Pop music is getting louder, possibly more boring (statistically speaking) 

 The  NYT  just alerted me to a  paper  by Joan Serra and coauthors demonstrating what we can learn about popular music with a big data approach.  I'll leave it to you to interpret the trends they identify (music is getting louder, also more similar), but it was interesting and gave me a lot of ideas for how I could borrow some of this technology for my own research.