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bogus comments on The mystery of Brahms - Less Wrong Discussion
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Mozart lived in the middle of neoclassicism. Novelty wasn't considered very important then. Beethoven's music was one of the watermarks in the rise of the importance of novelty.
Re. originality in popular music, see this video. Don't miss the section starting at 2:39. This video by the Axis of Awesome is fun, too. Pop music, like popular literature, doesn't have the same pressure for novelty. Mainstream pop music today has little stylistic novelty; that gets shunted into sub-genres. A lot of pop music today is difficult to distinguish from music made in the 1990s. The difference between pop music in 1960 and 1964 was much larger than the difference between 1990 and 2015.
What these mashup videos show is that a lot of modern songs are essentially variations on a single ground bass. Whether this means that they "lack novelty" arguably depends on what exactly you mean by novelty (I certainly agree that Mozart was not original in the way Beethoven was), but even Beethoven wrote in this musical form (see e.g. his 32 Variations in C minor)
You missed the section starting at 2:39, didn't you?
I just don't think that it proves much, beyond what I wrote above. Given how consonance and dissonance work, it's somewhat to be expected that playing many variations at once on the same ground can result in (consonant) music.