> A single songwriter can specialize in literally the snare-drum.
I was an amateur level producer in high school. I had hundred of snare-drum samples, not to mention a lot of way to influence the sound of a particular one. Picking a good snare-drum is very important, it can totally change the character of the song.
All of modern music producing it's like that, it's an extremely efficient market, it's really really hard to make "the sound of 2019", and this is why there are such few successful producers.
To put it in software engineer terms, saying that "all successful modern music is computer made, recipe driven, there is no originality" it's like saying "all successful modern sites are made exactly the same, you just pick a database, a web frontend, ads to sell, a few programmers, there is no originality"
In both your examples, you can have tremendous diversity, craftsmanship and sophistication within a quite narrow range of parameters.
You could say "artistry" (bold statements, individual expression, etc) has been replaced by "design" (sophisticated choices based on following existing trends and extended them just the right amount, standing out not too much, not too little, etc).
"I don't think there is less art in a massively popular song. It's just a different kind of art"
Technically you could say thins, but in reality I would say there is definitely 'less art'.
Katey Perry is a product, not an artist, listening to her reminds me of walking into a nice, clean, new McDonald's.
Sure there is 'art' even in Product Marketing and Segmentation ... but funny enough, most of this music does not last.
I have nothing against great and hyper-specialized production, but it's usually done in an industrial manner.
The same thing is often done with food ingredients: there are people hired by processed food manufacturers to get the 'ingredient mix' just perfect for taste - and this tends to commoditize products across the board.
The article makes a good case for this, i.e. why hyper specialization and product orientation leads to less diversity.
Example from another industry: as films become more 'global' - they have to be more bland and generic, and 'lowest common denominator'. International audiences don't 'get' American cultural cues.
Do you know why the Transformers movies make absolutely no sense? There is basically no plot. Just 2 hours of a long, ridiculous action sequence? Because they are catering to 'everyone' and 'everyone' is borderline illiterate, and doesn't grasp cultural references outside of their little region etc. etc..
I should add - do you remember Justin Timbrlake song 'Lovin' it'?
And how McDonald's brand tag line for that time was 'lovin it'?
That was coordinated.
A huge star, worked with a mega fast-food brand so that the song / brand tag line would be literally the same thing. That was a brilliant but kind of shady move by both parties, but it shows the 'absolute corporatrization' of the music industry. Literally the music is there to push fast food. That goes way beyond using a hit song to sell cars - it's literally the creation of pop-stardom in alignment with marketing objectives of a major brand.
The fact that can happen right in front of us, while so many people are apparently unaware - or don't care - is pretty funny and sad.
Again one could take the 'it's still art' line ... sure, a kind of 'art of sneaky marketing' maybe, but it's more than fair to say that this will significantly compromise creative aspects of the music.
Big labels are the same as Big Hollywood and Big Corps - they are in the business of entertainment in a way.
And it's not to say that McD's is entirely crap, nor does it mean that Timberlake is not talented, it's just that it's corporatized. Timberlake came up inside Disney, a professional by his mid-teens. Not so much the path of the artiste ...
> I should add - do you remember Justin Timbrlake song 'Lovin' it'?
No, and having researched it just now, from it's chart performance, I doubt all that many people outside of Belgium did even within a few months of its release, except for the part actually used in McDonalds commercials.
> A huge star, worked with a mega fast-food brand so that the song / brand tag line would be literally the same thing.
The song was written as a jingle, based on a pre-existing advertising campaign in Germany, before Timberlake became involved; AFAICT, his involvement was a straight take money to do cross-promotion deal.
I don't disagree with what you're saying, but I never got the impression that "I'm loving it" was anything less than a clear McDonalds/Timberlake tie-in. Was this really not obvious to parts of the world?
You say "most of this music does not last" but you're referring to music that was only produced a handful of years ago. It's too early to tell if it will or won't in a historical sense. In the minds of a lot of people below the age of 25, that music left an indelible mark, and very much will last. I'm not sure you've given Katy Perry much scrutiny if she reminds you of walking into a "nice, clean, new McDonald's." Perry's performance is sexually liberated and, if occasionally somewhat tone-deaf (e.g. Ur So Gay) comparatively transgressive. Further, although US literacy could be higher, most people are far from "borderline illiterate." But if you take exception with people not reading more broadly/deeply, consider reading some of the past 10 years of pop cultural criticism where the paradigm has shifted towards applying intellectual rigor to mass culture. You might learn something interesting.
A lot of people complain about the narrowness of modern popular music. It's a serious if subjective problem for them. The OP is all about ways to objectively statistically measure a problem that many people subjectively previously complained about.
The implication of the word "art" have generally involved fundamentally unique personal expression. There's expectation that grasping a piece of "true art" will involve something fundamentally surprising.
In contrast, beautiful design certainly involves skill, the designer may even have more skill than the artist. But the implication of design is that you won't experience surprise, just a better version of what you already are familiar with - the sensation of a more beautiful diamond ring or a book laid out more cleanly than you've previously seen.
All of modern pop music produced to earn money, perhaps. Otherwise, there are many music styles apart from pop, and many artists who don't use samples at all.
Two hundred years ago, most popular music existed primarily as simply a support for public dancing. The audience didn't expect to sit and listen to compelling virtuosos perform.
It was only the advent of recorded music that allowed individual performers of popular music to gain specific audiences (with free jazz performers of 1930s being perhaps the first popular recording artists noted for producing "works of art").
So music as just a product, in ways, isn't by itself new or evil. Now one can take issue with the characteristics of our modern music.
For discussion of the history of pop music, I'd recommend
Elijah Wald's How the Beatles Destroyed Rock 'n' Roll
> "Two hundred years ago, most popular music existed primarily as simply a support for public dancing. The audience didn't expect to sit and listen to compelling virtuosos perform."
Have to disagree with you there. The most immediate counterexample that jumps to mind is Wagner. Hugely popular and audiences went to a Wagner opera not looking to merely be entertained but for the artistic merit of his works.
I'm no music expert, but that (specifically your statement about dancing being premier) doesn't jive with what little bits I know. Granted you could narrowly define bits and pieces of what you said to constrain the set of artists you're talking about, but insofar as you mention free jazz of the 1930s as an early example of producing "art for art's sake", there are certainly earlier comparable examples, the "futurists" of the 1920s and earlier being one (Varese, who was conducting as early as the 1910's) and whose art was _VERY MUCH_ an artistic display intended to push forward electronic sounds.
I'm sure someone with a background in musical history can cite many examples even further back, my point being, I think there's been a constant gradient of music For Dance vs. music For Art, I don't think it's fair to say that one or the other is in any way particularly novel. (Victorian era music, for example, was a wide spread including everything from operatic virtuosos, to public house performances for dancing)
To your other point however, I certainly agree that music as a product is not new, that concept dates back long past even the eras of our classical masters.
Hmm, how about church music as another example of popular music not produced by elites. (Perhaps more respectable, but not necessarily elite.) Or how about work songs? Ragtime? Brass bands?
Indeed, some popular music wasn't produced for dancing but most of that wasn't considered art.
It's not really some simplistic generality. The larger point is audio reproduction and the increased production of commodities is what allowed the uniqueness of a kind of musician to be their selling point, once a musician was "selling himself/herself" rather than being a paid player.
Assuming I'm not misunderstanding you, In that classical was meant to be performances by virtuosos for art instead of dance? My counterargument was to show "proof by contradiction" of artists only a few decades earlier that countered the parent posts assertion of the 1930s, but as said, one with more music history could probably cite art vs. dance producers throughout history.
I was hesitant to talk about Mozart/Bach/the other greats because I don't honestly have a deep understanding for how music was societally perceived back then/what the delineations were between pop/"high culture"/dance/"artistic" music (e.g. what the isomorphisms are to the modern day, if there even are any), whereas the earlier 1900's were not so far different from the parent's 1930s claim.
Music for the church (often written by the same composers) is a counterpoint to this. I doubt too many people are dancing during requiems and masses. :) Also, there is music as the background to a theatrical performance (opera being the classic example of that).
However if we really want to compare the most popular pieces of each time, we really can't look at the "art classical". Most "art classical" wasn't even the most popular back then, from what I gather (though occasionally an "art classical" composer did make a popular tune that became well known).
It's difficult to find "top sales" lists of the old sheet music songs (which is probably the best parallel to modern record charts), but one someone put together for the US (https://thetop100songsofalltime.com/top-100-songs-of-the-189...) has, for the link example of the 1890s, mostly popular short tunes (in the 1890s, "tin pan alley" style).
Of what I recognize (there's a lot of songs on this list that frankly seems to have disappeared over time), there's some that probably would be the dance of its time. I wouldn't say all I recognize is "music to dance to" mainly because there are definitely some ballads among the tunes, as well as some Sousa marches, and songs which are probably more "sing-alongs". I'm guessing that most of these songs aren't exactly "works of art" in the way the original poster intended. :) But they were light entertainment for the time (ala pop today), and that's fine. Modern pop music also has some ballads that do not necessarily function as dance music, too.
I think the biggest difference between music then and music now, is that the dominant way to make a living was to compose sheet music for other musicians to play. Recordings quite literally changed all of this.
Why are we talking about two hundred years ago? In the late 20th century, popular music occupied a different role. It had functional uses for sure. But it was also an artform. I don't want to go back to 200 years ago. There was something democratic about music that was accessible, made for a wide audience, and capable of depth.
The individual artist or producer which want's to have a number one song is not driven mainly by money. The drive is just wanting to be the best. And being the best in such a competitive field requires having a highly polished product.
Nobody interested in being best would consider tip of pop charts as "best". Pop is mass appeal for money and or game. It is a lowest common denominator medium. People wanting to be best seek the recognition of their peers. Not commercial sales.
It can but it's mostly not especially in the pop music sector and anyone who works in the music industry knows this. Most of the so-called artist in the pop industry are assets for the industry not artists.
I see I get some downvotes for saying this, none the less it's true. And I say this as an former full-time now hobby musician/songwriter myself.
I'm always gonna be fascinated by any analyses like this - but can I just say how incredible tired I am of everything containing "music" combined with "this generation".
Everyone, everyone in the industrialised world and well beyond can purchase a device smaller than their palm and listen to literal billions of songs. Noone is stopping you from only listening to "Tibet monk techno punk instrumental remixes" for the rest of your life - without buying anything you don't already have. So can this mother of all substanceless debates please just die...?
What you say is true, although it misses a larger point: that even though we CAN listen to unlimited variety, since the labels control the distribution systems (radio plays, featured music, music sold in big box stores, publicity etc etc) the music they produce becomes inevitably popular. Turn on the radio, walk into Walmart, turn on the tv, watch a movie and you’re not going to hear independent Tibetan chants. You’re going to hear what they want you to hear because they have the reach to make sure everyone listens to it. Combine that with their PR teams and you end up with a situation in which the labels have a strangle hold on what we collectively listen to. Sure it’s possible to branch out and “ignore” that stuff, but the vast majority of people don’t. They listen to and like what their friends like, which is in turn what they’ve been told is “good”.
Additionally, I find that most of pop is quite manipulative on the emotions. Rather than complexity in the music, it goes for riffs and choruses that pull precisely on some undefinable feeling but which can be broken down into categories of Power, Sexy, Nostalgia, Hypnosis/Rapture-- by which I mean, it gives a feeling of a sort of intoxication or trance. Whether it is intentional or not, that is how I've found it to be. Nostalgia in pop is also recursive.
All music can influence emotions or state-of-mind to some degree, but the lack of complexity in pop music makes it so that this influence is the only "worth" or, perhaps more accurately, purpose of the music. There is nothing wrong with this necessarily, I am just giving another reason why pop and such might be so popular.
That's like saying that people are eating bananas and oranges and apples because there is a huge PR campaign to push them, and that this is destroying the chances for less popular fruits.
Sure, there is that, but let's not kid ourselves, those fruit are popular because they are actually preferred by a vast majority.
Bananas are a created product. Made popular by banana industry. Natural bananas are nothing like the highly breed thing you eat. They are not native in northern America. The demand for them was manufactured with marketing. Until now they are "part of our life" and seem normal.
If it was not for the music industry. Pop bands would not exist. Boy bands would not exist. Etc. They are as artificil as bananas.
But a lot of people now don't turn on the radio or TV; the alternate channels of music discovery are becoming primary. Once there's an initial contact — and there are plenty of opportunities that aren't controlled by labels — it's increasingly frictionless to find more of what you realize that you like.
Except that services like Spotify or Pandora still rely on the labels as well. Sure, they want to get away from the labels, but that is going to take time.
Well, they also rely on averages, and the resulting recommendations tend to be (for me) closer to "we're certain these won't offend you." That is there's little deviation.
Yes, that works for most people. But if you're seeking new, exciting and different then those recommendations come off as dull and lifeless.
I don't necessarily disagree, but I want to add that music taste has an important social component that often seems overlooked in favour of nebulous ideas like "artistic merit" (not from you, but elsewhere on this page.) If you and your friends only listen to Top 40, that music has personal and social resonance. It probably makes you feel good about your relationships, and also fosters the strengthening of those relationships. While some people prefer the individuality of their tastes, for plenty others there's a thrill to participating in a monolithic cultural event like One Direction or Ed Sheeran etc. These metrics of "good"-ness shouldn't be dismissed simply because the subjects of them don't play crazy polyrhythms where every song has 34 chords.
It's not a question of availability. It's about the quality, creativity and originality of the music. The late 60s, 70s and 80s produced a stream of musical talent the likes of which we haven't seen since. Tech has played a part in that decline though the early pioneers of techno-pop, such as Gary Numan and John Foxx were genuinely creative. Ask yourself, if you think all this is merely relative, where is the David Bowie, the Bryan Ferry and the Elton John of this decade? That's just 3. I could list 100 more from those 3 decades who tower above anything coming out of the music industry today.
Those people either have very short memories or believe the hype. A lot of the stuff outside the top 40 is barely passable. Sheesh, even top 40 is full of trash, and that's picking the "best" 40 songs over a 10 year span.
I still live in a World where mass-media is a thing because I watch recently made TV shows, occasionally recent films (aka movies), and listen to mainstream music on the radio.
I wonder how it's going to play out because generations up to now have shared a relatively small cadre of media offerings in semi-rigid genres; that shared experience has in some ways - at least in the 20th Century - underpinned societal culture.
Shared interest in YouTube stars, amongst many other things, still keeps the thread of share cultural experience in society; but what direction are we going?
If I have a billion different media offerings I can consume the chances of meeting people and having a shared cultural experience we can link over get smaller. Whither nostalgia?
The missing variable here is whether the market share represented by Billboard #1 songs has increased or decreased in this time span. Is everyone listening to more homogeneous music, or is the market for #1 songs shrinking to a smaller and smaller demographic?
I honestly don't know the answer, but a few decades ago in most towns the majority of the public listened to just a few radio stations and everybody knew the top songs. In the Spotify age, I'm far from certain that's true.
There are many very objective metrics we can use, but even by many creative metrics - it's worse.
Lyrically: have you ever listened to what 2Pac or Biggie were saying? They were rhyming. There was an obvious lyrical flow. Now compare to Lil' Wayne who literally spouts gibberish. Lil wayne 'says words' to 'a beat' and that's it.
Some people point out that 'there's always been bad music' i.e. if you go back to the top 40 in 1977 or whatever it's litered with derivative crap - but - there were many 'stand outs' of great music - even great pop music. For example, Michael Jackson was not exactly an exalted artist in the purest sense, but he was a genius pop artists. I fully respect Beyonce as a hard working and creative entertainer of our times, but I think in 10 years from now, you'll more likely hear a Michael Jackson song than a Beyonce song.
Underlying issues are partly commercialization, but also - 'visualization'. Remember 'video killed the radio star?' - well YouTube is the new MTV and 'how it looks' is as important than 'how it sounds'. Pop stars now generally are more attractive.
Also - it's just too easy to press a button and make noise - people confuse the creativity behind that with raw expression. I saw a band recently that had 2 guys playing 'a computer' and it was interesting, but ultimately very empty. The lack of character has me aching for good, live Jazz. :)
I love Kanye, but it's really hard to get fully behind someone standing there with a microphone, it's like a big Kareoke show.
> Lyrically: have you ever listened to what 2Pac or Biggie were saying? They were rhyming. There was an obvious lyrical flow. Now compare to Lil' Wayne who literally spouts gibberish. Lil wayne 'says words' to 'a beat' and that's it.
Firstly, a minor point: Wayne's dominant era is already a decade ago, and he is of the older generation of rappers now.
Wayne is not a "deep" rapper most times (although he has his moments, e.g. Tie My Hands and I Feel Like Dying). He's a punchline rapper - one who isn't trying to convey Meaning but just have fun on a beat. This tradition has a long history in hip-hop, going all the way back to the Sugarhill Gang and "Rapper's Delight".
His mixtape work is widely acclaimed as classic stuff - Da Drought 3, Dedication 2 and No Ceilings being the most prominent. His music has endless quotables, e.g. "real G's move in silence like lasagna"[0]. Rap heavyweights like Ice Cube, Eminem, Busta Rhymes, Kendrick Lamar, Nas and Raekwon have high opinions of his work, with hip-hop pioneer KRS-One calling him the "greatest rapper of all time[1]." Post-Wayne rappers betray a huge influence, with e.g. Kendrick Lamar, Young Thug, A$AP Rocky, and most prominently Drake.
> Underlying issues are partly commercialization, but also - 'visualization'. Remember 'video killed the radio star?' - well YouTube is the new MTV and 'how it looks' is as important than 'how it sounds'. Pop stars now generally are more attractive.
You had opera and musicals long before MTV and Youtube. And people mostly didn't hide their faces during live performances before or during the current period of recorded music.
Opera and Musicals are inherently visual. And Opera singers are not necessarily pretty.
Nobody cares what the pianist looks like :)
To be fair: Taylor Swift and Beyonce - if you see them totally without makeup, are not super attractive, they look in the range of fairly normal. Also there's a double standard for men and women to some extent. Top male artist right now is Ed Sheeran and he is one ugly mofo, then again, to my point - he's highly talented ... when he's not writing pop tunes 'designed for a mass audience' he does some cool stuff. On Charlie Rose he basically admitted he writes a lot of stuff for commercial purposes, it's a business.
It seems really hard to justify treating those 8 characteristics as independent, equally important, and all-encompassing variables. The page's attempt to do so amounts to saying it's a peer-reviewed method employed by other music researchers.
But the paper they linked made an effort to address that concern, and weights the features; it includes more echo-nest features, like tempo, mode and time-signature; it uses a different metric; and while it's not the overall conclusion of the paper, it includes a similar measure of similarity over time, but pegs 2015 as the most diverse year since 1963 in general, and 2014 as the most diverse year ever for #1s.
> The two most similar songs from 2007 to 2011 were Katy Perry’s “Teenage Dream” and Kesha’s “We R Who We R” , and they indeed sound alike.
I disagree. I just listened to both songs on Spotify, and they do not sound alike. Different keys, different vocal ranges, different voices, different instruments (or at least, different synthesized sounds). The Kesha song has more electronic effects on her voice. Kesha raps, while Katy doesn't. Really, the main similarity between the two songs is that they repeat the same chord progression through the whole song -- that's probably a consequence of what John Seabrook calls "track and hook".
That's like saying blue bubblegum and pink bubblegum make for a diverse range of foods. I guess maybe that seems like the case, given we've all mostly been eating bubblegum for some time.
There are far more similarities in these songs that have a greater impact:
* Very similar tempo (approx 120 bpm)
* Very similar keys (Eb Major vs Bb Major)
* Very similar dynamics (crushed and loud)
* Very similar ultra-present vocal processing
* Very similar light syncopation (Katy Perry's synth chords vs Kesha's chopped vocals)
I–V–vi–IV is just a chord progression. Using it does not make a song unoriginal. You can build a billion melodies on it in just one mode of a scale. Then there's all the other stuff: instrument choice, arrangement, rhythm, lyrics (if you have them).
A song is so much more than a chord progression.
For those playing along at home: modern pop favorite I–V–vi–IV is also the chord progression used in some arrangements of the 1788 classic Auld Lang Syne.
The algorithm producing the EchoNest scores has some questionable results, like Hollaback Girl - 38% acousticness and Hey There Delilah - 65% danceability.
I was an amateur level producer in high school. I had hundred of snare-drum samples, not to mention a lot of way to influence the sound of a particular one. Picking a good snare-drum is very important, it can totally change the character of the song.
All of modern music producing it's like that, it's an extremely efficient market, it's really really hard to make "the sound of 2019", and this is why there are such few successful producers.
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/04/22/arts/music/diary-of-a-son...
To put it in software engineer terms, saying that "all successful modern music is computer made, recipe driven, there is no originality" it's like saying "all successful modern sites are made exactly the same, you just pick a database, a web frontend, ads to sell, a few programmers, there is no originality"