75 Music Tropes And Clichés That People Find Absolutely Annoying

You have your big groups and your indie bands, your classical composers and your jazz legends. You have the pop stars who have been around for decades and the Latin hits that consistently rank high on the charts. And then there are the music tropes: the common and overused songwriters’ clichés that seem to make their way into every single genre, from rap to rock ’n’ roll and hip-hop.

If you’re into songwriting and music production, you know how hard it is to come up with fresh ideas. Every chord, drum fill, melody, and even lyrics get recycled over and over again, and it’s getting harder to find something that hasn’t already been done or doesn’t sound suspiciously familiar. You’ve surely been there, listening to a new tune and thinking, “Hey, doesn’t this sound like that song?”

We all have music formulas that we secretly like, while others have gotten so boring and annoying that we’re ready to rip our headphones off and throw them across the room. So which tropes in music are trite to the point that people explicitly said they couldn’t stand them anymore? That’s what we’ll find out today, thanks to a Reddit thread that asked people to name the music clichés they’re sick of hearing. From the classic “boy meets girl, boy loses girl, boy gets girl back” love story to excessive auto-tune, we’re calling out all the overused music elements that make people want to hit the skip button!