Where Has The Experimentation In Pop Music Gone?

There are countless resources and truly endless possibilities available to for innovation and ground-breaking new music.

However, when you listen to the popular chart music or even more specialized music you hear very little music experimentation. It seems that new technology has essentially homogenised many different musical styles, rather than enhancing them. The focus of new technology is make the music sound the best it can, rather than to encourage experimentation. Often when you do hear an unusual sound, particularly in pop music, it is a novel little moment rather than a solid component of the track.

If you think of every music movement and style from the 50s to the 80s you'll discover a huge development and spectrum of experimentation in pop music. The slap-back echo sound is characteristic of 50s rockabilly, multi-tracking gave new dimensions to 60s pop, the effective use of sequencers in 70s disco and the glossy synth sounds in the 80s were incredibly futuristic. The music arrangements were also great as well and that added to the technology that was being discovered.

In the last 20 years or so technology has mainly been used to enhance elements of distinctive sounds from the past, and quite often they are used on very uninspired and bland songs. The trick is to use any many effective musical elements as possible, but also to incorporate as much new technology and ideas as you can. You could do this by integrating tried and tested chord progressions, but unusual instruments to play these progressions, such as a theremin or some strange folk instruments. If you understand the boundaries of composition then you can start to play around with them.

So I guess what I'm saying is pop music has progressed the way it did in the past largely down to a happy marriage between new technological advances and quality songwriting. We need to inject this ideology and experimentation into modern pop music to lift it out of it's mediocrity.