Music today is more seen than heared; the emotional part of a song clip is essential, in terms of mass efficiency. Emotions are being sold (and produced), some musical harmony is still required, the complexity level of the text can be very low, but must be catchy. The whole thing revolves around creating sound emotions in a human world that is getting colder ! You just plug into your emotions, and do not have to notice what is happening around you. The alienation from men to men and nature has still not reached its culmination; I am awaiting an exponential decay in cultural creativity, concerning the (higher) laws of harmony.

I do not mean that only songs with primitive sounds and text are popular today, but many of them are like this. And many songs with good music and philosophical texts with some wisdom remain not popular.

Just look at this very popular hit - Despacito: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kJQP7kiw5Fk&feature=share . It has 5 billion (!) clicks. Compare it with any song that you liked in the past. What features in this clip are influencing positively people and attract them? Here neither music nor text is primitive, but still not too complex.

To what extent pictures in a clip may mean more than text and music? Which component has the highest psychological influence on people and why?

Music today is more seen than heared; the emotional part of a song clip is essential, in terms of mass efficiency. Emotions are being sold (and produced), some musical harmony is still required, the complexity level of the text can be very low, but must be catchy. The whole thing revolves around creating sound emotions in a human world that is getting colder ! You just plug into your emotions, and do not have to notice what is happening around you. The alienation from men to men and nature has still not reached its culmination; I am awaiting an exponential decay in cultural creativity, concerning the (higher) laws of harmony.

I see the text should contains a colloquial sentence.

The clip sould contains a new unusual motion.

Following

Yes, music, text and images should have some minimal quality and some innovations. But many clips on youtube have this. Still, some clips have only thousands of views, others- millions, and this one above - 5 billion.

Stephen stated correctly that it is influence on our emotions, not on brain. But it is interesting to decompose the components of popularity secret. Advertising also plays its role. Initial advertising is necessary. Without it even Despacito would not reach a million of clicks. But then only the strongest clips survive this competition.

good poetry, soft voice and music

Ahmad, this is not enough. Even for the same song one clip has much more views than the other. Images make a lot. Other clips with this song have only millions of views.

For "Despacito", they show poor country and not a beautiful beach. Then it became closer to poor people, and there is majority of them in the world. Clear orientation on Latin culture, and about a billion of people share it. Nice girl is important. And slow move to love, perhaps with knowledge of female psychology. I tried to put it rationally in words, but people listen by emotions, and often do not realize why they like this and dislike the other.

Dear Yuri Yegorov,

when I watch such videos as your, I with shudder think about a sharp fall of the intellect in the brains of people. Sometimes it seems to me that we live in an age when most people like to be morons. Why do I say that? Because I am well acquainted with classical music and myself often perform many famous compositions of brilliant composers such as Chopin, Beethoven and others. I have something to compare with, so I'm shuddering watching today's day in all aspects and I believe that human consciousness is largely formed by such videos.

Dear Gennady, I understand your concern about mental skills of people who do not understand classical music. But it is like in science. There are much less readers of an average scientific book comparing to fiction. Similarly, public vote is higher to pop music comparing to classic.

I haven't had a real chance to look at this yet. I will try tonight.

For one, I do not look down on pop music as many examples are rich and involving-you can't judge only by the worst.

Now I want to make some analysis of video information in clips. It is very difficult to put image in words, but I will try. Let us consider "Despacito" clip with 5 billion views. The image sequence can be (approximately) coded as: Agriculture - Catholic virgin - Sexy girl - Sea coast - Poor village - Community - Dance - Love. Let us keep first 2 letters of word and put number like intensity. We will get something like chemical formula, or receipt of cooking. Will be something like: Ag-Ca-Gi2-Se-Po-Co-Da3-Lo2. It is like a formula of chemically active substance than opens subconscious and makes masses to like some image sequence. Clearly, there are many options for images and artistic quality of images matters a lot.

What do we see? Willingness to see traditional values and simple life. In other clips (and movies) we can see such sequences: Money-Sin-Crime-Punishment (classical criminal movie). But very often: Murder-Fire-Catastrophe or Robot-Fight-Bad end. The last sequences are very frequent in modern Holywood movies. 5 billion likes show that many people are tired of that and prefer traditional values and good movies (like they were 40-50 years ago).

Dear Yuri Yegorov,

I did not mean at all that the intellect of a person and his spiritual values ​​directly depends on the degree of understanding of classical music. For example, the fascist Obergruppenfuhrer SS Reinhard Heydrich played the violin very well, but this did not prevent him from adopting the so-called "Final Solution" in the destruction of millions of Jews in gas chambers. I just wanted to emphasize that if someone advertises a video like yours, another video with a demonstration of masterpieces of classical music should be shown and let the people choose which of them to listen to. Nevertheless, now we see only a demonstration such as yours and The vast majority of people do not even know that there are classical masterpieces and therefore do not know what to compare with. That's what I wanted to say.

Dear Gennady, I am not promoting Despacito. I want to understand the secret of its popularity. I will give links to two songs in Russian. The first one -Voyage by Leningrad group - got 39 million of clicks in 6 months; see https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sl_pxCAcJz4&list=RDsl_pxCAcJz4 . The 2nd is a song of bard Zoya Jashchenko "Between This World and That", published 7 years ago and having only 11,000 views; see https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8ML6i7c_t2w . What do you like more? Voyage is done in Holywood style, with fire, shots, girls and throwing money. Zoya's song is highly philosophical in words, and set of images (pieces from movies complement it) is good - but not many views. By the way, at minute 3 there is an image of playing violin.

For those who cannot understand Russian, just value image sequence and maybe music.

P.S. Gennady, I am not aware about clip art on classical music. It may go in some movie, be part of it.

Dear Yuri,

In my own take, complexity is inversely proportional to popularity when talking about music, i.e. pop music. Most of pop songs are easy, flat, straightforwardly, even rough, both musically and in the lyrics.

Here, in Latin America we talk of Depacito as the assassin of music! Let's not focus on that, please.

There are, of course popular music with a certain degree of complexity, indeed. However, the great channels of distribution do not foster that popular music. It remains as sort of cult.

Dear Yuri Yegorov,

I looked completely at your "Voyage" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sl_pxCAcJz4&list=RDsl_pxCAcJz4 and partly "Between This World and That" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8ML6i7c_t2w . Well, to say: absolute debilizm in the first video and complete idiocy in the second clip. The first clip was created in Leningrad - it's in the city, which has always been the standard of spiritual life in Russia. This is a city where you could identify a local resident in a literary Russian conversation unlike Moscow and not to mention other regions of Russia. I forced myself to watch this video to the end with great effort and with horror thought that people really like being morons if they look at that kind of shit. And you know, it seems to me that it's very good that many people do not understand Russian, because there are a lot of obscene words in this video, not to mention debauchery and other abominations. However, what can be countered by this mud? As an example, "Famous Russian Waltzes" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9pYRx9Cwesc in the brilliant performance of the State Brass Band of Russia (about 59000 views). In general, I believe that computer music is very harmful to the human brain and should be strictly forbidden or at least severely restricted. To listen it is necessary only live music and it is desirable in professional and good execution. And the fact that mostly only shitty music is advertised, accompanied by scenes of violence - this is done absolutely consciously with the goal of turning a person into an animal. What for? This is geopolitics in the era of globalization in full conformity with the Doctrine of Allen Dulles.

Dear @Carlos and @Gennady, I understand your sentiments. I agree with Gennady that walses are good - but why only 59 thousand views? You are not obliged to like what the majority of Latins or Russian like (Voyage is on the first places in the list of popular Russian rock, while Despacito seems to be not only Latin, but also global #1 in views). But your attitude is emotional and not scientific. You cannot help people to change preferences for better before you understand the origin of their present preferences. And it is not as simple as "mass media turning people into animals". In fact, some clips (like Despacito) can be a network protest against Holywood style of preferences being imposed on us (more horror and blood).

What scientific goal do I have here? To understand the mechanisms of individual "like" and influence of network on that. We have 3 highly different number of views among my examples: 5 billion, 39 million and 11 thousands. Somebody does not like any. But many people do. Even if all 3 are equally bad for you (maybe you find yourself 3 good examples that are good for you, with similar order of downloads), why do they have so different number of downloads?

Is there a direct link between quality (as perceived by an average network user) and number of views? What key elements work as stimulators of "like"? What elements touch what strings in our conscious and subconscious? What are the differences across cultures and social groups in the same culture? These are scientific questions - at least in psychology, but perhaps also in art, marketing, network theory and social science. It is more important to understand how the present society lives and likes, rather than to blame it for going into a wrong direction.

Beauty is in the ears of the beholder, but expresses spatiotemporal variation? What is attractive in one country/culture is not attractive in another country/culture otherwise music would not express spatiotemporal variation? There is also the brain organization that has to adjust to new music. For instance, when I hear a song for the first time, I often don't truly like it, but like it when I hear it >10 times, perhaps because the brain requires time to reorganize neural networks also connected with 'pleasure' centers in the brain? And what about habituation or overexposure to the same song during a relatively short period of time?

PS: To get in a kind of mental trance you repeat the simple drum rhythms over and over and over again.....

Beautiful. Thank you, Cecilia, Marcel and Luciano, for your answers. They make development of the initial discussion into more directions.

I have similar idea to Marcel's about better attitude to a song after listening it for several times. But I would listen for the 2nd time only a song that I liked a bit in the first. Sometimes a year after I recognize that the best for me is not the 1st song from album, but let say 3rd, which I have ignored after initial listening and returned long after. Perhaps it missed some key elements to influence my subconscious, and i started to value it only after rational thinking about words.

Dear Secilia, I am sorry to hear that popular songs also have an attitude to women that many women dislike. But may it be culture specific? Did you ask Latin women if they also dislike Despacito? I know that many Russian women also like "machist" approach and like to see clips of Leningrad group, but there are also many (typically more intelligent) that dislike this. But You are right that many popular clips are more for satisfaction of male's instincts.

Luciano reflects on complexity issue in music, perhaps from a professional perspective. Indeed, not any random combination of sounds with a higher complexity will sound better for us. There is something in harmony that cannot be verified by mathematics. But in the past classical composers had a higher standard for a minimal complexity (selecting pieces that sound well) comparing to what is done in most of pop music today.

following.

If I remember well, female birds are more sensitive (than male birds) to sublte details in bird song variations (than male birds). Could this be extended to humans accepting that women perceive music differently than men?

Just to elaborate on Marcel's idea about sensitivity. Rhythm was coming to music from African culture, and perhaps both males and females in this culture were initially sensitive to it. Then it came to American culture about a century ago, and now is also important in Latin culture. I think that a century ago European culture was more interested to listen to a melody and not to rhythm. Revolution was done by disco music in 1980s (Boney M, et al). Perhaps still European females are more sensitive to a melody comparing to rhythm.

There are few factors like rhythmic, smooth-toned, and not-an-ass voice to help a song go famous and popular.

But still, I'm sure You'll love any song with any kinda meaningless lyrics, bullshit music on repeated listening., unless you have Disgust and Hatred like towards Bieber.

When I was asking this question, I was far from an idea that it may open Pandora box. In fact, now I am almost sure that the major influence of songs and clips is on our subconscious, not on our rational conscious mind. When I was a student, I once visited a friend whose parents have been professors of music (clearly, classical). And I saw a big volume on the table named "Subconscious". So it is related to the theory of all music.

Then, if we feel and value a song primarily by emotions and not by mind, can we put this rationally in words? Some people (minority) can do. But other do not want to discuss something that they dislike, and not always can tell why they like.

Who knows something about subconscious? By definition, it is some part of activity in our brain (or maybe between it and some universal field) that we cannot rationalize. But some people made successful attempts to penetrate that field. For example, Sigmund Freud; see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sigmund_Freud . He discovered many hidden psychopathologies, most of which are linked with libido. Still, some psychotherapists make private consultancies of this type.

But imagine S.Freud today, asking a question on RG and provoking a discussion among many of his patients... And that all is read by the whole network. I think that he might be expelled. People do not like to disclose their private secrets. And often they prefer not to know what sins are inside their subconscious. They just put likes to some network elements that bring some joy via activation of their subconscious. So it is good that we still have moved to some points in our discussion.