We're all vaguely aware that the "identifiable decade" era of popular music is over and nothing ever changes now. And we're also aware that kids eventually get too old to notice evolving styles in music and think musical progress ended at about the time of their own graduation. Enter science.
Studying "the coherent harmonics and timbral themes," found in U.S. chart hits, three major revolutions in music are discerned over the last half-century, according to research published in Royal Society Open Science.
As the chart shows, there were three periods of rapid change. The first is from 1963 to 1964—the period of the British Invasion. Though this appears to be the smallest, that is probably an illusion caused by there being few previous quarters to compare it with. The second is in the early 1980s. The third is around 1991. These revolutions do all correspond with times musical critics would have said change was happening (classic rock, new wave, and hip-hop respectively), but this analysis suggests other apparent novelties, such as the punk of the 1970s, were not the revolutions that their fans might like to believe.
Or, rather, that the methodology is optimized for something other than the dimensions that differentiate punk and prog.
tl;dr: the British are usually somehow responsible, and nothing's happened in music since the 1990s.
