Please don't attribute that quote to me. I clearly marked it as someone else's quote (J. Bryan Lowder) that came from a European study of musical progress over a the period of 1955 to 2010. Instead of cherrypicking, it examined 464,411 songs. The study is nicknamed "The Million Song Dataset."

They found that songs have become both louder and more homogenized. The study found, among other things that "the diversity of transitions between note combinations - roughly speaking chords plus melodies - has consistently diminished in the last 50 years."

And it has gotten louder due to over compression, a trick by recording engineers because the louder it is, the newer it sounds. I have CDs that are so over compressed, you have to remember to turn down the speakers or they'll blow you right out of your chair despite the fact that every other CD was of normal volume at that setting. This has become a real problem in the age of digitizing music.

Lowder, editorial assistant for culture at Slate magazine, was simply commenting on the study with his own example or he pulled the example from the study for his own use. That you can find an example that goes against their findings is not surprising since they weren't saying it's true in every single case. They're saying it's a trend and that it is pretty much undeniable when you examine it closely enough and I fully agree. The old farts win. You can google the study on your own.

If you don't like their findings, please take it up with them. Thanks.