Alex Murrell is a brand strategist who writes about advertising, forecasting, and cultural sameness in design, film, and music.
HN commenters cite his Age of Average essays as an explanation for why culture seems to be converging, including shorter, more repetitive pop songs.
I made a comment related to this recently (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45486391) and I got a lot of helpful responses that I think help explain some of these trends:
1. With the Internet, things "converge to an optimum" much faster than before where you had more regional variation. Dominant design, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dominant_design, explains part of this trend.
2. This article from earlier this year, "The age of average", https://www.alexmurrell.co.uk/articles/the-age-of-average, makes many of the same points but links to other good posts that help explain the change, particularly as it applies to business consolidation and risk aversion.
He covers music in a follow up article, https://www.alexmurrell.co.uk/articles/the-age-of-average-encore: "Chart topping tracks are becoming shorter, less melodically diverse and more lyrically repetitive".
According to him, it is not just tastes, it is the way musicians get paid:
"Streaming platforms pay artists each time a track gets listened to. And a “listen” is classified as 30 seconds or more of playback. To maximise their pay, savvy artists are releasing albums featuring a high number of short tracks."
In an objective sense, more new releases today are continuations of existing franchises than they were in the 90s. See https://www.alexmurrell.co.uk/articles/the-age-of-average, which was on the front page earlier this week.
Subjectively, the few teens I interact with seem hyped for new installments in old franchises, updates to existing games with more content, or remakes of old classics. I don't think there's as much excitement for new franchises, because of a wave of overpromising over the last decade.
In some narrow sense, this headline reminds me of this Alex Murrell blog post from 2023 called "The Age of Average": https://www.alexmurrell.co.uk/articles/the-age-of-average (HN discussion from that time: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35355703). Covers the strange phenomenon of cultural homogenization, with all designs (cars, buildings, brand logos, websites, etc) reverting to a mean. In some sense, I'm not surprised now that AI (or 'thought' more generally) is doing the same.
It's not coffee shops, it's everything. I read an essay last year on this topic, "The age of average" by Alex Murrell ( https://www.alexmurrell.co.uk/articles/the-age-of-average ) and it's stayed in my mind ever since. Cars, home interiors, instagram photos, skylines, self help books, franchise movies. The design of everything in our lives has become so relentlessly optimized we have a global culture that's stuck a risk-free local maxima.
How Silicon Valley helps spread the same sterile aesthetic across the world[1], Discussion:[2]
The age of average[3], Discussion: [4]
1: https://www.theverge.com/2016/8/3/12325104/airbnb-aesthetic-global-minimalism-startup-gentrification
2: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33520414
3: https://www.alexmurrell.co.uk/articles/the-age-of-average
4: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35355703