Pop

I am not the best person to judge how accurately this man's video assesses pop music then and now. I'm not up to speed on modern pop. Maybe one of you is? I have some difficulty telling the big female stars apart.

He claims three things have changed, and changed for the worse:

1. Music company costs to advertise a new song are sky high. They are therefore risk-averse, and biased toward "same old stuff." (It is exceedingly cheap to get something published on Youtube, but the process of getting it into enough ears to sell a lot of copies is more difficult and costly. There's lots of creative people in niches, but where?)
2. Many of the top singers use the same songwriters, so their stuff, unsurprisingly, sounds similar. (Is this true?)
3. A cheap way of getting attention is loudness, and a simple way of doing this is compression--bringing soft sounds up to similar levels as the louder ones, at the expense of dynamic range. (FWIW we use this in the other direction. Some preachers get pretty loud, and we compress them down. Don't tell.)