The Headphone Effect

I don’t have any solid statistics but I can be fairly confident and say today most of the music is listened to by iPods or other MP3 players (as opposed to Home HiFi or other devices). And that means most of today’s music is listened to by headphones/earphones.

Taking this and applying some evolutionary theory (or Memtics) to it, I think it means songs that sound better in headphones/earphones are doing better than the ones that don’t. Thus if you want to make a music that has a better chance of getting to the top of the charts, make it sound good in headphones: Focus on higher pitch tones rather than base and frequencies that get distorted in the average headphones/earphones!