Why does new music sound old?

Modern music’s like a stuck record - 16th Oct 2023

It's understandable if current music in the charts seems to ring a bell, given that 25 percent of the UK's top 40 hits incorporated older tunes within their music, a procedure known as 'sampling'.

Bridging generations, sampling has been commonplace since the 1980s, with various artists succeeding with smash hits by repurposing older tunes. This year, Doja Cat's 'Paint the Town Red' sampled Dionne Warwick's acclaimed 'Walk on By' from six decades earlier, and Puff Daddy's 'I'll be Missing You' in 1997 recycles The Police's 1980 anthem, 'Every Breath You Take'.

Apparently, human beings appreciate tunes they're already acquainted with, and above all tracks from their adolescence. One neuroscience study highlighted that people had stronger associations with music from their teenage years than other eras.

Contemporary sampling may come across as evidence of 1980s and 1990s nostalgia, but the rationale could be somewhat more nefarious. For the past 20 years, music companies have been snapping up artists' back catalogues, illustrated earlier this year, when – for $200 million – record company Hipgnosis purchased the rights to Justin Bieber's songs for their bank, a store which already contains the likes of Neil Young and Shakira.

Having acquired ownership, certain companies then press budding young artists in their employ to reuse their golden oldies. Others, like Primary Wave, repurpose the songs for other creative projects, such as their documentary about Kurt Cobain.

Jayson Greene, a music critic, holds that buying up song rights is a sure way to stifle originality in new artists. He says, "What's different now is that you have effectively patent trolls who are blocking access and hoarding resources."

These big record companies stunt independent musicians' artistic expression by stopping them from sampling earlier music. To make matters worse, due to people's tendency to focus on familiar melodies, fewer songs without sampling make it to the ranks of the top 40.

For Greene, hearing the same old melodies over and over could ultimately be tedious for listeners, as "Cultural attention is not an endlessly renewable resource."

If he's right, it's feasible that the musical pendulum may swing back to original works.