Popular songs on the Billboard charts always tended to sound similar, but these days they’re sounding even more similar. Andrew Thompson and Matt Daniels for The Pudding make the case:
From 2010-2014, the top ten producers (by number of hits) wrote about 40% of songs that achieved #1 – #5 ranking on the Billboard Hot 100. In the late-80s, the top ten producers were credited with half as many hits, about 19%.
In other words, more songs have been produced by fewer and fewer topline songwriters, who oversee the combinations of all the separately created sounds. Take a less personal production process and execute that process by a shrinking number of people and everything starts to sound more or less the same.
