Is Music Getting Worse?

Has music really been getting worse… or is it just shifting in ways we don’t always notice? And why does the soundtrack to your teenage years feel like the single greatest playlist ever made? Hannah and Michael explore music’s strange grip on our minds. They trace why certain lyrics feel simpler than they used to, and what gives our formative songs lasting emotional charge. And what exactly is the reminiscence bump, that curious memory quirk that makes certain songs feel unforgettable? Join Hannah and Michael as they unravel the personal, subjective and surprisingly enigmatic story of why our musical tastes tug at us so powerfully, and what they reveal about how we learn, remember and feel. ------------------- For more information about Cancer Research UK, their research, breakthroughs and how you can support them, visit ⁠⁠https://cancerresearchuk.org/restisscience⁠⁠ Cancer Research UK is a registered charity in England and Wales (1089464), Scotland (SC041666), the Isle of Man (1103) and Jersey (247). A company limited by guarantee. Registered company in England and Wales (4325234) and the Isle of Man (5713F). Registered address: 2 Redman Place, London, E20 1JQ. EXCLUSIVE NordVPN Deal ➼ https://nordvpn.com/restisscience Try it risk-free now with a 30-day money-back guarantee 🌍 ------------------- Find The Rest Is Science all over the internet by ⁠⁠clicking here.⁠⁠ ------------------- Video Producer: Adam Thornton Video & Social: Bex Tyrrell Assistant Producer: Imee Marriott Producer: Becki Hills Senior Producer: Lauren Armstrong-Carter Head Of Digital: Samuel Oakley Exec Producer: Neil Fearn Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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• 0:00Hannah Fry?

  This episode is brought to you by Cancer Research UK.

• 0:02Michael Stevens?

  Imagine this: inside all of us, billions of cells follow millions of instructions written in microscopic code. And when a new cell grows, it copies those instructions, but the smallest error can lead cancer to develop.

• 0:17Hannah Fry?

  Right, and this is the reason why there isn't a single cure for cancer, because, you know, there are more than 200 different types, each of them have got different distinct characteristics, you know, different challenges, different mysteries. And that means that trying to cure cancer isn't like following a single path, it's like trying to map out an entire forest.

• 0:34Michael Stevens?

  That's right. And Cancer Research UK is the world's largest charitable funder of cancer research. I mean, their work spans more than 20 countries, with over 4,000 scientists, doctors and nurses pushing knowledge forward to save and improve lives worldwide.

• 0:50Hannah Fry?

  You know, over the last 50 years, the work that this charity has done has helped to double cancer survival in the UK. And you have to think about, that is more parents at the dinner table, right? That is more friends at their birthday parties, that is more people who are living longer, better lives.

• 1:08Michael Stevens?

  For more information about Cancer Research UK, their research, breakthroughs, and how you can support them, visit cancerresearchuk.org/rastoscience.

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• 2:16Speaker 04

  This episode is brought to you by Google Chrome. You think you know a browser, but Gemini and Chrome? That's new. It can help you with practically anything on the web, like restoring a vintage motorcycle from a 50-page restoration blog, or finally break down that long article you've had open for weeks. Gemini and Chrome is here for it. Ready to make anything online make sense? There's no place like Chrome. Check responses set up required. Compatibility and availability varies 18 plus.

• 2:48Michael Stevens?

  Hello and welcome to The Rest Is Science. I'm Michael Stevens.

• 2:51Hannah Fry?

  And I'm Hannah Fry.

• 2:52Michael Stevens?

  Hannah, in your opinion, when was the best era for music?

• 2:59Hannah Fry?

  This can be completely subjective, right? I mean, you've given me complete free rein.

• 3:03Michael Stevens?

  I have, but I have not said that it's subjective. There may be an answer.

• 3:09Hannah Fry?

  Oh, well, now I feel like the pressure is on.

• 3:11Michael Stevens?

  You could be wrong.

• 3:12Hannah Fry?

  Oh. Of all the infinite world of possible answers that I could give, it feels like there's only one that you're looking for. Okay, here's my opinion, right? The first album I ever bought, I got £10 out of my bank. I was 11 years old, I was extremely excited. I went down to Woolworths, something that as an American you will not know about, and I bought a cassette of PJ and Duncan. And I think that the album was called Psych. Now, Michael, let me just...

• 3:40Michael Stevens?

  Say no more. That's exactly the answer I was looking for. Just kidding, I've never heard of that.

• 3:47Hannah Fry?

  Okay, this is... Any international listeners will not have had the full, unadulterated joy of Biker Grove, which was a kids TV programme in around about the 1990s. There was some amazing characters in it, Ant and Dec, who are now big hotshot TV presenters.

• 4:04Michael Stevens?

  Wait, are they Ant and Dec?

• 4:05Hannah Fry?

  They are. Ant and Dec is...

• 4:06Michael Stevens?

  They used to be known as...

• 4:07Hannah Fry?

  PJ and Duncan.

• 4:09Michael Stevens?

  I I bet most international viewers, meaning not from the UK, won't even know who Ant and Dec are.

• 4:15Hannah Fry?

  Do you think so? Are they not internationally renowned?

• 4:18Michael Stevens?

  I can't speak for the non-British humans on the planet, but I didn't know who they were until I lived here. And even then, it was hard to find them because I didn't have television. I was streaming. And so I wasn't tuning into, you know, pops of the month or whatever they were doing.

• 4:33Hannah Fry?

  Pops of the month, you know, they're they're kind of a big deal. They, how can I describe them? They're from Newcastle, so they're like cheeky, Geordie lads. They're just extremely likeable, extremely funny. They've spent their entire lives next to each other to the point where they appear on screen in order. And is always on the left-hand side. Dec is always on the right.

• 4:53Michael Stevens?

  I didn't know that.

• 4:53Hannah Fry?

  So that you read them alphabetically.

• 4:56Michael Stevens?

  I it's great to know because now I can see them and I can know who is who.

• 4:59Hannah Fry?

  Absolutely, which I think is something that people genuinely struggle with. But they started their career as actors in this kids TV show. And their characters, PJ and Duncan, went on to release a rap album.

• 5:10Michael Stevens?

  Oh, no.

• 5:11Hannah Fry?

  Okay, now I want you to imagine the whitest rappers you've ever seen, right? Make them whiter, younger, and with worse lyrics. That was the peak of music, in my opinion.

• 5:23Michael Stevens?

  So I would not give the same answer.

• 5:26Hannah Fry?

  Oh, you're saying my answer was wrong?

• 5:29Michael Stevens?

  I would say music peaked when the Spice Girls released Wanna Be.

• 5:36Hannah Fry?

  That's a similar era. You know what? I think you might be right.

• 5:40Michael Stevens?

  I might be right. And I think I think Jewel pieces of you. I think Alanis Morissette, ironic.

• 5:48Hannah Fry?

  Oh, no, I've never liked that song.

• 5:50Michael Stevens?

  Why?

• 5:51Hannah Fry?

  Because none of the things that she's describing are actually ironic.

• 5:54Michael Stevens?

  Let me tell you something. She never once in that song

• 5:59Hannah Fry?

  Yeah.

• 5:59Michael Stevens?

  claims that any of the situations she sings about are ironic.

• 6:05Michael Stevens?

  Look at the lyrics.

• 6:06Hannah Fry?

  I am.

• 6:06Michael Stevens?

  She says, "A black fly in your chardonnay. It's rain on your wedding day." And isn't it ironic?

• 6:14Hannah Fry?

  It depends on where you put that part of the sentence. If you're saying, "Yeah, okay, it's a free ride and when you've already paid, and isn't it ironic?" Fine, I agree with you. But she doesn't. She says the other way around. She says, "Isn't it ironic? It's like 10,000 spoons when all you need is a knife."

• 6:29Michael Stevens?

  You are one of those Alanis misunderstanders. She says, "It's like rain on your wedding day, 10,000 spoons when all you need is a knife, and isn't it ironic?" What is it? It is the fact that life has a funny way of helping you out.

• 6:46Hannah Fry?

  I'm sorry.

• 6:46Michael Stevens?

  When things go wrong.

• 6:48Hannah Fry?

  Right, our episode plan is cancelled. We're gonna do a solid 30 minutes on this, on this topic and nothing else.

• 6:56Michael Stevens?

  As I say that, I'm starting to think everyone's gonna have their own personal answer. This is all subjective.

• 7:01Hannah Fry?

  Okay, I mean, yeah. I would just counter-argument to your argument, if I may. Because during the 90s, the middle of the 90s, there were, I mean, of course, it was a major era for music, right? It's like so much money to be made. It was like a growth industry. And there were two British music producers, who were fully aware of this fact, who were like, "Is the stuff we're making actually good? Or are people just buying it because we tell them to?" And so what they did is they had a bet between them to try and get the worst possible song into the British charts. The result of this supposedly was, this bet was a girl group called Vanilla. And their debut song was "No Way, No Way, Manar, Manar", sort of based on the Muppets.

• 7:46Hannah Fry?

  So we're talking same era as wannabe. Also, I should tell you that the music video was them standing next to a pool, which was, I think, Brockwell Lido. Just. Just standing around.

• 7:58Michael Stevens?

  Okay, alright.

• 7:59Hannah Fry?

  Got to number fourteen in the charts, I should say.

• 8:01Michael Stevens?

  Number fourteen. I mean, look, I don't hate that song. I see a time and place for it. For example, right now, right? They made something that is a conversation starter, which is one of the many things we ask music to help us do.

• 8:14Hannah Fry?

  Yeah.

• 8:14Michael Stevens?

  So they succeeded there.

• 8:16Hannah Fry?

  It's objectively bad, though. I mean, come on, Michael. I know you're a philosopher, but...

• 8:21Michael Stevens?

  That's what I'm proving wrong. It can't be objectively bad. It has value. In that it's a great story. It's pretty funny, especially when you give it the context of they tried to make the worst song and that hit number fourteen on the charts. I love hearing that. It's improved my life.

• 8:37Hannah Fry?

  You're welcome.

• 8:38Michael Stevens?

  Today, I want us to talk about this. I want us to talk about the science and the psychology of good music, about whether or not music has been getting worse since I was ten.

• 8:50Hannah Fry?

  Oh, what an absolute treat. I'm buckling up. Let's go.

• 8:53Michael Stevens?

  Let's go. Alright, so obviously, the first thing I did is I looked to see if there had been any objective attempts to rank musical decades or moments in music history.

• 9:07Hannah Fry?

  Right.

• 9:07Michael Stevens?

  And there have been a lot that claim to use data from the popularity of songs, from the words that are used, the complications in the melodies. But none of them agree with each other. If you Google, "When was the best era for music?", and you search like Google Scholar even, you get, "This study said it's the eighties", "It was the seventies", "It was nineteen ninety-two", "It was eighteen forty-seven", and it's like, wow, you can warp the data to give you any answer you want.

• 9:37Hannah Fry?

  But I do sort of wonder, though, I mean, without picking holes in your argument before you've even started, I sort of wonder what you mean by best here. That's the thing that like I'm really questioning. This is like something that philosophers have worried about, I mean, for centuries, right? I mean, and they don't agree. So there's people like Godfrey Leibniz who...

• 9:57Hannah Fry?

  Like, he argued that if there are things that we can all agree on that are very beautiful, like high quality, like, I don't know, Michelangelo's ceiling in Sistine Chapel, or some Mozart, then surely there should be some like definable, measurable quality that we can latch on to that says like, this is the thing that makes one thing objectively better than the other. You sort of need that as a grounding before you can go in and decide what decade or what era was better. But any attempts that they've been to try and find that kind of measure, I mean, they sort of fail, right? There was a violinist, Joshua Bell, do you remember this happening? He's like this incredible violinist.

• 10:37Michael Stevens?

  Is this the guy who played down in like the subway?

• 10:40Hannah Fry?

  Yes.

• 10:41Michael Stevens?

  As a busker, yeah.

• 10:42Hannah Fry?

  Exactly. So he had a three and a half million dollar violin, a Stravarius, and he basically was at the top of an escalator on the metro. And he started playing, and he's literally one of the finest classical musicians in the entire world. Like, the night before he was playing as part of the Philharmonic, people were paying, you know, hundreds of pounds, hundreds of dollars in order to go and see him. And here he was, just standing there in the subway, and no one even stopped to look, right? I think by the end of the day, he had managed like thirty-two dollars in his hat. That's how much he'd collected. So if there was this objective measure of like, the best in the world playing the best instrument, then surely people would at least notice.

• 11:24Michael Stevens?

  Doesn't surprise me at all.

• 11:25Hannah Fry?

  Yeah.

• 11:25Michael Stevens?

  Because the contexts are so different that what I want to hear when I'm waiting for the subway is very different than what I expect when I've bought tickets to see the New York Philharmonic. And if you put the best violinist ever down in the subway, I'll be like, hey, I'm just trying to get to work. That's kind of annoying. If you put the worst busker on stage at the New York Philharmonic, I'll notice that too.

• 11:54Michael Stevens?

  But it doesn't mean that one's better than the other, in my opinion. One's better for different contexts. A really bad violinist just being ridiculous on the subway? That's actually pretty cool. I would record that, I'd tell my friends, I'd say, "You gotta come and see this, I can't believe it." But if I bought $600 tickets to see a concert and that happened, it would actually be pretty amusing as well, but I might be more upset.

• 12:19Hannah Fry?

  Bad violinists are always good.

• 12:21Michael Stevens?

  They're, yeah, actually, that is kind of what I just said. Whereas good ones, they gotta be careful. Don't be good in the wrong place, or you'll be bad. You'll be forgettable. And so, pinning down some objective, this applies all the time, rubric to music, is gonna always leave people feeling, like, disappointed. Or frustrated.

• 12:46Hannah Fry?

  But then if you don't have an objective measure of quality, if it's dependent on the context, then, then how do you measure what counts as better music?

• 12:56Michael Stevens?

  Well, you could agree that it's okay to choose certain properties of songs and measure from there. So, for example, last year, there was a study published in Nature, showing that songs, music, had indeed become more simple over time. Beginning from the 1970s to today, music had increasingly become more simple in terms of the lyrics and the vocabulary and the readability. It had become less complexly structured.

• 13:37Hannah Fry?

  Okay.

• 13:37Michael Stevens?

  So, there were more repetitions of phrases, okay? For example, they found-

• 13:43Hannah Fry?

  Since the 1970s? I mean, I can think of a lot of repetitive songs in the 1970s.

• 13:48Michael Stevens?

  I know, but they looked at 12,000 songs over 40 years. They also found that the negativity of the lyrics increased, and they found that the egotisticalness increased, meaning the usages of the word "me," "mine," "I" went up.

• 14:06Michael Stevens?

  So, as you can imagine, a lot of grumpy old people loved that study. They knew it. They knew it. Music was better when I was a kid, which happens to be, you know, right when they started this, and it's all gotten worse since. I want to tell you about some other studies, though, before we discuss all of them.

• 14:26Hannah Fry?

  Okay, deal.

• 14:27Michael Stevens?

  Another, there's been a lot of studies that have found that pop music very closely tracks with the socio-economic status of a society at a time. So when times are tough, pop music gets sadder. When times are great, when people are happy with the direction of their lives and their country, pop music gets much more optimistic, not country music.

• 14:49Hannah Fry?

  Hold on, though. I've got some questions on that.

• 14:51Michael Stevens?

  Yeah.

• 14:51Hannah Fry?

  So are we saying here, is the conclusion that I should draw, that people are sort of upset about their jobs, upset about, you know, how the economy, how far their money goes, whatever it might be, and are writing more morose songs? Or is it, because how much do people actually really pay attention to and recognize sort of macroeconomic conditions, which is effectively what this is, what these studies are comparing against? Or how much is it that, I don't know, like, like, I sort of think that when you saw the emergence of laptops as ubiquitous, which was around the same time as the financial crisis, you just saw not just different types of songs, but you saw more people making

• 15:36Hannah Fry?

  music, right? People who didn't have access to generating whole entire tracks from their home before.

• 15:43Michael Stevens?

  I'm glad you're going there, because that's where I would go first. And I read the whole study about music getting simpler. My first thought was, okay, what songs did they analyze? And they analyzed 12,000 songs across 40 years. And I thought, okay, that's both not enough songs and too many. 40 years is not enough to really tell me how music connects with any kind of pattern, because that's like two generations, tops. That's basically just a couple cohorts growing up.

• 16:20Michael Stevens?

  You need to at least analyze music for a hundred years or more, in my opinion, to really track what's happening to it.

• 16:29Hannah Fry?

  To music specifically, rather than technology around making music and who's making it and so on.

• 16:34Michael Stevens?

  And, and you know, especially if you're looking at, these were songs in English. So you're looking specifically at the Western English-speaking world. You're almost really just tracking how music changes at a time when boomers are going from middle age or, or younger up to being senior citizens. Because they were the biggest part of the population. They were the, the, the main engine of what music was being made to sell, to be sold to. So you're not really looking at humanity as a whole. But then also, you're still looking at too much music, because 12,000 songs?

• 17:11Hannah Fry?

  Yeah.

• 17:12Michael Stevens?

  That's 300 songs a year. It's like almost a song, a brand-new song every day. Can you name a brand-new song every single day that was made that day? Can you, can you name 12,000 songs?

• 17:25Hannah Fry?

  No.

• 17:26Michael Stevens?

  I think that by the time you analyze that many songs, you're looking at songs that do not represent the state of music in popular culture.

• 17:34Hannah Fry?

  They're not the zeitgeist.

• 17:36Michael Stevens?

  And as you mentioned with laptops and the democratization of not just music production, but music distribution. It's not even a laptop story. That happened back in 1977, when the New York blackout meant that you could kind of just like go into a store and take a stereo, and now you're a DJ. And suddenly remixing, uh, being an MC is something that way more people can do.

• 17:59Hannah Fry?

  Wait, I didn't know, I don't know this story. What happened in 1977?

• 18:02Michael Stevens?

  There was a giant blackout in New York City. The power goes out.

• 18:06Hannah Fry?

  How long for?

• 18:06Michael Stevens?

  It was just one day. No power, and that means that it's dark. People can't see what you're doing. Suddenly, all those instruments, all that stereo equipment that's in that store. It's a little easier.

• 18:21Hannah Fry?

  So was there mass looting on, on that day, really?

• 18:24Michael Stevens?

  Yeah. But so the sort of oral history goes, the next day, there were musicians everywhere.

• 18:31Hannah Fry?

  Wow.

• 18:33Michael Stevens?

  And that happened again with digital technologies, allowing people to open up GarageBand and throw in a drum loop. And then, well, there's a microphone built into my laptop. I I'm doing all of this suddenly. And then I can upload it to YouTube. I can upload it to, I don't know, back then, you'd be putting it up on ifilm.com or so, you know, like, you you could share your music. And when a study looks at a lot of songs, they're going to be dipping into songs made by all kinds of people, songs that were not made for mass consumption even.

• 19:13Hannah Fry?

  Well, that does feel like the biggest difference from the 1970s to now is that is that the the gatekeepers of music have have changed, right? It used to be that you had to have a record deal, you had to like persuade people that you were sellable. And now, literally, anyone can make stuff and put it online and and and find a route to an audience.

• 19:31Michael Stevens?

  Yeah. So so to make an analogy, I'd say it's kind of like, OK, we used to just taste food at this great restaurant. Then we started sampling food from the great restaurant and all the restaurants nearby and even like the dump and all the trashcans. And we found that, on average, food doesn't taste as good anymore. It's like, well, yeah, because like, most of what you're eating is the garbage, or it's the songs that were just made for someone for their 10 friends. Like, you know, but in 1970, you couldn't pick up a whole bunch of songs from every SoundCloud artist in their bedroom, because that didn't exist.

• 20:12Hannah Fry?

  Well, hold on then a second, right? So I buy your argument. I like the the sampling from the dump. I think that that really rings true, especially now with AI-generated music. But anyway, but but then why does everybody think that their era was the era when music was better? If the 1970s wasn't this objective peak in music for the entire history of humanity, then why does everyone sort of claim that it was?

• 20:35Michael Stevens?

  Yeah. No, it's a great question, because we could talk forever about what studies have said and what their methodologies are. But at the end of the day, this is not an alien concept to us, that music used to be better. This is particularly coincidentally better when I was a kid. Why does that happen? Well, it's it's a well-known Piece of human behavior. And there are a lot of different names for what I think is involved in all of this. You've got, for example, rosy retrospection.

• 21:02Hannah Fry?

  Mm-hmm.

• 21:02Michael Stevens?

  That's a name used to describe our tendency to remember things better than we experienced them at the time. In fact, experience is kind of this little, um, well, let's see, the shape, the shape is kind of a, like a little dip. Okay? We anticipate things being really great.

• 21:20Hannah Fry?

  Mm-hmm.

• 21:20Michael Stevens?

  And then while we're experiencing them, we're like, kind of disappointed, but then later on, we remember it and we're like, it's pretty cool.

• 21:26Hannah Fry?

  Yeah. My favorite example of that is the impact of having children on your, uh, your life satisfaction.

• 21:34Michael Stevens?

  Yeah.

• 21:35Hannah Fry?

  Because children make you much happier until they're born. At which point you suffer very greatly in terms of your happiness. And that continues until they leave home, at which point, at which point you're way

• 21:49Michael Stevens?

  It's the most beautiful thing you ever did in your life.

• 21:51Hannah Fry?

  Yeah.

• 21:51Michael Stevens?

  Yeah, exactly. And this happens with all kinds of things in the past. Um, on top of that, our brains are wired to remember more from our twenties, specifically. This is known as the reminiscence bump. If you interview people who are over forty and you just ask them to list out memories, they will have an overwhelming glut of memories from between ten and thirty. That is, uh, called the reminiscence bump because it's this like sudden, like, I've got a lot of things to say from that era and then, I don't know, now I don't have much. Now, I don't know if that's totally genetically wired into our brains, or if it's sort of a thing that our societies impose on us, like-

• 22:35Hannah Fry?

  Well, I also wonder whether it's something that's, that's like physically going on with your brain, right? You have the, the plasticity of your brain, which, which, I mean, never goes away, but it decreases with age. I mean, when you're experiencing things and remember them, you, you are like quite literally rewiring your brain.

• 22:51Michael Stevens?

  Yeah, exactly, you are. And we know that, that the- Biology of a brain is still changing up until like twenty five. I mean, it's always changing.

• 23:00Hannah Fry?

  Sure.

• 23:00Michael Stevens?

  But it doesn't really reach.

• 23:03Hannah Fry?

  Maturity almost.

• 23:04Michael Stevens?

  A kind of maturity until the twenties.

• 23:06Hannah Fry?

  Yeah.

• 23:07Michael Stevens?

  So I'm just not ready to say that I think that it's a genetic thing that you'll find in all human societies, because we are particularly prejudiced against old people.

• 23:20Hannah Fry?

  Hmm.

• 23:21Michael Stevens?

  We.

• 23:22Hannah Fry?

  Which isn't true around the world.

• 23:24Michael Stevens?

  Which isn't true around the world, but I think it's also possible that just once people to reach forty, they just think, I, I'm not supposed to live a life that creates all these memories and stories to tell, because that's what you do when you're young.

• 23:37Hannah Fry?

  Hmm.

• 23:37Michael Stevens?

  We need to be careful about exactly what conclusion we draw there.

• 23:40Hannah Fry?

  I also wonder, though, I mean, I think there is another aspect to this, too, which is about novelty and about how our brains are like constantly searching for differences, right? I mean, we're like, we're like change detectors, effectively. And the thing is that when you've had, when your life experiences are limited and you sort of have a new memory, a new experience, it's like it feels very fresh. It feels valuable and important for your brain to remember it. But as you get a bit older, I mean, I've already been to this club a thousand times before.

• 24:14Michael Stevens?

  Been around the block a few times. It's less surprising. You know what? Yeah. I like that, too, because that reminds me of consensus bias. And it is our tendency to think that other people think the way we do. It is most predominant with old people. It is the least predominant with young people. Like, college students will say, here's what I believe. Do I think that's a common belief? Probably not.

• 24:41Hannah Fry?

  Hmm.

• 24:42Michael Stevens?

  But once you're sixty, you think, this is how it is. Yeah. Uh huh. And that's what everyone thinks. Because you, you have experienced more of life. You've been young, you've been old, you've been in college, you've been a graduate, you've had a job, you've been fired, you know people who have lost their jobs. You just, you feel like you can make a better estimation of what's common and what's not. You can't, as it turns out, but you feel like you can. So all of these psychological things, I think, conspire to make us prefer the music that our brains matured to, that happened while our brains were maturing, and then makes us think that things in the past were better. And that everyone should agree on it.

• 25:26Hannah Fry?

  But then also, I guess there's something here about those songs that you grew up to and had your most exciting experiences to because they were the new experiences, right? You know, your first kiss, your first car, your first, I don't know, like time in a club, right? All of those things will have had a soundtrack to them that that really is physically etched into your brain.

• 25:49Michael Stevens?

  That's right, that's right. And so like for me, I recently watched this little musical mashup of like breakthrough artists from 1980 to today. And it was a really great sort of history of what was the most popular thing. And when it hit that period of time, when I was nine to 10 years old, the way the songs made me feel shifted so dramatically. Instead of just being a really great song, it became a song that represented this feeling of like my eyes getting wider, entering the world and listening to the radio and to popular music and being part of the world. Like not an adult, but I felt like I was approaching adulthood. What is this? It was so different.

• 26:32Michael Stevens?

  So Alanis Morissette's Ironic, and I'm bringing her up a lot. I remember being in fifth grade and we had a talent show and a couple of girls sang Ironic. And I was like, what is this song? And I went home and I turned on MTV, which I had never watched before. And the music video was playing and I'm like, I'm peeking through the crack of childhood into the real world. And that kind of experience, of course it imprints onto my mind forever. And it's hard for me to ever communicate that feeling to someone who might not like the song. Because they didn't have the same experience with it.

• 27:10Hannah Fry?

  Or or think that the lyrics of it are nonsense.

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• 30:01Michael Stevens?

  Welcome back. We have been talking about whether music is getting worse, and I think that we can probably agree on a few things. We can agree on the fruitlessness of trying to find some kind of always-applies-in-every-context measure of objective worth of a song. Okay? I think we can also agree that there's more going on than just the talent of artists or their creativity, that we also have a tendency to have a lot more memories from when we were teenagers and when we were in our twenties. We remember things from the past being better than maybe they really were at the time. We mature and come of age in Western societies around that time, and music imprints on us

• 30:44Michael Stevens?

  as part of that journey, a journey we will never have again. It's almost like the most important time in our lives because it's the first important time in our lives. I want to even add to that two other things. I think that specifically in the 20th and 21st century, we have come under this spell of progress in innovation and creativity as a thing. We think that, well, yeah, you know, you start with an acoustic guitar, and then someone invents an electric guitar, and then Jimi Hendrix does the Star Spangled Banner, and it changes everything, and that's going to keep happening. But I think that's a bit of a fiction as well.

• 31:24Michael Stevens?

  I think that we've become obsessed with defining the present as made out of the past. Like, today, this artist is influenced by this one and that one, and this is what genre they're in, and we're pulling everyone back into these defining categories from the past. And that's where the value of the music comes from, and if we can't see that the same pattern continues in the same direction that we used to feel...

• 31:52Michael Stevens?

  We think the music is getting worse.

• 31:54Hannah Fry?

  Hmm.

• 31:55Michael Stevens?

  Does that make any sense?

• 31:56Hannah Fry?

  I think so. I mean, I think I recognize it in more subjects than music, to be honest. I think like, we, we had this obsession in the past of categorizing things, like the sciences, right? Like, this is biology, this is chemistry, whatever. This is like these straight, like, silos that don't, I mean, they were separate, right? Like, biology and chemistry were separate from one another. And as time has gone on, actually, those boundaries don't really apply anymore.

• 32:22Michael Stevens?

  Right.

• 32:23Hannah Fry?

  And I think that you're right, that it's like, but in music, the difference is, is that we are absolutely determined to kind of hold on to them in a way that is actually perhaps quite destructive.

• 32:34Michael Stevens?

  I have a feeling that we look back at events and musical genres and songs and not just remember them as being better and better now, but also as more important. Where, where I'm coming from here is that when we look back at the Wright Brothers' first flight or the moon landing, we think, wow, imagine witnessing both of those in your life. What would that have been like? Well, we know what it was like because those people told us. When humans landed on the moon, there was this old woman in New York who was interviewed, like, what do you think? Like, you, you have memories from before airplanes. And she said, I don't know, it's kind of cool, but it was a much bigger deal when they built the Brooklyn

• 33:17Michael Stevens?

  Bridge. And you could walk from Brooklyn to Manhattan?

• 33:22Michael Stevens?

  It was incredible. The moon. Not as impressive to me.

• 33:26Hannah Fry?

  But that was because of her worldview, right? Of like, the things that were important to her life at that moment.

• 33:32Michael Stevens?

  It's because of everything we've discussed so far on this podcast. It's that she was giving us another version of, back in my day,

• 33:39Hannah Fry?

  Mm hmm.

• 33:40Michael Stevens?

  they built bridges. Now they just go to the moon? And that's how we feel today. We think, oh, man, today I can have a burrito delivered to me in a little taxi whenever I want. And that's nothing, but back in my day, we had cassette tapes, which were better. And it's like, things keep getting surprisingly advanced, but we just don't accept it. We keep thinking, there's, we have a tendency to see the past as being more of a change and more important than what's happening now.

• 34:14Hannah Fry?

  So I also think that there's this, I mean, there's a very big cultural aspect to this, right? Because while she might have said, they built bridges, you could walk from Brooklyn to Manhattan, I imagine that actually that was specifically important to her because of where she was and where she lived. And I think that you see this in music too, right? So there was a, there was a recent study by some MIT people. They were circling around this idea that there are some sounds, some musical sounds that we prefer over others, even if they couldn't quite get to an objective measure of what makes them nice. But they took things like a chord of a C and a G, which I think to almost everybody who is listening to this will be like, yeah, that's, that's a pleasant sound. And then they took

• 34:55Hannah Fry?

  a great in combination of like a C and an F sharp, which historically has been, been nicknamed as the devil in music. And so for Western ears, this is, obviously one sounds much nicer than the other. And then what they did is they went to this very remote Amazonian tribe who had had very little exposure to Western music. They played them these chords, the ones that clashed and the ones that didn't, and were like, which do you prefer? And they were basically like, huh, don't mind, just noise, it's just noise. And what's intriguing about that is that like, it's not just about whether the past was better, it's about like, what you are accustomed to listening to. There's like this sweet spot of novelty, right? We are very put off by the banal, but we're also really put off

• 35:39Hannah Fry?

  by the radically unfamiliar. And actually, if you don't have experience of like, what culturally is considered to sound good, there is nothing objective about even those sounds clashing at all. It's just what we've kind of been trained on. There's this other study that I really love by Matt Salganick, who's this like computational social scientist, right? And he had this genius idea when he was doing his PhD, which was to try and work out how much of an impact the sort of cultural perception of particular bits of music were to how much people liked it, right? Like, how much does social proof, it's called, right? How much does everybody saying that this is the thing that matters

• 36:22Hannah Fry?

  change you into thinking this is the thing that matters? So what he did is he set up this, I mean, you can sort of imagine it like Spotify, like a sort of a very simplified version of Spotify, where he put up a number of different songs and people could go on and they could listen to certain bits of music and they could kind of like them. And there was a billboard effectively of like what the top songs were, which is very particularly clever.

• 36:46Michael Stevens?

  Right.

• 36:47Hannah Fry?

  And essentially, what he found was that lots of people would be sharing the same system, but he had like different universes where he would try out different experiments. So with the same songs, but sometimes he would like start off the ranking in a slightly different way.

• 37:03Michael Stevens?

  Right.

• 37:04Hannah Fry?

  Sometimes he would let the the the ranking evolve based on what people were really listening to, and then he would flip it upside down for new people. And essentially, what he discovered was that every now and then there would be a song that was so good, so inherently full of quality, that it would always rise to the top. But beyond that, it was just junk. People would listen to over and over again, songs that other people thought were good, and that was it. That was sort of the end of it. That's that's the thing that we like. What we like isn't about the noise itself, it's about what we think other people think is important.

• 37:35Michael Stevens?

  Yeah. You know, and I think that in a lot of ways, if you think that music is getting worse, you think that everything's getting worse. You think that

• 37:46Michael Stevens?

  Society's getting worse. For example, I think that in that study that found that negativity in songs has gone up and personal, first-person pronouns have gone up. It's more egotistical. I think that in a way, it's true that it's just much more socially acceptable to be negative, to criticize and to speak how you feel. It's more acceptable to talk about yourself and your own journey. So in a way, music changes because we already did. Music is just following what we're all doing.

• 38:23Hannah Fry?

  I also think that that point that you made earlier about how you're now listening directly to the creator is important, right? And it's like, if I feel, if I'm having a rubbish time, I could just make a song about it. I don't have to convince a panel of executives that this is a song that would connect with other people.

• 38:40Michael Stevens?

  That's right, yeah. So I wanted to talk about another study which found that pop music very closely matches the zeitgeist of the times. So when people in general feel like the economy and the government isn't working for them, when they're not happy with the direction of their life or the direction of the country they live in, pop music tends to get pessimistic, darker, more minor chords. And we see the reverse when people are happy. When there's an economic boom, pop music gets really optimistic. That's a pattern that's sort of possible to see. But we don't see it in country music.

• 39:22Hannah Fry?

  Right.

• 39:22Michael Stevens?

  We see the opposite effect.

• 39:24Hannah Fry?

  Go on.

• 39:24Michael Stevens?

  When national optimism is higher, country songs are sadder and vice versa. When everyone's really sad, that's when the country song is about, let's have a party. But when everyone is saying they're happy with the country, that's when the songs are all like, my dog died today.

• 39:44Michael Stevens?

  It's almost like a homeostasis between the world and country music. And it's trying to say, whoa, come back down. Hey, get back up. And I don't know how to explain it. I wish I could come on today and give you some great analysis of that. But I think the seed I want to plant is that pop music, to me, I think is more of a like, yeah, this is the socially acceptable way to feel right now. It's the trend, it's trendy. But country music is more of a like, confirming this is how you should feel.

• 40:18Hannah Fry?

  The thing about music and science in particular, those two together, is that of course, there is an enormous amount of money involved in trying to like grip on to statistical definitions of what people like, of what counts as good, of what will sell. And so many people have tried to do this. And actually, it turns out that it is just, as you said right at the very beginning, so much more about context than it is about the actual sounds or the actual notes. So much more about the experience that you are having as an individual. That, you know, there's like nice studies, like the one you were describing. But, you know, ultimately, I think just listen to Alanis Morissette and be happy.

• 40:57Michael Stevens?

  Yeah, yeah, it's too complicated. You can do studies and figure out what people want.

• 41:02Hannah Fry?

  Yeah.

• 41:02Michael Stevens?

  For sure. But you know what decides what people want? Them. But also what the artists tell them they want. Right? This is, that's my favorite thing about the show Mad Men. It was Don Draper being like, no, our job isn't to give people what they want. It's to tell them what they want. And so what I'm saying is that algorithms can never really predict what's going to happen. Ultimately, they, they, they run into a problem, which is that someone's going to make something that shouldn't work, but they do it so convincingly that it does. And now the algorithm has to learn that everything should be like that.

• 41:36Hannah Fry?

  And this, I think, is actually, I'm gonna finish on a note of optimism about AI and music, because, okay, there's certain types of music, right, where it's like wallpaper, you know, like elevator music, just stuff that's going on in the background. And I think that that can very easily be replicated by artificial intelligence algorithms. But the key point of what we're saying here is that you cannot grab on to what makes something good. And so the only thing that really people are looking for universally is something that connects them with another human, and that is something that cannot be replaced.

• 42:10Michael Stevens?

  That's right, yeah. I, I, I think AI could help you connect to another person, but there'll always be another person there. It's a conversation, and sometimes conversations might be boring to one of the people listening, but it doesn't mean the conversation has gotten worse. It means that person has become irrelevant and old.

• 42:29Hannah Fry?

  [laughing]

• 42:32Michael Stevens?

  And that's how I feel sometimes, that I'm entering that era where it's like, hey, dude, music is just not made for you. Movies aren't made for you anymore. And that's fine. I think I owe it to the young people of the world to just stop trying to fit in and be cool.

• 42:46Hannah Fry?

  Step aside, Michael.

• 42:48Michael Stevens?

  Step aside with my Smash Mouth CD.

• 42:51Hannah Fry?

  I am okay with that.

• 42:52Michael Stevens?

  So, given everything we've discussed, let me ask you the same question again. Maybe your answer has changed. When was the best era for music?

• 43:01Hannah Fry?

  There is absolutely no doubt in my mind now. I've spent half an hour talking to you, listening to you, and I am, I've never been more sure about anything. PJ and Duncan, psych.

• 43:12Michael Stevens?

  Wow, it's just confirmed it. And I think that we have. We've given all the reasons people like the music that they do, and PJ, Duncan, and the biker balls, they, they fit the bill.

• 43:24Hannah Fry?

  I'm gonna make you listen to it now.

• 43:25Michael Stevens?

  I'm gonna change my answer. I think the best era was, eh, 250 million B.C.

• 43:34Michael Stevens?

  The bird songs happening then really achieved perfection sonically.

• 43:40Hannah Fry?

  Okay, well, on that note, I think we're going to leave things here for today.

• 43:43Michael Stevens?

  Thank you for watching. I had a great time. I hope you did, too. Be sure to follow us wherever you get your podcasts.

• 43:50Hannah Fry?

  You can like and subscribe on YouTube as ever, or you can send us a good old fashioned email like the old days when everything was better, [email protected]. See you next time.

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