The Musical Diversity of Pop Songs
pudding.cool
pudding.cool
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"
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You could say "artistry" (bold statements, individual expression, etc) has been replaced by "design" (sophisticated choices based on following existing trends and extended them just the right amount, standing out not too much, not too little, etc).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 think it's just a statistical problem.
Target A: you want your song to be liked by 10 thousand people
Target B: you want your song to be liked by 1 billion people
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..
Katey Perry to me is the 'Transformers' of Music.
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 ...
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.
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.
Thats the problem. Why are we treating music like an industrial product? (The answer is money)
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
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 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.
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.
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.
Classical music was pop for it's time. People danced, drank, and even had massive riots when a controversial composer came to town.
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.
http://mentalfloss.com/article/55247/3-dirty-songs-mozart
Chopin, for example, wrote 59 marzukas, which is music for a traditional Polish dance of the same name.
Beethoven wrote many dance songs, especially waltzes.
Albeniz, especially wrote music derived from traditional music. Suite Espanola is a wonderful exploration here.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Suite_Española_No._1,_Op._47
I could go all night on this topic, but the point is that, although we don't recognize the music as dance, it was to the people of that time.
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.
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.
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...?
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.
Sure, there is that, but let's not kid ourselves, those fruit are popular because they are actually preferred by a vast majority.
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.
https://www.recode.net/2018/4/3/17191390/spotify-plan-big-mu...
Yes, that works for most people. But if you're seeking new, exciting and different then those recommendations come off as dull and lifeless.
That music never went away. It's not like you're no longer allowed to listen to Pink Floyd. Music doesn't have an expiry date.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1999_(song)
http://www.lyricsfreak.com/p/prince/1999_20111205.html
Prince refused to perform it after it expired.
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?
TL;DR, Nostalgia won't be what it used to be.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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".
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)
(edit: formatting)
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.