  Popular music is a key cultural expression that has captured listeners'
attention for ages. Many of the structural regularities underlying musical
discourse are yet to be discovered and, accordingly, their historical evolution
remains formally unknown. Here we unveil a number of patterns and metrics
characterizing the generic usage of primary musical facets such as pitch,
timbre, and loudness in contemporary western popular music. Many of these
patterns and metrics have been consistently stable for a period of more than
fifty years, thus pointing towards a great degree of conventionalism.
Nonetheless, we prove important changes or trends related to the restriction of
pitch transitions, the homogenization of the timbral palette, and the growing
loudness levels. This suggests that our perception of the new would be rooted
on these changing characteristics. Hence, an old tune could perfectly sound
novel and fashionable, provided that it consisted of common harmonic
progressions, changed the instrumentation, and increased the average loudness.
