Instrumentational complexity of music genres and why simplicity sells

Listening habits are strongly influenced by two opposing aspects, the desire for variety and the demand for uniformity in music. In this work we quantify these two notions in terms of musical instrumentation and production technologies that are typically involved in crafting popular music. We assign a "complexity value" to each music style. A style is complex if it shows the property of having both high variety and low uniformity in instrumentation. We find a strong inverse relation between variety and uniformity of music styles that is remarkably stable over the last half century. Individual styles, however, show dramatic changes in their "complexity" during that period. Styles like "new wave" or "disco" quickly climbed towards higher complexity in the 70s and fell back to low complexity levels shortly afterwards, whereas styles like "folk rock" remained at constant high complexity levels. We show that changes in the complexity of a style are related to its number of sales and to the number of artists contributing to that style. As a style attracts a growing number of artists, its instrumentational variety usually increases. At the same time the instrumentational uniformity of a style decreases, i.e. a unique stylistic and increasingly complex expression pattern emerges. In contrast, album sales of a given style typically increase with decreasing complexity. This can be interpreted as music becoming increasingly formulaic once commercial or mainstream success sets in.Comment: 17 pages, 5 figures, Supporting Informatio

Instrumentational variety and uniformity for music styles within the time period <i>t</i> = 2004–2010.

<p>Music styles collapse onto a line where and are inversely related. ‘Experimental’ is the music style with the highest instrumentational variety, styles with the lowest levels of variety and highest uniformity values belong to the ‘electronic’ and ‘hip hop’ genres. <i>Inset:</i> The values for and are similar to results from the model.</p

The arrangement of styles in the <i>V</i>-<i>U</i> plane remains robust over more than fifty years of music history.

<p>However, the position of individual styles can change dramatically over time, as it is shown for ‘indie rock’, ‘new wave’, ‘disco’ and ‘synth-pop’. Some styles, such as ‘folk’, show almost no change in their position.</p

Maximum spanning tree for the style-similarity network, , for the years 2004–2010.

<p>Nodes represent styles, colors correspond to the genre to which the style belongs, the node size is proportional to the number of albums released for each style, the link strength between two music styles and is proportional to . Several clusters are visible. They are identified as styles belonging to ‘rock’, ‘jazz’, or ‘electronic music’ genres.</p

A bipartite network that connects music styles with instruments is constructed.

<p>(A) Schematic representation of the data containing the relations between styles and instruments. (B) Visualization of the matrix describing the music production network, . A black (white) field for style and instrument indicates that . (C) Part of the bipartite network that connects music styles with instruments for a given year . Large nodes represent music styles, small ones instruments. It is apparent that some instruments occur in almost every style while others are used by a substantially smaller number of styles. For instance, there are only two instruments appearing exclusively in ‘hip hop’ among these five styles (for example the flageolet) whereas dozens of instruments are only related to ‘experimental’ (such as countertenor vocals). Vocals, lead guitar, and drums, on the other hand, appear in each of the five styles, whereas bones used as percussion elements only appear in ‘Black Metal’.</p