Earlier this year, researchers at the Spanish National Research Council published a paper in which they claimed to have scientifically proven that rock and pop music all sounds the same. They analysed more than 464,000 songs and concluded that, over the last 50 years, the melodies had become increasingly similar and the palette of sounds used more homogenous. This generated a degree of controversy – some suggested the research was flawed, that it had failed to consider rhythm and language – and a lot of headlines. Some of these were attached to gleeful articles by the kind of journalist who never misses an opportunity to favour the world with the information that everything was better when they were young.

The kind of journalist who never misses an opportunity to inform the world that everything was better when they were young is a crashing bore – and deluded, to boot – which makes it painful to say I find myself very broadly in agreement with the Spanish researchers. You don't have to analyse 464,000 songs or think music has been on an irreversibly steep decline since the 1960s to realise that, currently, a lot of pop does sound the same. You just have to listen to the top 40. Huge chunks of it cleave to roughly the same musical template, set about three years ago, when French DJ and producer David Guetta unexpectedly broke into the US market, scoring a huge hit, When Love Takes Over, with former Destiny's Child singer Kelly Rowland and producing The Black Eyed Peas' equally massive I Gotta Feeling. There will be a four-four house beat. There will be a euphoric, hands-in-the-air breakdown similar to those found on early 1990s rave tracks. There will be auto-tuned vocals. There will be a moment where the vocal goes "woah-oh-hoah" (or similar) in the stadium-rousing style of Coldplay.

It's a blueprint that has crossed musical boundaries. As a result, representatives of genres that used to be identifiably different from each other – pop, hip-hop, R&B – currently make singles that sound largely indistinguishable. You could argue that its popularity is merely evidence of dance music's current vast global appeal – in recent years, even traditionally resistant American audiences have taken to it – but the overall effect has been to homogenise pop as never before. After three years, it's now a very tired idea indeed, but that doesn't seem to have occurred to its main practitioners.

"You've certainly made your mark on the global pop sound already!! Really there's no need to do any more," wrote the website Popjustice recently in an open letter to Guetta. "If you want to take a decade off, please don't let us stop you." Nor has it occurred to the record labels that keep commissioning their work, or at least work that sounds exactly like it. The singles that come out are getting worse and worse. Something like Britney Spears' recent collaboration with Will.i.am, Scream And Shout, is pop music that sounds the way a snob who hates pop music thinks pop music sounds: cynical, blank-eyed, joyless, devoid of imagination, contemptuous of its audience.

Indeed, it's that audible sense of contempt that gives a glimmer of hope. For one thing, you take people for fools at your peril. It might work in the short term, but no one's so stupid that they don't eventually cotton on to what's happening, as The X Factor's tumbling ratings suggest. Furthermore, it makes me angry, and I'm 41, so you have to wonder how it makes a teenager feel. Maybe pissed off enough to take matters into their own hands, pick up a laptop or a guitar, and make pop music that's amazing.

See also in pop

• The Voice.

• Getting pictures of Bowie for the Olympic closing ceremony.

• £900 tickets for the Rolling Stones.