Is Pop Music Is Literally Ruining Our Brains?

Ever put much thought into Pop music? Pop music is technically the most popular music out there, and a group of researchers are trying to prove that it is ruining your brain. Should be more worried about the next Miley Cyrus single pumping through the car radio than eating over-processed food? First off, are we really going to lump everything topping the charts into one brain rotting category? Sure, there is some pretty awful 'music' on the radio these days... but there always has been! What is currently #1 on the billboard 200? Woman - Jill Scott . Is that seriously what is killing peoples creativity? Does that sounds like plastic over processed dumbed down noise to you? What about Bruno Mars's Uptown funk. If that is considered garbage pop music, I think it's time for me to find a new creative outlet. Is Ed Sheeran lacking in the musical talent department? No, would think that would be a resounding NO.   For those who think that pop music is getting WORSE, there are dozens of studies that will prove you dead wrong. Take this study from Queen Mary University of London. A group of researchers put 17,000 songs spanning 50 years of the Billboard 100 list through data-mining software to generate a quantitative data set about the evolution of what’s topping the charts. Look and see what happened in the 80s! That decade was the least diverse of any time period in the last half-century.   The team measured harmony, timbre, and chord changes, the researchers built a “fossil record” that tracked when particular stylings were more or less prominent. With that data, the team was able to see the decline of the dominant 7th chords as jazz and blues faded from the mainstream. Via Mental Floss These days you can find a scientific study to support just about anything. This is great so long as you take both sides of the coin in, and apply some critical thinking skills. This study claims that people that prefer pop music over other genres significantly lack creativity. Does this mean that pop music kills your creativity? In 2008, Adrian North of Scotland's Heriot-Watt University published the largest study yet of musical taste, involving 36,000 people, 60 countries and three years of work. He asked each participant to rank their favorite genres of music. He discovered that the most common characteristic among all genre listeners was creativity. However, one group of listeners showed a genuine and significant lack of creativity: pop music lovers. That doesn't necessarily mean that stupid people love pop — just that pop trains us to expect less from our artistic and creative lives. Music can nourish our minds like almost nothing else, so when a mega-industry is devoted to selling the least inspired music they can, they're short-changing all of us. A survey of other research on music reveals that pop music has gotten worse over the last 50 years. Not only that, it's been used to brainwash listeners through predatory marketing strategies across [...]

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