Gridification (noun): the algorithmic quantization of human-performed timing. The term was introduced by Jeffrey Anthony.
Hit records used to drift in time the way people do. Since around 2001, that movement has been vanishing from the charts.
Share of top-five hits with no tempo movement at all, by decade. In the 1960s and 70s, not one held to a single unchanging tempo. Today most do.
Pro Tools Beat Detective, the tool that snaps recorded audio to a grid, shipped in 2001. It is the fault line in the data.
Standard deviation of tempo within each song, averaged by decade (BPM).
These figures describe the tempo surface of the finished recordings. They do not identify the tools used on any single track, or measure the timing of individual musicians.
What we lose, civically, when recordings stop keeping human time.
The real inflection point was not generative AI. It was 2001.
A grid can be a compositional choice without being a corrective regime.