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Music from the Western world is in the midst of a Weberian rationalization process that has been punctuated with periods of charismatic growth and change. While this process of musical production has contributed novel elements which modify the prevailing standard of the day, inevitably these novelties also become routinized as a result of reproduction by agents in the popular music industry. The encoding and decoding paradigms of cultural studies are reviewed and intersected with the Marxian ideas of use and exchange value to illustrate how and why this process takes place the way it does. An empirical analysis of popular music from the turn of the 21st century is carried out to determine if uniformity is associated with popularity. Results indicate that there is a periodicity to uniformity, implying that novelty ebbs and flows in the popular music market, and that the popularity of any given song is significantly associated with how closely that song matches the prevailing standards of musical production.

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Jesse Fletcher received his doctorate in sociology from the University of California, Riverside in 2010. Dr. Fletcher works primarily in the areas of social psychology, sociological theory, and mathematical sociology.

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