(The success of Bad Bunny - the most-streamed artist of 2020 - is a testament to not only pop music’s changing forms but also its widening cultural borders.) Instead, the chorus of “Bad Guy” offers the listener a low-key, half-whispered, stream-of-consciousness rhyme scheme (“Just can’t get enough guy / Chest always so puffed guy /I’m that bad type / Make your mama sad type”) over muffled drums and bass. It displays few of the values we typically associate with pop: the peaking decibel levels, the soaring melodies, the recurring phrases that are easy to sing along with, all wrapped into a steadily repeating climax that neatly tucks itself in between verses. Take Billie Eilish’s “ Bad Guy,” one of the biggest hits of 2019. The form of pop as we know it seems to be changing before our ears.

Listen to the Top 40 charts of the last decade and a surprising trend emerges. Beyond radio play, songs are five-second memes, 12-second TikTok soundtracks, 30-second ads and two-and-a-half-minute club anthems.

A mix of generational churn, creativity spawned by the digitization of music production and the dilution of the industry’s top-down structure - paired with the fragmentation of the media and adaptations to the streaming economy - has warped song structures. By the end of the 1980s, that figure had doubled to 84 percent.īut things quickly began to shift in the 2010s. The music theorist Jay Summach has found that by the end of the 1960s, 42 percent of hit songs used verse-chorus form. Listeners loved this new form so much that it was soon the industry default.

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