When Oliver Anthony’s “Rich Men North of Richmond” hit number one on the Billboard Hot 100 in August 2023, the achievement felt seismic. Not because of musical innovation—it’s a straightforward folk-country track recorded in under four hours with audible background noise—but because it circumvented the system entirely. Recorded by a Virginia factory worker nobody had heard of, released on YouTube without label backing, the track became culturally significant primarily by being authentic in an era where authenticity has become industrially extinct.
The relief listeners expressed wasn’t political, despite how various factions tried to weaponize the song. It was aesthetic. For a brief moment, something reached the top of the charts that didn’t sound like it emerged from the same songwriters, producers, and algorithmic assembly line that manufactures most contemporary hits. The song sounded different because it was different—made by someone outside the system, for reasons unconnected to market research or streaming metrics.
That difference revealed how homogenized popular music has become. Music Authentic and others have been documenting this phenomenon for years. While the current AI-music scare dominates headlines, it’s a distraction from structural issues that have been entrenched for decades. The real problem isn’t artificial intelligence—it’s the industrial system that turned music creation into manufacturing long before algorithms entered the picture.
The Swedish Assembly Line
Max Martin—born Karl Martin Sandberg—holds the third-most number-one hits in Billboard history behind only Paul McCartney and John Lennon. He recently tied Lennon at 29 number-ones and will likely surpass him. His catalog includes “…Baby One More Time,” “I Kissed a Girl,” “Blinding Lights,” “Can’t Feel My Face,” and dozens more songs that defined their respective eras. Since 1998, he’s written or co-written 28 Billboard number-ones, producing most himself.
Martin didn’t achieve this alone. His Cheiron Studios in Stockholm pioneered an assembly-line approach where producers write songs, play instruments, engineer recordings, and mix everything before artists even arrive. When Britney Spears recorded Oops!… I Did It Again in 1999, Cheiron had already written seven songs and recorded all instrumental layers before she showed up in November. She spent one week doing vocals. Martin and his team functioned like a band that swapped singers between tracks.
This inverted the traditional workflow. Historically, artists or songwriters created material, then hired producers to shape the sound. At Cheiron and its descendants—Maratone Studios, MXM Productions, Wolf Cousins—producers write everything first, then slot in whichever artist fits the track. The artist becomes the least essential component, replaceable across projects without fundamentally altering the product.
Martin’s disciples—Dr. Luke (Lukasz Gottwald), Shellback, Savan Kotecha—adopted this model and spread it industry-wide. These writers and producers don’t work in isolation; they operate “writing camps” where teams collaborate on individual songs, sometimes with a dozen people contributing to a single three-minute track. The credits on contemporary pop hits read like corporate org charts because that’s effectively what they are.
Martin calls his songwriting approach “melodic math.” Certain musical patterns trigger specific psychological responses, and those patterns can be systematically deployed to maximize commercial appeal. He focuses on vocal melody first, often using nonsense syllables—what he calls “Burger King English”—to sketch how phrases flow before fitting actual lyrics later. The lyrics serve the melody, not vice versa.
His songs share structural hallmarks. Choruses arrive before fifty seconds. He uses only three or four distinct melodic parts per song, introducing them sequentially to avoid overwhelming listeners. Simplicity and clarity dominate arrangements. Familiar and unfamiliar elements balance carefully—enough novelty to catch attention, enough familiarity to create instant connection. He saves the highest notes for the second half of sections, creating internal tension-and-release schemes within phrases.
This isn’t artistry in the Romantic sense of individual genius expressing ineffable emotion. It’s craft in the industrial sense of systematically replicable techniques designed to produce consistent results. A 2012 Spanish National Research Council study analyzed 500,000 recordings from 1955 to 2010, measuring harmonic complexity, timbral diversity, and loudness. Timbre—the texture, richness, and depth of sound—peaked in the 1960s and declined steadily afterward. Music became more homogeneous across songs as production converged on proven formulas.
When two people control substantial market share in any industry, product diversity suffers. Martin and Dr. Luke alone shaped a substantial portion of hits from the late 1990s through the 2010s.
The Consolidation Machine
Industry consolidation accelerated homogenization. The 1996 Telecommunications Act enabled media near-monopolies. Radio conglomerates like iHeartMedia (formerly Clear Channel) own hundreds of stations playing centrally programmed playlists. Labels consolidated into three major players—Universal Music Group, Sony Music Entertainment, Warner Music Group—controlling roughly 80% of the market. Live Nation and AEG dominate concert promotion and venue ownership. Spotify, Apple Music, and YouTube control streaming distribution.
Each consolidation point creates a chokepoint where gatekeepers determine what reaches audiences. Labels sign artists based on perceived commercial viability, which means similarity to existing successes. Radio programmers favor familiar sounds that fit established formats. Playlist curators at streaming services deploy algorithmic recommendations that push listeners toward stylistically similar content. The entire distribution chain rewards the familiar and punishes the genuinely novel.
Digital production tools democratized music creation—anyone with a laptop can produce professional-quality recordings—but paradoxically increased sameness. Software comes preloaded with the same sounds, the same loops, the same presets. YouTube offers “type beats”—instrumental tracks designed to sound like specific successful artists. Aspiring producers download “Metro Boomin Type Beat” or “Drake Type Beat,” pay $200 for a license, and build songs from prefabricated parts specifically designed to evoke existing hits.
Sample pack culture through services like Splice and Loopcloud creates sonic monoculture. Thousands of producers access identical sounds, build tracks from identical components, and wonder why everything sounds familiar. The track-and-hook method, where different specialists handle different song elements, became industry standard. One person writes the beat, another the hook, a third the verses, a fourth the bridge. Digital audio workstations made this inevitable by allowing files to transfer easily between collaborators. A single song can involve fifty or a hundred contributors working in different studios, different cities, different continents.
This production-line approach increases output dramatically. Where sitting in a room working out chord progressions and lyrics with bandmates might yield a few songs over weeks, track-and-hook methods produce dozens or hundreds in the same timeframe. Someone can literally specialize in snare drums, contributing that single element across numerous tracks. Efficiency improves. Distinctiveness evaporates.
The Death of Artist Development
Record labels historically invested in artist development—signing acts based on potential, funding several albums while artists found their voice, accepting that commercial breakthroughs might take years. That model collapsed alongside physical sales. When streaming pays $0.003 to $0.005 per play, labels can’t afford patient development. They need immediate returns, which means signing artists who already have traction or who fit established commercial templates.
The result: labels became risk-averse, favoring safe bets over artistic experimentation. Artists who don’t fit prevailing trends struggle to get signed. Those who do get signed face pressure to work with hit-making producers and songwriters rather than developing their own sound. The feedback loop reinforces itself—successful artists sound similar because they’re using the same writers and producers, so labels sign new artists who sound similar to current successes, who then use the same writers and producers.
Contemporary pop stars frequently maintain the fiction that they write their own material, but credits tell different stories. Major hits often list eight or more writers. Some credits represent genuine collaboration; others reflect industry practices where producers and engineers receive writing credits as part of their deals. But the core songwriting typically comes from a small stable of professional writers who work across multiple artists, genres, and labels.
Sia Furler spent four years writing for other artists before returning to performing. Her royalties from those four years dwarf her earnings as a solo artist. Max Martin’s net worth exceeded $400 million as of 2017, entirely from song royalties. These writers are worth more than most stars they write for, and they’re not captive to any single label. They can turn unknowns into stars and the biggest stars depend on them for content, even while maintaining the illusion of artistic self-sufficiency.
Many contemporary artists can’t actually sing. Studio technology fixes pitch, timing, and tone to the point where vocal performance becomes almost optional. Others lend their voices to material they didn’t write, performing songs crafted by committees for maximum commercial appeal. Milli Vanilli became a scandal in 1990 when it was revealed they didn’t sing their own records. Today, that’s standard practice, just less explicitly acknowledged. The difference is the industry learned to obscure the machinery. Milli Vanilli deserved better—they were scapegoated for a system that had already industrialized vocal performance.
The Streaming Takeover
The promise was democratization. Anyone could release music. Distribution barriers would crumble. Artists would connect directly with fans. That narrative omits crucial details about who actually controls distribution infrastructure.
The major aggregators artists rely on for “independent” distribution are now owned or controlled by the same industry players. Sony purchased AWAL. Warner owned Spinnup before shutting it in 2022. Universal bought Ingrooves, FUGA, and PIAS. Sony owns The Orchard. TuneCore is owned by Believe, a French company operating globally. DistroKid remains independent but faces pressure from all sides. The acquisition strategy is simple: absorb independents, consolidate control, expand market share.
Even if artists avoid those distributors, streaming platforms themselves function as the new labels. Spotify’s Discovery Mode—launched in 2020—allows artists and labels to accept reduced royalties in exchange for algorithmic priority in Radio, Autoplay, and certain Mixes. The company claims this doesn’t affect flagship playlists like Discover Weekly or the AI DJ, but multiple lawsuits filed in late 2024 and 2025 argue otherwise. The core allegation: Spotify operates a “modern form of payola” where financial incentives secretly drive supposedly neutral recommendations.
A class action lawsuit filed in Manhattan in November 2025 alleges that Spotify “exploits” subscribers “by marketing itself as a platform that offers organic music recommendations” while actually selling those recommendations. The complaint claims Discovery Mode and editorial playlists constitute “deceptive pay-for-play” that misleads consumers into trusting recommendations are based on personal taste when they’re actually shaped by commercial arrangements.
Spotify denies these allegations, calling them “absurd” and “riddled with misunderstandings.” The company insists Discovery Mode isn’t used in all algorithmic playlists. But the technical argument is interesting: if Spotify’s recommendation ecosystem is integrated—sharing user-interaction data, taste profiles, and common models across surfaces—then a paid-for boost signal introduced in one part inevitably influences the others. Spotify says certain surfaces have “cabined algorithms and pristine data sets,” but that defense relies on a narrow, literal interpretation that may not hold up technically.
Whether or not Discovery Mode legally constitutes payola, it functions similarly: trading reduced royalties for increased visibility. Artists desperate for streams accept the deal because algorithmic placement drives everything else. Get into Release Radar or Discover Weekly and streams multiply. Miss those placements and songs vanish into the void.
Editorial playlists like Today’s Top Hits and RapCaviar wield enormous power. Landing on these playlists can make careers. Missing them can end them. The November 2025 lawsuit claims editorial playlists are also subject to pay-for-play, citing unnamed “industry insiders” and the “disproportionate” rates of major-label music. Whether accurate or not, the perception exists because the system operates opaquely.
The algorithm accelerates homogenization. Spotify’s Discover Weekly and Release Radar push listeners toward music similar to what they already like. Apple Music’s For You curates based on listening history. YouTube autoplays related content. These systems optimize for engagement—keeping users on platform, minimizing churn—which means recommending the familiar over the challenging.
These systems function like echo chambers. Someone who listens to contemporary pop receives more contemporary pop, algorithmically defined by similarity to existing listening patterns. The occasional outlier appears to maintain the illusion of discovery, but core recommendations reinforce existing taste profiles. Over time, listeners hear an increasingly narrow slice of available music, and that slice increasingly comprises songs produced using the same methods by the same people.
Streaming economics compound the problem. Artists need millions of streams to generate meaningful income. Labels and independent artists alike face pressure to optimize for streaming performance, which means fitting algorithmic preferences. Song structures adapt: intros shorten or disappear entirely because listeners skip tracks within seconds, verses condense, choruses arrive faster, runtime shrinks. The average hit song length decreased from 4-5 minutes in the 1970s to 3-3.5 minutes today.
Lyrics simplify. Studies examining “lyric intelligence”—complexity and quality of writing in Billboard chart-toppers—found steady decline over the past decade. Lyrics get shorter, more repetitive, easier to remember. The “Millennial Whoop”—a two-note melodic pattern that appeared across dozens of hits—became so ubiquitous it earned its own name. These patterns emerge not because artists lack creativity but because commercial imperatives demand instantly accessible, algorithmically friendly content.
TikTok as A&R Department
Labels no longer scout dive bars or local scenes. The TikTok algorithm became the new talent scout. In 2025, labels stalk stats, not stages. They don’t care if artists can sell out a show—they want to know if the last video hit three million views in 24 hours.
According to a 2024 Warner Music scout report, TikTok virality defined by over one million video uses outweighs raw follower counts in artist discovery. A&R teams now require minimum thresholds: 50,000 TikTok followers plus 10,000 Instagram with 5%+ engagement rates before considering demos. Artists averaging 12% monthly growth secure priority over stagnant large accounts.
A staggering 84% of songs that entered the Billboard Global 200 in 2024 went viral on TikTok first. Not after. First. That’s not a promotional channel anymore. That’s the entire game. TikTok’s “Add to Music App” feature has facilitated over three billion song saves to streaming services since launch, generating billions more streams.
Ice Spice had her “Munch” sound go viral before her team could even clear the track for Spotify. Within weeks she was signed, memed, and performing at major festivals. Benson Boone went from casual TikTok covers to topping charts in under a year. Labels stalk TikTok for their next big signing because the For You page is the new backstage pass.
Nobody wants to admit that not every artist wants to be a content creator. But now they’re being told they have to be. Make three TikToks a day, post behind-the-scenes content, engage with trends, fake the vibe if necessary. In a now-deleted 2022 TikTok, Halsey called out her label for refusing to release her song unless it went viral first: “I’m tired of pretending to have fun making TikToks just so my label will release my song.”
Doja Cat has joked—and not joked—about being a “TikTok machine.” FKA twigs and Florence Welch have shared struggles with pressure to “go viral” before being “respected.” Artists feel creatively trapped between making good music and making algorithm bait. There’s tension: create art, but also make it algorithm-ready. Fans are starting to see the difference between authenticity and algorithm-chasing.
Welcome to 2025, where the chorus gets more budget than the bridge, and albums wait in line behind algorithms. Albums are getting shorter. More EPs. More micro-projects. Why drop 12 songs if only one goes viral? The wildest part: one 15-second snippet with the right beat drop can do more for a career than a well-crafted LP ever could.
TikTok’s SoundOn distribution service now signs artists directly, functioning as both platform and label. UK artist LeoStayTrill worked with SoundOn on his viral hit “Pink Lemonade,” which hit number 56 on the Official UK Singles chart and amassed over 100 million global streams. Charlie Jeer signed with SoundOn in October 2024, and his single “Her Eyes” hit number one on Spotify’s Global Daily Viral chart.
Back in December 2020, two years before SoundOn existed, TikTok revealed that over 70 artists who broke on the platform that year had signed major label deals. The existence of SoundOn and the resources invested by the platform to drive artist success stories have drastically changed the dynamics between TikTok and the record labels to which it previously served as a talent funnel. Now TikTok competes directly with labels, signing artists, distributing music, and taking a cut of streaming revenue.
The Circle Is Complete
The narrative was that digital tools would liberate artists. Anyone could record, distribute, and connect with audiences without gatekeepers. That promise ended. The circle is complete.
Every “shortcut” service offered—Spotify playlisting, TikTok campaigns, Instagram promotion, YouTube optimization—isn’t a genuine path. These are new gatekeepers replacing old ones, extracting value while maintaining control. The fast-pacing killed artist development entirely. Labels want instant results. Platforms want viral moments. Neither can afford patience.
You can’t crack in unless picked by music powers to be used and discarded afterward. Independent success stories like Oliver Anthony are outliers that prove the rule. He turned down eight-million-dollar offers and said he didn’t want stadium shows or spotlights. Whether he maintains that position remains to be seen, but the initial impact came from being genuinely outside the system. Listeners responded to that outsider status with an intensity that surprised industry veterans.
The overwhelming majority of contemporary music emerges from the same industrial songwriting apparatus, shaped by the same commercial imperatives, optimized for the same algorithmic distribution systems. Everything sounds the same because the economics, technology, and power structures of contemporary music production favor sameness.
Mixing and mastering contribute to homogenization. The loudness wars compressed dynamic range to the point where everything hits the same decibel levels. LUFS (Loudness Units relative to Full Scale) standards and Spotify’s normalization attempt to address this, but the damage persists. Engineers master for algorithmic approval rather than sonic quality. Tracks need to sound good through laptop speakers, phone speakers, earbuds—fidelity takes a back seat to compatibility.
The session player economy collapsed. Nashville and LA studio musicians—the professionals who actually performed on records—got replaced by loops, samples, and digital instruments. The Wrecking Crew, the Funk Brothers, the Nashville A-Team—those were communities of working musicians who brought individual style to every session. Now one producer programs drums, bass, guitars, keys using the same software everyone else uses, pulling from the same sample libraries everyone else accesses.
Producer tags became branding. Metro Boomin’s “If young Metro don’t trust you…” identifies his productions instantly. Mike WiLL Made-It, Zaytoven, DJ Mustard—their tags function like logos. This shifts focus from artists to producers, reinforcing the industrial model where artists are interchangeable and producers are the brand. It’s not the artist’s sound anymore—it’s the producer’s sound, rented by whichever artist can afford the session.
Songwriting camps operate with ruthless efficiency. Labels or management companies gather writers, producers, and artists in one location—often a luxury house or studio complex—for a week or two. Teams form, break apart, reform. Songs emerge from rapid-fire collaborations, with the best material selected for release and the rest discarded or sold to other artists. Credits explode because everyone in the room technically contributed, even if their contribution was minimal.
These camps optimize for volume. The goal isn’t one perfect song—it’s ten decent songs that might become hits if marketed correctly. Quality control means “does this fit current trends” not “is this artistically compelling.” The machine moves fast, churning out material for artists who need constant content to feed streaming algorithms and social media.
The AI Flood and the End of the Revenue Pool
By the end of 2025, the situation accelerated beyond what even pessimists predicted. Deezer reported 50,000 AI-generated songs uploaded daily. Spotify’s intake hit 100,000 AI tracks per day. These aren’t estimates—these are platform-confirmed numbers representing the industrialization of content generation at a scale no human ecosystem can match.
The mathematics are straightforward. Streaming services operate on revenue pools divided among all streams. When AI tracks flood platforms, each additional upload dilutes the pool further. Every AI-generated stream—and there are billions—takes fractions of cents from human artists. The royalty share shrinks. Recognition becomes impossible when legitimate releases drown in algorithmic noise. Discovery mechanisms collapse under volume they weren’t designed to handle.
Labels and aggregators initially downplayed the threat. By late 2025, the conversation shifted. Universal Music Group, Sony, and Warner all filed lawsuits against AI music generators, alleging copyright infringement and seeking injunctions. But the flood continues regardless of legal action. The technology exists, the incentive exists (passive income from minimal effort), and the platforms struggle to distinguish AI from human creation at scale.
Revenue pools that once supported artists—however inadequately—now get carved into increasingly smaller fractions. Artists who might have earned $100 from a million streams a few years ago now earn $60, $40, $20 as the denominator explodes. The AI content serves no artistic purpose. It exists purely to extract value from systems designed for human creativity.
This is the endpoint of industrialization. What Max Martin’s assembly line started—the replacement of human artistry with systematized production—AI completed. The circle closes. Human artists can’t compete on volume. They can’t flood platforms with content at AI scale. The only path that remains is the one the industry systematically devalued: genuine human creation.
What Actually Helps
Genuinity helps. Even with imperfection. Especially with imperfection. There are still humans who want authentic human creation, who can tell the difference between something made by someone who cares and something generated to fill space.
A recording made by a riverbank with birds in the background helps. A session in a forest where the wind occasionally overwhelms the microphone helps. Mistakes that stay in the final mix because they’re honest help. Rough vocals that crack on the high notes help. All of this helps because it proves a human made it, for human reasons, accepting human limitations.
The industrial system—and its AI extension—can’t replicate this. AI can simulate imperfection, but the simulation is itself perfect. The industrial songwriting apparatus can incorporate “authentic” elements, but the incorporation is calculated. Genuine creation resists optimization. It contains elements that serve no commercial purpose, that don’t test well, that exist purely because the creator wanted them there.
A kid learning to play guitar creates more value than a Super Bowl halftime performance these years. Not commercially—the halftime show generates millions in advertising revenue and streams. But in terms of what music is supposed to be, what it’s supposed to do, the kid matters more. The kid is learning something real, developing an actual skill, potentially creating something that hasn’t existed before. The halftime show is choreographed spectacle, expensive and impressive, but fundamentally empty.
This isn’t romantic nostalgia. It’s practical reality. The industrial system and its AI offspring saturated every commercial channel. Fighting on those terms is futile. But the kid with the guitar, the artist recording by the riverbank, the band that plays because they want to rather than because algorithms demand content—these exist outside the system. They can’t be optimized away because they’re not optimizing for anything.
What’s Real
Oliver Anthony’s viral success demonstrated something the industry doesn’t want acknowledged: authenticity still resonates when it appears. His achievement was temporary—one song, one moment, one breakthrough—but it proved listeners can still distinguish real from manufactured when given the choice.
The “independent” lie persists. Artists claim independence while using major-owned distribution, major-controlled playlisting, major-affiliated promotion, and major-connected production. True independence exists, but it’s much rarer than industry marketing suggests. Most “indie” success stories involve industry infrastructure at multiple points.
Everything sounds the same because the industrial manufacture of popular music optimizes for sameness. The Swedish assembly line, the track-and-hook method, the writing camps, the algorithmic gatekeepers, the consolidated ownership, the AI flood—each layer adds homogenization. The system doesn’t need to conspire to make everything sound alike. The incentives simply point that direction, and everyone follows.
What Music Authentic and others have been saying for years is now undeniable. The shenanigans are real. The AI-music scare isn’t a distraction anymore—it’s the culmination. The structural problems that existed for decades finally reached their logical endpoint: complete industrialization of music creation and distribution, where human artists compete with infinite AI content for shrinking revenue pools.
The liberation narrative ended. Barriers to entry dropped, but barriers to discovery became insurmountable. You can release music, but you can’t make it heard. You can build an audience, but the platforms own that relationship. You can create something genuine, but it drowns in algorithmic noise designed to extract engagement rather than foster connection.
The circle is complete. You can’t crack in unless picked by music powers to be used and discarded afterward. The fast-pacing killed artist development. The streaming economy killed sustainable careers for all but the top fraction of a percent. The AI flood killed the remaining oxygen in the room.
What remains is this: genuine human creation for people who still want it. That’s not a path to industry success. It’s barely a path to survival. But it’s what’s real. The kid learning guitar, the artist recording imperfectly by the riverbank, the band that plays small venues because that’s where the music lives—these matter more than Super Bowl halftime shows and playlist placements and viral TikTok moments.
Not because they’re commercially viable. Because they’re human. In an industry that industrialized humanity out of the product, being human is the only meaningful resistance left.