I think the problem you're pointing to is not that pop music is somehow more difficult or more performance based - a lot of pop music is basically electronic music and has relatively little performance element. What you're noticing is that music (and not just pop music), and in fact, all art, is anti-inductive [1].
What I mean by that is that our expectations of music are constantly changing and evolving, and the minute something is created that captures our imagination, creating something similar becomes "not that interesting". It would probably be fairly easy to create an engine that produces pop music from the 80s or 90s or even 2000s, but the closer you get to today, the more the music is either a copy/rearrangement of an existing pop song, or it's not recognised as pop music.
The very nature of music is constantly reinventing itself, everyone always looking for that "new sound". These neural networks, as they are at the moment, can, it seems, pick up an existing "sound" and learn to reproduce it, but creating "new sound" is another matter, at the moment at least.
yep exactly what I am pointing to. I meant performance based in that its complexity comes from how it interacts with culture language, other music, ideas, etc: cultural production. True also of classical composition, but as you say, it's already been done, and so the pattern can be reproduced. I was also adding the idea that the mathematical and notational rule-logic of a lot of classical music lends itself to machine based reproduction in ways that modern pop pastiche does not, and that's counter intuitive as some comments noted, because the actual product itself is entirely machine mediated.
What I mean by that is that our expectations of music are constantly changing and evolving, and the minute something is created that captures our imagination, creating something similar becomes "not that interesting". It would probably be fairly easy to create an engine that produces pop music from the 80s or 90s or even 2000s, but the closer you get to today, the more the music is either a copy/rearrangement of an existing pop song, or it's not recognised as pop music.
The very nature of music is constantly reinventing itself, everyone always looking for that "new sound". These neural networks, as they are at the moment, can, it seems, pick up an existing "sound" and learn to reproduce it, but creating "new sound" is another matter, at the moment at least.
[1] http://slatestarcodex.com/2015/01/11/the-phatic-and-the-anti...