Tedium - The Death of the Key Change 🎹

Today in Tedium: A few years ago, I decided that I was going to listen to every number one song in the history of the Billboard Hot 100. That’s 1143 songs released between 1958 and 2022. I decided I would listen to one song per day. Why would I spend years of my life doing this? Mostly because I’m a musician. I wanted to further educate myself on the past to improve my songwriting. But I have a strange perspective. I work on data analytics and personalization at Audiomack, a popular music streaming service. So while part of my musical education was driven by old-fashioned listening, another part of it was driven by a giant data set that I built about those 1,000+ songs. After crunching some numbers, one of the most shocking things I learned is that the groups of notes we choose to make number one hits with have changed dramatically over the last 60 years. In today’s Tedium, I break down the pop chart’s underlying key change. — Chris @ Tedium

(Caught In Joy/Unsplash)

The two factors that changed the key of pop music forever

So what is going on? Both of the shifts can be tied back to two things: the rise of hip-hop and the growing popularity of digital music production, or recording on computers. First, let’s talk about hip-hop.

Though hip-hop grew in popularity throughout the 1980s, it didn’t become the cultural zeitgeist until the 1990s. Hip-hop stands in stark contrast to nearly all genres that came before because it puts more emphasis on rhythm and lyricism over melody and harmony. For example, while you might be able to tap out the percussion or recite some lyrics from “Juicy” by Biggie Smalls, you would likely not be able to hum the melody. That’s because the song doesn’t have a melody in the same way that something like “Over the Rainbow” by Judy Garland does.

Thus, if you changed the key of “Juicy,” Biggie wouldn’t necessarily have to change how he raps, but if you changed the key of “Over the Rainbow,” Judy Garland would have to sing different pitches. If you picked the wrong key, those pitches might be outside of her vocal range. In short, key doesn’t matter as much in hip-hop.

As hip-hop grew in popularity, the use of computers in recording also exploded too. Whereas the guitar and piano lend themselves to certain keys, the computer is key-agnostic. If I record a song in the key of C major into digital recording software, like Logic or ProTools, and then decide I don’t like that key, I don’t have to play it again in that new key. I can just use my software to shift it into that different key. I’m no longer constrained by my instrument.

Furthermore, digital recording software lends itself to a new style of songwriting that isn’t as inviting to key changes within a recording. Before we get a sense of how recording works today, let’s generalize how it was done for decades.

Imagine that I’m Sting and I sit down to write a song in the early ’80s for my group The Police. While composing, it’s likely that I’ll work linearly. What this means is I’ll write section-by-section. First, I’ll write a verse, then a chorus, then another verse, and so on. One way to create intrigue as I get to a new section is to change something. Maybe the lyrics. Maybe the melody. Or maybe the key.

On “Every Breath You Take,” Sting does the third. Most of the song is built around a laid back groove in Ab major, but then on the bridge, the energy kicks up as the song shifts to the key of B major. Because songwriters in the pre-digital age were writing linearly, shifting the key in a new section was a natural compositional technique.

But in the computer age, this linear style doesn’t make as much sense. Let’s look at a song I recorded recently in Logic Pro to understand why.

There’s a ton going on here, but I want to focus on a few things. Let’s start with the second pane from the left, the one that you see “Guitar—Arpeggio” at the top of. This pane displays each track you are recording. So when I needed to record a bass, I created a new track, labeled it “Bass”, and was able to record my bass directly into the program. In this image, I have the bass track selected. Direct your eyes to the section just to the right of the bass track.

You can see a visual representation of what I’ve recorded. But something interesting is going on here. I only recorded two bars of the bass. I then copy-and-pasted those same two bars throughout the entire song. I was able to do this because I built this song around a bunch of short loops. After that, I went back and wrote the melody and lyrics over the recorded track. This process illustrates how digital recording software generally encourages a vertical rather than linear songwriting approach. Joe Bennett, a professor at the Berklee College of Music, explains this in a chapter of The Oxford Handbook of the Creative Process in Music:

The orchestral-score style vertical layout of most [digital recording software] … may encourage loopbased writing, because the default setting of the software is to display only a few bars horizontally on screen, with several vertically stacked tracks. This layout, I suggest, makes the songwriter more likely to work on vertical production elements and instrumental layering, and to pay less attention to linear elements.

Together, these factors not only explain why songwriting has changed so dramatically in the last 30 years but also why, despite its timeless message, Jackson’s inspiring gospel song is a vestige of a bygone era.