Q: I used to complain about how pop songs were all about the same things but then i realized everyone sings about the same things and i found that comforting
A: everyone wants to be a pop song. even people who don't really know how to do it. so maybe, quite often, copycatism is not actually the good strategy, but the weaker strategy being used by swarms of people each quarter trying frantically to copy whatever very non-copying thing that has most recently been so emboldened as to occur