Is music getting worse? Rick Beato is a musician, producer and critic with more than five million YouTube subscribers. His answer would be: yes, pretty much. In a recent video, he compares the 2026 Grammy Song of the Year nominees to those of 1984. There are a few bright sparks among the slate of new songs, but Beato regards most of them as derivative, unoriginal and unlikely to be remembered past the end of the awards show. In contrast, 42 years on, all the 1984 nominees – Michael Jackson’s “Beat It,” The Police’s “Every Breath You Take” and Lionel Richie’s “All Night Long” among them – are firmly embedded in the popular music canon.
One could ask the same question about science: has it gotten worse? My answer, I have to say, reflects Beato’s for music. As in popular music, bright sparks do still show up in the stream of science. But, as with popular music, nearly all of what passes for “science” these days is dull, derivative, repetitive and forgettable, unlikely to make an impression past the deadline for the next grant application.
Beato has a compelling explanation as to why popular music seems to be getting worse. His thesis is simple: the culture and economics of the music industry have cheapened creativity and incentivized mediocrity. New technologies are accelerating this decline.
Could something similar be behind the cheapening of science? “No” would be the reflexive answer of most in the industry – and probably laymen, too. But both music and science are, at root, creative arts: Einstein liked to imagine what it would be like to ride a photon; August Kekulé dreamt that the structure of benzene was like an ouroboros, a snake swallowing its own tail; Francis Crick and James Watson imaginatively turned the DNA double helix outside in to arrive at a structure no one else thought possible. Science advances more through these flights of creative fancy than through all the millions of scientific papers academics publish each year. As in the field of music, creativity in science has been debased like a tin nickel. Mediocrity is incentivized.
How did this happen? In popular music, according to Beato, the proliferation of songwriters has been a major factor in the decline. He notes that all the Grammy-nominated songs in 1984, save one, were composed by a single songwriter – the exception was authored by two. And in nearly every case the songwriter was also the performer. This year, several of the nominated tracks were written by teams of songwriters. Rosé and Bruno Mars’s “APT,” has nine songwriters; Kendrick Lamar and SZA’s “Luther,” has ten.
A similar trend has taken over science. The single-author paper, once the norm, has been all but completely replaced by the multi-author paper. It’s not uncommon now to see bylines listing dozens or even more than a hundred contributors. At the upper extreme, a 2016 article on the Higgs boson particle boasted 5,154 authors.
This mad proliferation of authors and songwriters is usually justified with the trope that “diversity is our strength.” Bring more minds into a team of researchers and musicians, and fruitful cross-fertilization will inevitably ensue – that’s the logic.
That does happen, sometimes. But the opposite is the norm. What occurs most frequently is that teams foster crowd-following and conformity. The most forgettable of the 2026 Song of the Year nominees are also the ones with the most writers, whereas the most memorable, “Wildflower,” has only two, Billie Eilish and her brother Finneas O’Connell. In science, many of the most memorable publications have only one or two authors. The microbiologist Carl Woese, for example, has fundamentally reshaped our conceptions of the origin and kingdoms of life. He typically published alone or with one co-author. Big committees of writers and researchers seem to smother the spark of genius.
Then there’s the problem of new technologies. Music today is mostly a digital medium, and the digital tools for its production are astonishingly sophisticated – and growing more so with every year. This is good news, because it’s put new creative palettes and canvasses of sound into the hands of musicians. That means really brilliant musicians can create totally novel music (assuming they aren’t being suffocated by a team of cowriters).
But there’s also bad news: one doesn’t need much in the way of musical talent anymore to churn out music that sounds pretty good. Digital instruments, clips, samples and loops populate the digital world in the millions, and they are inexpensive to obtain. If you want a percussion track, for example, you don’t need to bring in a drummer who may have spent years mastering his instrument. You don’t need to book expensive studio time, where you might work with a wise producer. And you certainly don’t need to invest the time working out a complex beat yourself. You just drop a few downloaded loops into a track, mix in a sample here and there to liven things up and, within hours, you have a track that sounds pretty good. Not incredible, but pretty good.
This technological revolution in production has been accompanied by a technological revolution in distribution. Nearly all music is now streamed digitally to consumers through platforms such as Spotify and Apple Music. The volume is astonishing: nearly five trillion songs were streamed in 2024 alone, and that number grows by about 15 percent annually. This appetite is supplied by a prodigious production of new music: an average of nearly 99,000 new songs were uploaded every day of 2024. Of these, 80 percent have never been never played. Talk about forgettable!
This pattern of technology-enabled overproduction plagues science too. In 2022, the number of peer-reviewed publications worldwide reached 3.3 million. In years past – say, 1984 – this number was typically less than a million. As with music streams, this number is increasing exponentially. Like all those never-heard songs crowding streaming platforms, an enormous proportion of that torrent of articles – as much as 80 percent – are never cited and presumably never read.
The underlying theme here is this: both popular music and science incentivize content creation over artistic creation. Artistic creation is the realm of imagination and genius; it requires talent and hard work, both rare commodities. By contrast, content creation is easy: you fire up your digital-audio workstation, click around, play with some widgets and a predetermined chunk of mediocrity comes out. Then you click a few buttons on Spotify and the song is displayed, with no distinction, alongside the work of genuinely talented musicians, who have honed their skills and suffered for their work. There’s no way for the average listener to separate the wheat from the chaff here.
Sharp scientists are likewise increasingly drowned out by their lessers’ content creation. The success or failure of a scientific career is now dominated by metrics of content production: how many papers are published, how many citations gleaned, how many grant dollars won. These numerical metrics can be easily inflated by pumping out mediocre papers. Never mind that scientific advancement is accomplished through a much more methodical, slow – and creative – approach. When a researcher puts himself up for promotion and tenure, these are the metrics that drive the decision. Rare is the tenure committee that actually reads and engages with a candidate’s publications.
So, where are all the musical and scientific geniuses, with their idiosyncrasies and innovations? The answer is obvious: they’re being drowned in a rising tide of mediocre dreck.
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