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Comment by addisonj | Hacker News Reader

Incredibly fascinating article. The article mentioned both the 'sameness' of pop music as well as blatant copying, but what I find the most interesting is how they pop industry has somehow found some magical rate of evolution to keep most people interested while not changing too fast to alienate certain demographics.

A few years ago, when dubstep was still fairly new, a build up and shift as dramatic as the typical dubstep 'drop' would have been fairly jarring for most pop music. Fast forward to today and you hear elements of it almost everywhere, but it all happened gradually enough to make it feel familiar but different enough to be exciting.

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Dubstep was invented in South London in the late 1990s.

http://www.vice.com/en_uk/read/an-oral-history-of-dubstep-vi...

It was only new recently in the sense that it became a mainstream pop genre.

The article kind of misses the point - pop is a packaging and marketing industry, not a music invention industry.

The invention happens in subcultures, mostly in the UK and US. Then it's discovered, reinvented, and popularised by the industry.

At least, that's how it used to work. With mass exposure to the same online influences everyone is listening to the same stuff and moving in the same directions. There's a lot less original experimentation happening, and that's a much bigger problem for pop than the fact that the industry is making product, because it means there's not much coming down to feed the production line.

I really enjoy finding undiscovered new music on SoundCloud. Amateur production values are incredibly high now - infinitely better than a cassette demo of 20 years ago.

But if anything a lot of the writing sounds professional and safe. It's slick, polished, beautiful/grungy/glitchy/ironic/whatever and good listening. But it's not often amazingly surprising, or fresh enough to kickstart a subculture into orbit.

> The invention happens in subcultures, mostly in the UK and US.

Really? Or is it just invention of genres that go and influence pop music? Which is better explained by the fact that most pop music is indeed produced by the UK and US.

While I can think of many musical (sub)genres that were invented in the UK or US, I know them because they got quite popular (in or around the hit charts).

But there's also others, the ones I know are from my personal tastes over the years. Isn't electro from Germany and the Netherlands (The Hague)? Or Suomisaundi, a bouncy subgenre of psy-trance from Finland. Israel being a big influence on certain styles of goa-trance. "Lounge music" (there may be a better term) got big from Yonderboi (Hungary), and then Balkan beats appeared. And "filterhouse" came from France (Cassius, Daft Punk). And I'm not too familiar with the genre but I'm sure that Scandinavia has quite a few subgenres of metal on their name?

(disclaimer: I probably got the "proper" names of the subgenres wrong to some people)

> A few years ago, when dubstep was still fairly new, a build up and shift as dramatic as the typical dubstep 'drop' would have been fairly jarring for most pop music. Fast forward to today and you hear elements of it almost everywhere, but it all happened gradually enough to make it feel familiar but different enough to be exciting.

Agreed, and that's what's bugging me: I missed a bit in the article the following: how do they get massive groups of people buying into the products they are selling, every time? If you look at the whole pipeline, from writing the 'hit' to recording / mixing / mastering to getting it on iTunes (record store?) and the shows live in the halls / stadiums, where and more importantly: how, are they getting the people that far that they part with their money to 'own' a copy of these, often dreadful (music wise), songs?

It is, IMHO, that part of the whole pipeline that they have mastered, not the song writing/recording: the product isn't the music, the product is something else, the front person ('artist') + the whole entourage around it, but it's fascinating how they manage to construct _that_ entourage that is sought after by people with money to burn. they must know an answer (which is sold in the form of the artist+entourage+shows+music) to an unknown question / benefit sought a lot of people have.

The piece you're not quite mentioning is that for a very long time now, mainstream pop culture has been mostly about getting adolescent kids to lust after the celebrities or musicians or whoever. That segment of the market sells (images of) people as sex objects, not any particular creative media on its own merit. It's a bit disturbing but there you go.

>how, are they getting the people that far that they part with their money to 'own' a copy of these, often dreadful (music wise), songs?

With a combination of marketing, and, how about it, people actually liking them.

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