Anatomy of a Pop Song

“Locked Away” by R. City featuring Adam Levine. “I Can’t Feel My Face” by The Weeknd. “Hotline Bling” by Drake. These are songs that we hear every day, whether on our radios, from our friends’ iPods or while we’re out on the town. This is the nature of pop music: familiar, comfortable and profitable.

The term “pop” is, obviously, short for “popular,” although it has come to define a very specific genre. Many trace the origin of pop to Elvis, although there are those who place it later, usually with The Beatles. Either way, the original pop music was very much what we now consider rock and roll, and the two designations were used interchangeably. It was in the late sixties and early seventies that rock and pop began to part ways. The term “rock” was then used for music that desired to be high art; the term “pop” went to music that wanted to sell.

Whether or not pop music managed to maintain an artistic soul, it certainly managed to sell. In 2014, Billboard reported that the global music industry was valued at nearly fifteen billion dollars. To maintain this level of success, the industry has come to rely on uniformity of sound.

Record companies, songwriters and radio stations all take a risk when they produce, write or play a new song. The financial risk is greater, however, if the song is significantly different from what they already know will sell. As a result, many songwriters and production companies choose the safer option, producing “new” music that sounds like what is already popular. The public wants to hear songs that sound almost exactly like the songs they know and love.

Contributing to the homogeneity of pop music are the record labels’ data analysis systems. After collecting data on the current hits, the systems compare various aspects of proposed new songs to determine how well they will do. After a song has been produced, other data analysis systems track its performance on social media and apps like Shazam to determine whether or not it could become popular. If it is deemed a viable hit, the record labels, armed to the teeth with their new data, tell the radio stations to play it, and voilà, they have a hit.

Pop music is uniform for another reason as well: many of the same people are used to create all the greatest hits. Max Martin, for example, was, in 1999, involved in the writing and production of both Britney Spears’s single “… Baby One More Time” and the Backstreet Boys’ “I Want It That Way.” Since then he has worked on songs for a variety of superstars, including Kelly Clarkson’s “Since U Been Gone,” P!nk’s “So What,” Katy Perry’s “Dark Horse” and, more recently, “Love Me Like You Do” by Ellie Goulding and “Style” by Taylor Swift. Much of pop music is dominated by a few producers and songwriters like Martin, whose work is used by the best-selling artists in the industry.

The similarity of most pop songs is perhaps best highlighted by diagramming them. Pop songs typically fit the mold of ABABCBB, where A is the verse, B is the chorus and C is the bridge. This is not set in stone. Sometimes the chorus is introduced at the beginning of the song or there are more than two verses, but a high proportion of pop songs fit the basic model.

The truth is that the people who create pop music are far more concerned with the profitability of their songs than their quality. The result is a large body of songs that, while sung by different people with different words, all seem to be more or less the same.