The development of new technologies has profoundly transformed the music industry. These days, it’s possible to create a new song with just a few clicks of a computer mouse.

This ease of creation might have been expected to drive greater musical originality, but a study published in the journal Scientific Reports shows otherwise.

The authors of this research believe that the melodies of the most popular songs in the United States have become considerably simpler since the 1950s. They found evidence of this after analysing the musical structure of songs that appeared in the top 5 of Billboard’s annual bestselling singles charts between 1950 and 2022.

In their paper, Madeline Hamilton and Marcus Pearce explain that the complexity of rhythms and pitch structures has decreased since the 1950s. They note that melodies had become particularly simplified in 1975 and 2000, and, to a lesser extent, in 1996.

The scientists believe that “the 1975 melodic revolution is perhaps a manifestation of the rise of the new wave, disco and stadium rock genres”, while those of 1996 and 2000 may have had more to do with the emergence of hip-hop and the rise of digital audio workstations, the specialised software for music creation.

While melodies have become simpler in recent decades, this doesn’t mean that the songs in the charts are no longer worthy of interest. In fact, Hamilton and Pearce found that note density – i.e. the number of notes sung per second – increased in the most popular songs, particularly since the year 2000.

“If you have a melody with a lot of notes per second, that kind of limits how complex the melody can be,” Hamilton told the Guardian.

In addition, the advent of digital tools and the internet has profoundly changed the way music is produced and consumed. Artistes can now carry out all the production stages of a recorded musical work themselves, something that was previously very complicated, if not virtually impossible, without the help of a recording studio.

In this context, musical complexity is perhaps expressed more in the quality of sound than in melodic structure, as the experts point out in a news release.

This tendency towards simplification is not limited to melodies. Separate research, published at the end of March in the journal Nature Scientific Reports, found that song lyrics have become less rich and more repetitive since the 1980s. Rock and rap are the musical genres suffering most from this linguistic impoverishment.

Is this a sign of a general dumbing down? Not necessarily. It could be due to the fact that, these days, we consume more music in the background, without necessarily paying attention to it. So we may prefer music that doesn’t distract us, either through lyrics or rhythmic arrangements that are too complex or intense.