Throughout the history of recorded music, formats have helped shape what we hear. Our ideas about how long a single should be date back to what could fit on a 45 RPM 7" vinyl record. AM radio meant mono recordings, rather than stereo, and producer Phil Spector’s Wall of Sound—with its cavernous echo and massed instruments—was built for it, offering plenty of depth through a single speaker. Video killed the radio star. Ringtones birthed the quick-hit digital chirps of snap music. The requirements for American Top 40 FM radio, in particular, grew so byzantine by the early 2010s, when blaring, mathematically precise hits reigned supreme, that an industrial-strength supply chain of super-producers and songwriters emerged to fulfill them.
And now, streaming’s promise for listeners is also a gauntlet thrown down for creators. With tens of millions of songs just a few taps away, artists must compete or be skipped. The unprecedented wealth of data that streaming services use to curate their increasingly influential playlists gives the industry real-time feedback on what’s working, but this instant data-fication in turn risks feeding back on itself. While streaming has undoubtedly coincided with a shift in the pop charts away from the caffeinated bravado of several years ago, streaming-era hits appear to be as rigidly defined and formulaic as ever—if not more so.