to $3 million. He also said that 2,000 artists would receive payments of $10,000 or more, while 800 would receive $50,000 or more. With Pandora's reported earnings in the second quarter of 2012 alone hovering around $100 million, however, most artists still weren't happy.

The battle over royalties and online music streaming certainly wasn't limited to Pandora; Spotify, an increasingly popular online music streaming service, has faced its own difficulties with artists' dissatisfaction with royalties-including a rather heavily satirized Taylor Swift.

Swift's very public act of pulling her music from Spotify certainly helped the service gain exposure in the public eye -- last year, a poll published by Fortune showed it as the fourth most-used streaming service in America, behind Pandora, iHeartRadio, and iTunes Radio. This poll showed about five times as many users listening to Pandora as it did Spotify, though this gap is likely to have closed a bit since then.

In December 2013, Spotify released data on how much rights holders were paid per play of their songs, with the amounts surprising many people with how low they were: on average, rights holders received between $0.006 and $0.0084 per play. That's less than a cent per play, which means hundreds of thousands or millions of plays are required for any meaningful earnings. Pandora, according to one 2013 report, pays $0.0012 per play to record labels, and $0.0002 to artists, which means an artist earns $200 per 1 million plays. No matter how you figure it, that's not very much.

Of course, there's a lot at stake here. Artists deserve to be paid for their work, especially when it's their music that's bringing millions of listeners to Pandora, iHeartRadio, and other online streaming services that are making millions of dollars on the ads that they sell. Artists and record labels work hard, and the astronomical rise in popularity of streaming has put a big damper on CD sales.

Within the past few years, online streaming has surpassed digital music sales, adding to the worries that allowing listeners to access music for free (or very nearly free; a premium subscription to Spotify is only $10 per month) will destroy the music industry, as the unnamed English entrepreneur predicted to Brandenburg when he showed off the MP3. Whatever the reason, album sales are tanking, with totals hitting record low numbers, and online streaming is taking off.

Whether or not the increase in streaming can make up for the drop in album sales isn't clear; a Complex article from earlier this year presented some figures suggesting that the money made from billions of song plays via online streaming may have helped the record industry break even in 2014, but they don't provide a comprehensive picture. It's a tough one to get.

It's clear, however, that streaming services are doing well: not only are Pandora, iHeartRadio, iTunes Radio, Spotify, Google Play All Access, Rhapsody, Slacker, and TuneIn Radio prospering, but new names are entering the market as well.

YouTube is working on a premium streaming service, and the very loosely Dr. Dre-affiliated Beats Radio recently debuted. Jay-Z recently launched another service called Tidal. No matter what you have to say about listeners, artists, and the music industry, being in the streaming business is a good way to make money.

At the moment, it seems that the system is precariously balanced, with some artists appreciating the publicity that they're getting from online streaming services, and others -- as well as record labels and other industry members -- not happy about the fractions of pennies that they're making per play. Despite there being no clear alternative to this model, it doesn't look likely to last long in its current incarnation; there are just too many people on both sides who are unhappy with it.

One group that's very happy with it, however, is listeners. The ease with which users can access tens of millions of songs in a matter of seconds is extremely appealing to a wide variety of types of listeners, from the most casual to the most committed.

A shocking statistic that shows just how good online streaming is for listeners is that music piracy in Norway has actually gone down by an astonishing 80 percent since streaming became more popular. And if online streaming is better and easier than piracy, it's clear that it's good for listeners, probably to the point of being bad for everyone else.

Besides being able to quickly access a monumental amount of music, of course, the biggest advantage of this format is that it doesn't require terabytes of hard drive space to store it all. Being able to stream it from the cloud and download a few albums at a time for mobile listening is very space efficient --this was not the case in the days of Napster and LimeWire, in which users had to download all of their music, which both took a long time and required a huge amount of space.

The Future

So if streaming loses the crown as the most widely used form of music listening, what will take its place? To put it simply, I have no idea. When I was pondering this question a few days ago, I thought that music technology could advance so drastically within the next five or ten years that we wouldn't even be listening to artists anymore.

We'd plug ourselves into machines that would take our tastes and procedurally generate new music that would perfectly fit what we like in our music libraries, much like video games are using procedural generation. While some people are experimenting with procedural music, it doesn't look like anyone has tried to take that next step into complete customization.

However, there are a few signs that I might not be too far off here. Janel Torkington, in an article on the future of music listening, points out that no matter how many tracks we have available on Spotify or Beats Radio, we still have to make decisions on what we want to listen to.

Which means that our current way of listening to music is actually harder than it is to listen to the radio, which is still strangely popular among Americans -- 91 percent of Americans listened to AM/FM radio in 2013. This suggests that a lot of people are looking for not only music that they like, but an easy listening experience that allows them to simply consume and not create.

Which is why people like Paul Lamere are looking into "zero-UI" music players. These players would ideally require no interaction from the listener whatsoever -- they would use a wide range of information made available to them (demographic information; Facebook and Twitter posts; music library information; details on which songs were playing when the user turned up the volume, skipped a track, or abandoned a listening session; the current activity the user is taking part in, from walking to working to working out) to generate a highly targeted playlist that not only works with the users' taste, but also their context. While many of us music aficionados might be horrified by this idea, Lamere makes a strong case for the fact that this sort of system would be perfect for the majority of music listeners.

Spotify has also looked into similar ideas -- a Guardian article from last year reported that they were looking into ways to incorporate heart rate, motion, temperature, and sleep patterns to figure out what the listener is doing and what sort of music they might like to hear. It's obvious that Spotify is serious about this, as they bought The Echo Nest, the company headed by Lamere. The Echo Nest is an innovative "musical intelligence platform" that powers many discovery engines and other recommendation applications. Just where their partnership with Spotify will lead is anybody's guess, but it's a safe bet that it will be pretty cool.

Then again, we've seen what happens when technology goes further and faster than we're ready for: look at the advent of tiny cell phones, and how quickly we went back to full-size phones and even huge phablets. Look at how small earbuds got before we decided that the big, booming sound of a pair of Sennheisers or Bose over-ears was better. Recommendation services may be the hot thing of the day, but I wouldn't be surprised if we go back to the radio era, or even the mixtape era, before we progress further.

There's something special about picking out an album that not only contains one of your favorite tracks, but has the perfect balance of up-tempo tracks and soulful melodies; that hits the sweet spot of combining builds-ups and breakdowns, catchy hooks and crushing riffs. The art of putting an album together is still alive and well, even if it's a bit under appreciated at the moment. Its day very well may return.

Conclusion

The history of music consumption is a long one, and spans almost 150 years. The history of music, and music performance, is a lot longer, with some philosophers believing that music is one of the the defining characteristics that makes humans different from lower-order animals.

Music has played a role in how we celebrate, worship, communicate, design, and build for centuries, and it will likely remain one of the powerful tools in the human cognitive vocabulary. Music is a powerful thing, and the way in which we relate to it has changed as we have evolved and become more advanced as a species.

Of course, there have been some big changes; music has been affected by the way in which we consume it, and the way in which we consume music has been a strong defining force -- the change from the gramophone to the tape, the advance from the CD to the MP3, have been notable technological paradigm shifts in human history.

The future of music consumption is a question mark at the moment -- further algorithmic control looks likely, but the exact degree to which it will come to rule our listening experience remains unknown. And regression back to full control certainly isn't out of the question. The only sure thing is that music -- in one form or another -- will be with us forever, whether we go back to listening to vinyl on home players or we find a way to implant individualized algorithmic composers and players directly into our brains.

From the gramophone to the FM radio, from the Walkman to the MP3 player, from the anarchy of Napster to the algorithmic rule of Pandora, the systems through which we relate to music today only bear a passing resemblance to the ways we listened 100 years ago. And yet, we still listen. Whether music is part of what makes us human, an evolutionary quirk, an escape mechanism, or a distinctly advanced way of relating to our environment, it's here to stay. And we'll continue to innovate, challenge, and completely change the ways in which we consume it.
Image credits: Levin C. Hardy, Phonatic, Daniel Christensen via Wikimedia Commons, Roadkill Rescue; Pennsylvania Center for the Book; Bain News Service, Alexandra Studio, Jeh92, CZmarlin, Mathwiz593 via Wikimedia Commons; Lucidica; John Liu, Aaron Yoo, Leo-setä, Rae Allen, Christliches Medienmagazin pro via flickr; Motion Picture Experts Group via Wikimedia Commons; Transia Design (edited) via Shutterstock; bixento via flickr; Michele M. F. via Wikimedia Commons; Matthew Pearce, Juan Pablo Olmo via flickr, DNA Sequence via Shutterstock, QZ.com, Young woman with headphones, music from brain (edited), black music note button via Shutterstock, Piano keyboard with headphones, Evolution of recording devices via Shutterstock, collection of various vintage audio tapes and vinyl on white background and 134916515 via Shutterstock.

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The Evolution of Music Consumption: How We Got Here

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Spend ten minutes walking down almost any street in the world, and you'll see a familiar sight: a young person walking down the street with Apple's iconic white earbuds firmly planted in their ears. They might be bobbing along to the beat, or they could be keeping their head down, just trying to get to work through the crowds.