Being the kind of guy who is happy to use music and not know how it works, I’ve never really thought that much about what goes on in the production room. So this video was fairly interesting - it runs though some aspects of modern production methods and contrasts them with the older ways of doing things. Worth a watch if you’re totally new to music production like me
He brings up some good points and I don’t disagree with him, except that I disagree with the premise that it’s why music is beginning to sound alike.
If you listen to Korean or Japanese music, there’s a wide variety of sound using the same production techniques. Ado, Yoasobi, and G-Idle are good groups to look at for poppy stuff, Maximum the Hormone and Nemophila for more rock oriented.
Stuff just doesn’t have to sound the same.
Plenty of great and diverse music being made everywhere - more than ever before, in fact. Just gotta look past pop.
Exactly this.
Pop is more and more bubblegum… chew for some minutes and glue under some desk.
There are tons of good artists with lots of different approaches. Even if you go on music tiktok looking for small bands trying to self promote, you’ll find interesting things!
There’s a lot of good pop in Korea and Japan. Yeah, bubblegum, but you might be surprised.
And they can have crazy good basslines.
The prob with playing that is you need to listen to it. 
I’m trying to discuss, but if people have closed minds nothing I can say. Tapping out
I checked the video out before posting, and I 'd rather not listen to it again, so that’s all I’ve got to say about that.
Sweet bassline, but they better watch out for the Japanese j bass enforcers. Is it even legal to play an HH bass in Japan?
I thought that was a lot of fun. Enjoyed watching it! That’s a pretty cool bass, too.
Yeah I think he’s very much looking at it from a production perspective - the influence of digital technology and stuff. I’m sure there’s still variety out there when it comes to songwriting but you’ve got to admit that most modern music is heavily processed, and probably in the same way…
Especially on this forum @howard ! 
But most people do listen to pop. Baby Shark = over 5 billion views on YT
In the West, yes. In Asia, there’s a lot more variety.
Here’s a band called QWER from Korea. Seemingly an average pop song
Here’s a dissection of the song by classical and jazz musicians, and there’s a lot more going on musically than you would think from the pop. The analysis starts around 7 minutes
I’m not saying you should like this stuff, but judge a song on its own merits, not dismiss it simply because it’s pop. I can’t stand most pop, I don’t like this song as a matter of fact, but there’s a lot of good musical ideas in it. Listen with an open mind.
Some good points there for sure, and definitely something to be aware of. But, yes, I think he looks at this mainly from a producer point of view.
What has happened with music production (looking from the perspective of someone wanting to make music) is nothing short of a democratization of this process; along with all the benefits and disadvantages we associate with and know from other democratic processes.
Back in the old days, you needed a) a certain proficiency on your instrument, b) have access to a studio with all the hardware and know-how; and c) know a bunch of other guys who played different instruments reasonably well (well, unless you were Mike Oldfield perhaps).
Unless you had at least these three items lined up, you couldn’t properly record and produce music intended for more than showing to your friends.
Nowadays, I am happy I have tools available that allow me to bring my musical ideas to fruition even though I don’t play keyboards at a sufficiently advanced level, or have a drum set (mic’d up) standing around, or own studio hardware for 100+ K dollars etc etc
To make this work, I might have to rely on chord progression builders, MIDI riff collections, sampled drum sounds, effects plug-ins, console emulators, and so forth, and, yes, there will be a “canned” aspect to this, and while it’s good to be aware of this, it is perhaps not worse than having had dozens of 90’s hits which all used the same D50 patch or similar.
But, OK, maybe less copying and pasting of recorded bits - that is indeed a bit lazy 
That already happened when Punk came to be, or PageMaker (for DTP) or Adobe Premiere (for Video Production).
Some cool stuff came from “bedroom producers”, especially in electronic music.
But: the issue is not the “democratization”, which is of course great. The issue is the copy&paste, target group optimized, image-based soulless f#cking producer/marketing driven “music”…
True, but it was still easy to distinguish the amateur stuff from the pro stuff…
Yeah, it is that coin that has two sides, or that sword that has two edges…
Not always. I know that some of my punk flyer designer friends became quite well known and influential, in arts or typography…
Layouting and typography were stuck in the 70s, a lot has happened since then, especially due to the “underground”…
EDIT Same for electronic music. But that coin really hast two sides, with 90% of techno being sh#t!
Conversely one could argue on this point:
that there always were producers that followed a “formula”, sometimes ad nauseam… I hated Stock, Aitken, Waterman stuff already back then 
I make this point all the time so thank you for making it quite eloquently for me
We have seen a complete democratization of music production, to the point that I now have, on a mac mini sitting on my desk, more music production capability than any music studio had for any price, in the years my band was gigging. Yes, I don’t have the studio acoustics, but I can rent a practice space that does for like $50/day. And that’s if I need it. These days, the only thing stopping anyone from recording is needing the personal creativity and time.
It’s crazy. The quality of the software at the ridiculously cheap price it is available at has totally changed the music production landscape, and this is unqualified and unequivocally only the very best of things. There’s more good music being made and distributed widely now than at any time in the past and this is a big reason why.
The flip side of this is that now every village idiot has access to the same production capability that the modern Beethovens do.
And yes, there is incentive for the software makers themselves to package up as much of the workflow as possible into presets and easily copyable templates. And this can lead to uniformity if abused, as can the age old thing of producers copying and/or stealing from each other.
So, what we see are the same effects we have always seen with pop production, but happening much more rapidly and effectively.
On any given day, it is still a lottery who shows up for music making at my home - the village idiot or Beethoven
