Last week, I was driving home, flipping through radio stations, and I had one of those moments where I genuinely wondered if I was losing my mind. Every channel sounded exactly the same: Katy Perry, then Lady Gaga, then suddenly Justin Bieber, and then Lady Gaga again. Three different artists, but the chord progression, the production style, the vocal inflection it was all one track. Like they’re living in the same sonic neighborhood. Why? Because pop music is doing exactly what it’s supposed to do. Scientists call it the mere exposure effect, and it can make a song feel like déjà vu without anyone noticing.
Pop artists like Madonna and Lady Gaga make this pattern even clearer. When you listen to their songs side by side, the similarities in production, melody, and vocal styling are impossible to miss, not because one is copying the other, but because pop music builds on familiar sonic blueprints. Critics love to argue about imitation, but John Fiske would say the real power lies in how audiences interpret these echoes. We use these recurring sounds as resources to make meaning, connect eras, and locate ourselves in pop culture’s ongoing remix. Instead of treating a song as an original, untouchable artifact, listeners reshape it through memory, comparison, and cultural context. Which raises the bigger question: what meanings are we creating when we hear Madonna and Lady Gaga sounding so alike, and what does that reveal about how we understand pop music’s constant recycling.
Adorno would probably say, “Exactly.” In On Popular Music, he argues that pop songs are standardized predictable structures with tiny variations. When you listen to Vanilla Ice next to Queen, or watch the “Most Used Melody in Pop Music” video, it’s hard not to hear his point. Pop music repeats itself because repetition sells.
Bermingham’s Remix Manifesto gives the conversation a different angle. Instead of seeing repetition as laziness, he sees it as cultural lineage. Music evolves by borrowing, sampling, and reimagining. Gaga channeling Madonna isn’t theft, it’s genealogy. It’s the musical version of “we come from somewhere.”
Then Hadju steps in with the science: our brains love patterns. That déjà vu moment in my car? That was my brain lighting up because it recognized a structure before I consciously did. Familiarity feels good. It feels catchy. It feels safe. Songs like “One Day,” “Sunday Bloody Sunday,” and “Blowin’ in the Wind” show how powerful familiar musical structures can be when they’re used to carry political messages. These songs aren’t musically complicated, they rely on simple chords, steady rhythms, and repetition. That simplicity is exactly what makes them effective. The listener already knows how to feel before the lyrics even land, which gives the message more room to resonate. Meanwhile, tracks like “Let It Be,” “Free Fallin’,” and “Only the Lonely” lean into repetition to create comfort and nostalgia, proving that emotional impact doesn’t require musical complexity. And then there’s “Seven Nation Army,” which has basically become a global chant; its riff is so recognizable and so easy to latch onto that it transformed from a rock song into a cultural anthem. Together, these examples show that repetition isn’t just a pop music trick, it’s a tool artists across genres use to make their messages unforgettable.
So yes, a lot of pop music sounds the same. But that sameness is doing cultural work. It persuades, soothes, motivates, and unifies. It keeps us connected to older sounds while remixing them into something new. And it reminds us that music isn’t just entertainment, it’s a language our brains are wired to understand.
The big question is, if pop music keeps repeating itself because we respond to what feels familiar, what does that say about the kind of listeners we’ve become, and the kind of music we’re shaping in return ?
