According to the main chart, songs in the top 10 are more likely to be repetitive, and that discrepancy has been growing. That raises the question, is there a causal link between being repetitive and reaching the top 10? If so, the answer to "Who's responsible for this madness?" is: the listeners.
I think this is partly true. However, there is a significant phenomenon where there is financial/political pressure to play songs (pay to play) which then creates demand for songs since they are then familiar to listeners. So companies/firms can pay stations to play otherwise unremarkable music (perhaps simple songs or those with the highest profit margins/potential available to stakeholders) and in a general sense this influences listeners to want to keep hearing those now familiar tunes. The whole pop-ephemerality of music-as-a-commodity feels like the new opiate of the masses - in general people are more content as long as they have a meaningless tune as the background soundtrack for their day-to-day repetitive tasks.
I wonder what the correlation is between acceptance of repetitive music and the repetitiveness of a listener's daily tasks.
Well of course it's the listeners. The most popular product in any market is virtually guaranteed to be a lowest common denominator because that's what will have the broadest appeal.
