Forgetting ‘Penny Lane’: why are there no key changes in music anymore?
Since the days when The Beatles were in their pomp and transforming popular music and culture with their kaleidoscopic array of endeavours, music has continued to evolve. One of its inherent beauties is that its parameters continue to shift, blending innovation with tradition.
In their lifetime, every music lover will witness many zeitgeists coming to the fore and dissipating, only to be overtaken by another and later revived by a fresher shape that cherrypicks from it in creating its aesthetic and essence. While The Beatles and Bob Dylan remain among a handful of artists who have practically always enjoyed the same level of consistent influence, many others have burst onto the scene, made a splash and then been nudged out of the picture by other artists with fresher ideas. It’s brutal, but it’s reality.
Psychedelic rock, prog, punk, post-punk, glam metal, grunge and other sonic conditions have all enjoyed their time in the limelight before the world moves on, and all have enjoyed revivals or reappraisals that have seen them be explored once more, years after they first captured the imagination of the masses. For instance, one day, a form might seem dated, and then 20 years later, through our naturally shifting perspectives and a heavy hit of nostalgia, people can find that their opinions change; look at how nu-metal has come back.
For many reasons—including Woodstock 1999—in the mid-2000s, almost everyone was glad it retreated into the abyss. Yet, in our complicated and bleak contemporary era, it has found a home again and resonance among a fanbase that was mostly not even born to witness it play out in the first place.
Music is constantly changing. Just a few years ago, the umpteenth post-punk revival was something to aspire to for many bands, and now musicians and fans generally can’t think of much worse, save for a few genuinely authentic and brilliant artists. It has now been overtaken by hyperpop and other genres that pull from across the spectrum of music to make a daring and glitchy sonic representation of the society we live in, where barriers are transgressed in a collapsing world.
As music is always hurtling forward at breakneck speed, many standards have been knocked off their perch. Arguably, the most significant fall from grace has been that experience by the key change. Remember it? Whether it be The Beatles in ‘Penny Lane’, Bon Jovi in ‘Livin’ on a Prayer’, Nirvana in ‘About a Girl’ or even Westlife in the climax of ‘World of Our Own’, so many artists used them for decades. They were, in every sense, the oldest trick in the book and had audiences hook, line and sinker, no matter how many times they’d heard them in their several compositional variations.
According to an insightful 2022 report by Audiomack analyst Chris Dalla Riva in Tedium, the entire history of the Billboard Hot 100 between 1958 and that year contained 1143 number-one songs. The report charts a dramatic drop in chart-topping hits using key changes in those 60 years. He found that a quarter of the songs from the 1960s to the 1990s included a key change, but from around 2005, their use took a stark nosedive. Remarkably, from 2010 to 2020, only one number one contained a key change, Travis Scott’s first topper of the Billboard Hot 100, 2018’s ‘SICKO MODE’, featuring Drake.
A chart he included shows that around the mid-1960s, key changes exploded and were employed heavily. They then dropped off a touch in the 1970s, perhaps due to disco, as YouTuber Rick Beato suggests in his reaction to the report, before growing exponentially in the 1980s and 1990s, where it had another golden period until before tailing off immensely.
So, why are there no key changes anymore?
According to Dalla Riva, hip-hop’s approach became a cultural norm, and the rise of digital music production changed the traditional ways of writing music. One reason is that after hip-hop became hugely successful in the 1990s thanks to the likes of N.W.A. and The Notorious B.I.G., rhythm and lyricism became the two things people aspired to perfect, not melody and harmony, as they had done for years. For instance, even if the key of ‘Shook Ones, Part II’ by Mobb Deep changed, the rap flow probably wouldn’t have to be modified. However, if you did that with a pop song like ‘Penny Lane’, the entire number goes out of whack for the performers.
The ubiquity of computers and DAWs such as Logic and Ableton in music creation has also changed the approach to composition. Traditionally, songwriters would write in a linear fashion, in a key suiting their voice and the mood, going through each part, verse, chorus, and bridge one by one, but now that rigid structure is not the hegemon. Artists and producers can write in blocks, bars, and sections in whatever order they see fit, leading to a much more open process and songs taking on various forms that do not need a key change.
Furthermore, as attitudes changed, particularly after some of the truly awful number ones of the 1990s, people had had enough of them, as they’d become a cheap, overworn gimmick. Despite that, it’ll probably make a comeback soon.
