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You’ve heard it. It’s so ubiquitous it would have been impossible not to. It’s a melody built around four notes, and it reappears in hit after hit, sticking in your ears like honey.
Danish musicologist Carl Martin has dubbed it the “Gen Alpha melody”, so named because many of the songs featuring it were released during the 2010s.
‘APT.’ by Rosé and Bruno Mars. ‘One of Your Girls’ by Troye Sivan. ‘Ode to the Mets’ by The Strokes. Artists spanning genres as diverse as rock, pop and EDM – as well as musicians from Spain, India, Norway and beyond – have used it.
Martin noticed the pattern while listening to pop songs from around the world. He recognised the same recurring melodic framework, so he began compiling examples for a YouTube video.
Eventually, he identified around 500 tracks before narrowing the list to 72 songs that shared what he believes is the same melodic pattern. Played back-to-back, the similarities become uncanny. Suddenly, you start to hear it everywhere.
“I’ve never seen a specific melody come as close to being this widely used in popular music,” Martin says in his 14-minute explainer video.
Why does the ‘Gen Alpha melody’ keep resurfacing?
Martin says the melody is built around four “pillar” notes spread across two short musical phrases – the musical equivalent of sentences.
“All other tones revolve around these because they’re landing on strong beats or the melodic phrase ends on them,” he explains.
While songwriters can fill in the gaps between them differently, they all revolve around these same pillars.
Martin believes it works so well because it follows a “question and answer” pattern: it begins with an unresolved idea before ending on a “nice and consonant” resolution.
“It’s a great-sounding melody by itself and it has this bittersweet quality,” Martin says.
That also helps explain why it appears so often in songs about heartbreak and melancholy, two of pop music’s most timeless themes.
And it’s so flexible that the same melody can appear in songs that otherwise sound nothing alike, from Yungblud’s pop rock hits to EDM bangers by Zedd and Tiesto.
Why isn’t anyone getting sued?
The similarities may be striking, but Martin argues they don’t necessarily amount to the most widespread example of copyright infringement in history.
He describes the phenomenon as “interpolation” – in other words, borrowing an existing melody rather than sampling a recording – and says it’s not always a conscious decision. Instead, he believes many songwriters have absorbed the melody simply by hearing it repeated throughout popular music before reproducing it without realising it.
Despite its name, the melody predates Gen Alpha by decades. Among the earliest examples is The Beatles’ 1965 hit ‘It’s Only Love’. But the roots likely go even deeper.
Since Martin published his video, some have traced similar patterns back to Beethoven, meaning the Gen Alpha melody may have been hiding in plain sight for centuries.