The Slop Machine is Taking Down the Pop Machine

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The last time I listened to a really good pop album released by a woman, it was Lady Gaga’s Mayhem, released in March 2025. Gaga’s sixth studio album continues her exploration of fame, love, and self-transformation through an eclectic mixture of disco, electro, pop, and rock. Mayhem touches on many of the themes and genres that made Gaga the pop star she is, but with maturity, playfulness, and innovative sounds. Since then, I’ve been stumped when trying to listen to pop music because much of it feels very fake and very alienated from my own life. I don’t hate pop music, and I have historically recognized the importance of it as a mass-produced art, especially for marginalized communities. Making pop music or music that is popular doesn’t mean it’s inherently meaningless.  

But it’s becoming more and more difficult to find pop music that says something of substance about anything. Most industries are now being inundated by slop—AI and otherwise—and the music industry is no different. Gaga herself released “RUNWAY,” a song for The Devil Wears Prada 2 (2026) in collaboration with Doechii, that sounded suspiciously AI-like. But even before slop became ubiquitous on and offline, music critics and scholars warned of tech’s effects on the music industry.

In a 2025 piece for Isis Magazine, writer Jack Stone uses economist Yanis Varoufakis’s concept of  “technofeudalism, a new stage of capitalism in which the digital economy (Spotify, Apple, Amazon) satisfies consumers’ demands at the increasing exploitation of workers,” to explain the decline of the music industry. “On average, an artist needs around one million monthly listeners on Spotify to receive the equivalent of a typical hourly wage,” writes Stone. “While consumers benefit from endless choice, musicians, with the exception of an elite few, are practically reduced to serfdom.”

This is the reason, Stone argues, that music is largely homogenized and sounds more or less the same. Now, if you’re a big artist with an established following, there’s no incentive to release a good album or experiment with your sound—you can keep making money while deploying the same exact formula. “The combination of the death of the album and the decline in competition and dynamism in the music industry has not only homogenized mainstream music to an unprecedented degree; it has also engendered the pursuit of utterly meaningless plastic pop,” Stone writes.

Specifically, Stone bemoans the centering of the self in music, and how that produces particularly meaningless music without a larger message. This facet is particularly important, considering the force of fandom culture and how cults of personality dominate the music industry. Many pop stars today no longer make music to compete with other artists or to captivate a growing audience—they release formulaic songs that will resonate with their existing sycophantic audience.

Pop music might be dead and capitalism might have killed it, as Stone speculates, but I think a more accurate description is that pop music has been zombified. The intersection of technology and music has facilitated a complete takeover of pop music, where the motivation is solely profit rather than art-making.

Songs are formulaic because they’re created according to data about what already works. Music videos are opaque, delivering cunty yet empty choreography and fashion that is often accompanied by product placement. Is it really necessary to have a KATSEYE member play with slime while hitting every beat? Today’s pop music is all about selling products, not booty shaking—and much of what reaches our ears is chosen for us much more forcedly now than before the advent of social media and streaming.

Defending your favorite millionaire’s honor online as if you’ve been personally offended is weird, anti-social behavior.