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Study on Music: Simplicity Sells and Complexity Doesn't

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Antiochus

Antiochus

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A few months some researchers in Austria did a study massively mining the entire Discogs database for music from 1955 to 2011 to see if there's any relationships between musical/instrumental complexity and the underlying sales for them. Here are some of the interesting tidbits they came up with:

http://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0115255

The Discogs database is one of the largest online user-built music database specialized on music albums or discographies. Users can upload information about music albums. A group of moderators assures correctness of the information. Discogs is an open source database and publicly accessible via API or XML dump file released every month. We use the dump file of November 2011 containing more than 500,000 artist and more than 500,000 albums assigned to 374 styles. The data spans more than fifty years of music history, from 1955–2011. Discogs uses a music taxonomy based on two levels, music genres and styles. There are fifteen different genres, such as ‘rock’, ‘blues’, or ‘Latin’. On the second level genres are divided into styles, for instance ‘rock’ has 57 styles including ‘art rock’, ‘classic rock‘, ‘grunge’, etc. ‘Latin’ contains different music styles such as ‘cumbia’, ‘cubano’, ‘danzon’, etc. S1 Fig. in S1 File shows the histogram of the distribution of music styles per genres. For each music album we extract information on the instruments played by artists, the release date of the record, and the music genres and styles assigned to the album. The data is grouped into time windows of seven years, e.g. the last time-step contains data on albums released between 2004–2010, and so on. S1 Table in S1 File provides some descriptive statistics of the dataset.

To measure the average sales numbers of music styles we use a dataset that contains information on the Amazon SalesRank of music albums as of 2006 [27]. The Amazon SalesRank can be thought of as a ranking of all records by the time-span since an item last sold [28]. Albums in the Discogs dataset are assigned their Amazon SalesRank by matching album titles between the two datasets. As the Amazon SalesRank dataset only contains information on album titles, it was matched to entries in the Discogs dataset by choosing only albums whose title appears only once in both datasets.
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In this work we quantify the variety and uniformity of music styles in terms of instrumentation that is typically used for their production. We employ a user-generated music taxonomy where albums are classified as belonging to one of fifteen different music genres that contain 374 different music styles as subcategories. Styles belonging to the same music genre are characterized by similar instrumentation, a fact that has already been exploited in the context of automatic genre detection [25]. We construct a similarity network of styles, whose branches are identified as music genres. We characterize the instrumentational complexity of each music style by its instrumentational variety and uniformity and show (i) that there is a remarkable relationship between instrumentational varieties and uniformities of music styles, (ii) that the instrumentational complexity of individual styles may exhibit dramatic changes across the past fifty years, and (iii) that these changes in instrumentational complexity are related to the typical sales numbers of the music style.
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The relationship between instrumental variety and uniformity of styles is remarkably stable over time. Variety and uniformity have been computed for six time-windows of seven years, starting with t = 1969–1975. For each time period and show a negative relation in Fig. 4. Values of are normalized by to make them comparable across time. Although this relation is stable over time, the position of individual styles within the plane can change dramatically, as can be seen in the highlighted trajectories of several styles. The evolution of music styles is also shown in the S2 Fig. in S1 File where the trajectory of is shown for each style that ranks among the top 20 high instrumentational complexity styles. For example, the style ‘new wave’ sharply increased in complexity rapidly and was popular from the mid-70's to the mid-80's, after which it decreased again. Similar patterns of rise and fall in complexity are found for ‘disco’ and ‘synth-pop’ music. ‘Indie rock’ gained complexity steadily from the 60s to the 80s and remained on high complexity levels ever since. Styles losing instrumentational complexity over time include ‘soul’, ‘funk’, ‘classic rock’, and ‘jazz-funk’. However, other styles such as ‘folk’, ‘folk rock’, ‘folk world’, or ‘country music’ remain practically at the same level of complexity.
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To understand the mechanisms leading to an increase or decrease in instrumentational variety and uniformity we compute the change in the number of albums for each style between two seven-year windows, = 1997–2003 and = 2004–2010. The change in number of albums is compared with changes in instrumentational complexity , see Fig. 5A. We find that increasing complexity is typically related to an increasing number of albums within that time-span with a correlation coefficient and p-value . This suggests that styles with increasing complexity attract an increasing number of artists that release albums within that style.
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We found a negative correlation between variety and uniformity of music styles that was remarkably stable over the last fifty years. This finding reveals an intriguing relation between local and global properties of the music production network. Styles with low instrumentational variety are characterized by instruments that are typically associated with a large number of other styles. While the overall distribution of instrumentational complexity over music styles is robust, the complexity of individual styles showed dramatic changes during that period. Some styles like ‘new wave’ or ‘disco’ quickly climbed towards higher complexity and shortly afterwards fell back, other styles like ‘folk rock’ stayed highly complex over the entire time period. We finally showed that these changes in the instrumentational complexity of a style are typically linked to the sales numbers of the style and to how many artists the style attracts. As a style increases its number of albums, i.e. attracts a growing number of artists, its variety also increases. At the same time the style's uniformity becomes smaller, i.e. a unique stylistic and complex expression pattern emerges. Album sales numbers of a style, however, typically increase with decreasing complexity, see Fig. 5B. This can be interpreted as music becoming increasingly formulaic in terms of instrumentation under increasing sales numbers due to a tendency to popularize music styles with low variety and musicians with similar skills. Only a small number of styles in popular music manage to sustain a high level of instrumentational complexity over an extended period of time.
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The last sentence is especially cogent. Granted the researchers were not able to cover additional musical territory after 2011 (one may guess their results may be even more reinforced), but in short, the larger the album sales of a particular style, the more correlated it is with simplicity of the music.
 
I'll look at this more closely later but I see a lot of emphasis on instrumental complexity. Is there anything here about lyric complexity?

A quick ctrl+f didn't reveal anything.
 
Guess that's why Meghan is so amazing. And I suppose that means people like Beflopcé should go back to the drawing board instead of churning out shitty little indie music.

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This surprises no one. However complexity often passes the test of time and makes the experience more pleasant in repeats. That's why you still enjoy Stairway to Heaven but can't stand a single note more of Call Me Maybe.
 
I think it also depends on the time, the artist popularity and hype surrounding a record release. Aren't Dark Side of the Moon and The Wall by Pink Floyd among the best selling albums ever?
 
Simplicity and predictable basic chord progressions and harmonies are exactly why I can't stand popular music.

As a lifelong musician I need to listen to music which doesn't sound like I could write myself in 60 seconds.

Edit: I'm talking specifically about the music here and not the lyrics. I can't write lyrics to save my life but then they don't make music compelling for me either.
 
Depends on the genre. A lot of Instrumental Math Rock based bands are quite successful by their own right.

But if we are talking about mainstream success, then absolutely. Your average Joe does not care about the constant change of tempo and style in your song and wants a simple catchy tune to make him hip hop.

EDIT: Also ditto on New Wave falling off the face of the earth once complexities are introduced.
Thanks Talking Heads.
 
No WAY!!!

It's like that with any medium. Its why cartoons are for kids, movies have one word titles, cheap action movies sell more than amazing dramas, and pop music is well Popular. Unless you happen to be a fanatic in any of those area's, chances are you tend to stick to the simple catchy stuff.
 
zbarron said:
A part of me agrees with this. Take NES music and how timeless those simple tunes are. Simple is often beautiful.
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Perhaps simple in the complexity of the instrument itself, but old NES songs still had multiple melodies and counterpoint working together in a complex way. When you orchestrate them it becomes even more apparent.
 
zbarron said:
A part of me agrees with this. Take NES music and how timeless those simple tunes are. Simple is often beautiful.
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Don't get me wrong, I think a song/piece/composition whatever can benefit from complexity, I do think that you should never use how far you can push complexity as a justification of a good musical idea. If a song calls for it, complexity can benefit the song, but sometimes it's not necessary.

Also, I like a good pop song, and I think it takes talent to write a good pop song. I can't write amazing musical hooks to save my life.
 
ATF487 said:
I wouldn't say this, but complexity in the absence of good song writing is pointless.
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I actually like this better honestly. Having said that, I've been around musicians before who bash (as in, outright revile and mock) anything that isn't insanely hard to pull off; something that's only obtainable after years/months of practice and musical studying. You sometimes wonder if they just can go back to basics and have some respect for good old songwriting.
 
I don't know why everyone is going on about how obvious the results are - if you actually read the article as opposed to just the headline, you'd see that there is a lot of interesting and non-obvious stuff in there. For example, the rise and fall of musical complexity within individual music genres.

There's a great book called 'This is your brain on music' which tries to scientifically explain how musical tastes come about. I'm going to grossly simplify what it's about because I haven't read it for a few years. It talks about how your brain, through some weird evolutionary quirk, enjoys music because it sets up expectations with a pattern, and then surprises you by modifying the pattern. More complex music can be seen as catering to those listeners who require more complicated patterns in order to feel the surprise aspect. Perhaps the more niche genres trend towards more complexity because the people who consume and create music within that style build up a kind of tolerance.

Conversely, perhaps more mainstream music genres trend towards simplicity because it doesn't require this build up of tolerance.
 
More often than not, simple music is better than complex music. Simple music takes true skill to create masterfully. There's nowhere to hide in simple music.
 
lord quas said:
It doesn't matter whether music is complex or simple. The only thing that matters is whether it sounds any good.
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I agree; seems weird to try to make an argument centered around 'quality' as it relates to complexity or simplicity*. Some of the most critically regarded music (no I don't mean 'pop music') I'm is also incredibly simple.

*referring to some posts itt, not strictly the article
 
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