while doing some late night net surfing, I stumbled upon this interesting article about The $1,078,000 Reason Every Pop Song Sounds the Same. This article reveals the commercial reason behind the trend that every pop song out there is getting more and more homogeneous. With the same four chords, it seems that record labels and songwriters are getting less and less creative with music. The article compares the 1% of the financial and economic equity issue with a similar situation in the music industry. Only the most popular artists at the moments can afford the best songwriter, beat makers to ensure that it has the perfect “pop veneer” that is sure to make a hit. Record labels are making a lot less money than they use to due to piracy, therefore less willing to take the risk to give new songwriters.

There is a lot of investment that record companies put in to making sure that their songs are guaranteed a profit. Singer Rihanna’s popular single “Man Down” costed an estimated $1,078,000 to produce.  Of that, approximately a million goes towards marketing the song, putting in on the radio, movies trying to gain exposure. Which is surprising, my knowledge about the marketing behind the popular music we listen to was very naive. Why does a already popular artist’s song need to be marketed? Shouldn’t artists sing their own creation and let the mass audience decide whether if it is a good song or not? My assumption after reading this article is that, big record label companies are not willing to risk losing profit to invest in new artist and new music, but rather heavily invest in those who are already successful in the industry and requiring them to sing what is only mainstream and ‘pop-like’, and therefore creating less diversity despite having new technology to do so. In my opinion, behind the glitz and the glam, the music industry is struggling. As consumers, we could change this by reinvesting our purchasing power so that record companies have the incentive to diversify the type of music they produce.