This article has been reviewed according to Science X's editorial process and policies. Editors have highlighted the following attributes while ensuring the content's credibility: It's difficult to imagine a song like Queen's 1975 "Bohemian Rhapsody" topping the charts today. Almost six minutes long, it moves through several radically different musical sections and famously ignores the conventional structure of a pop song.
It seems almost designed to break the rules of what a hit single should be. Fifty years later, popular music seems to have moved in the opposite direction. Once artists and producers figure out what makes a commercial hit—from its length and structure to its rhythm, melody and how quickly it reaches a catchy hook—songs can be optimized to reproduce those traits.
This tendency is especially pronounced today because streaming platforms allow millions of songs to compete for our attention. This creates intense pressure to stick to formulas that are known to work rather than risk experimenting with something different. As a result, the musical landscape becomes filled with songs that sound alike.
This is an example of what my colleagues and I call hyperselection in a new paper published in the journal Frontiers in Psychology. This idea refers to what happens when competition becomes so intense, and we become so adept at identifying and optimizing what succeeds, that we repeatedly select for the same characteristics while alternatives are eliminated. Beyond music, hyperselection is making many parts of our world more efficient and optimized while simultaneously making them more predictable, mediocre and sterile.
In professional football, teams constantly search for tactics that give them an advantage. Once a strategy proves successful, other teams follow suit. The game becomes increasingly competitive and tactically sophisticated, but teams also become all the more similar in how they play while leaving less room for individual flair.
The same happens in academia. Scientists are rewarded for publishing papers, receiving citations and attracting research funding. These are reasonable indicators of scientific performance.
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