Don't you think: modern music has actually become more monotonous

The study is published in Scientific Reports. A team of scientists from Italy studied 21,480 compositions created between 1600 and 2021. The sample included works from six major genre groups, including classical, jazz, pop, rock, electronic music and hip-hop.

Details

To compare music from different eras, the researchers used MIDI files - digital recordings that contain information about the notes, their duration and sequence, rather than the audio tracks themselves. They visualised each song as a network: notes became "points" and transitions between them became links.

This approach made it possible to measure how varied the music was in its transition from one note to another, how often the same moves were repeated, and how complex the melodic and harmonic structure remained.

The results showed that older works, especially classical music before the 20th century, had a more complex and varied structure on average. Jazz peaked in complexity around the 1950s and 1960s, but then also began to simplify.

Modern genres - pop, rock, electronic music and hip-hop - are more likely to rely on a smaller set of repetitive transitions. According to the authors, the distinctions between genres have become blurred over time: music from different genres is increasingly built on similar structural principles.

Why it matters

The work explains why new songs can seem familiar on first listen. If songs use more of the same transitions between notes and more predictable patterns, the listener may actually experience them as more similar to each other.

That said, the study does not prove that modern music is "worse." The scientists only analysed melodic and harmonic structures. They did not evaluate lyrics, vocals, production, sound engineering, rhythm, cultural context and emotional impact - i.e. important parts of what makes music interesting. Nature Portfolio separately emphasises: the authors do not claim that the results mean a decline in musical creativity.

One possible reason for the trend is the digitalisation of music. Recordings have become readily available, musicians hear and borrow techniques from each other more quickly, and streaming platforms and algorithms can encourage more predictable and fast-reading compositions. The authors of the study believe this may have increased the simplification and convergence of genres.

Background

The idea that popular music has become simpler has long been debated. Scientists have previously found signs of simplification of lyrics and melodies in modern pop music. The new work expands this question: it shows that similar processes have affected not only pop, but also historically more complex genres - classical and jazz.

The conclusion, however, should be read carefully. Music can become simpler in musical structure, but more complex in other dimensions - for example, in sound, processing, rhythm, visual presentation or modes of distribution.

Source

A study by Niccolò Di Marco and co-authors Decoding the evolution of melodic and harmonic structure of Western music through the lens of network science is published in Scientific Reports in 2026. The authors analysed more than 20 thousand MIDI-compositions of Western musical tradition from 1600 to 2021.