Is old music killing new music?
tedgioia.substack.com
tedgioia.substack.com
> The current list of most downloaded tracks on iTunes is filled with the names of bands from the last century, such as Creedence Clearwater and The Police.
Well yeah, younger generations, who are much more likely to listen to newer music, have moved on to streaming, for the most part.
> Just consider these facts: the 200 most popular tracks now account for less than 5% of total streams.
It's easier then ever for people to find different music to listen to now. Not everyone listens to the same hits anymore. It doesn't mean people are listening to less new music. Their listening is likely just more distributed across more new music.
> Just consider the recent reaction when the Grammy Awards were postponed. Perhaps I should say the lack of reaction—because the response was little more than a yawn.
As the article showed, people don't watch the Grammy's anymore. This doesn't mean people don't listen to new music anymore. People look more towards things like The Needle Drop[0] or streaming playlists then the Grammy's for music recommendations. Honestly, the Needle Drop's channel growth alone, should be enough to show that new music isn't going anywhere.
Overall, the vast majority of the points here can be attributed to the lower barrier to entry of making music, and to the new ease at which people can find the niche they like in new music.
The increase in investments in old music catalogues strikes true to me, but this is more a reflection of who is willing and able to pay for music, rather than who's consuming it.
I think these metrics are all indicative of real trends in music, but "the death of new music" is absolutely not one of them.
- Playing live shows is a huge part of how bands and artists grow their following and get discovered. COVID has had a pretty significant impact on people's ability to do that.
- The amount of high-fidelity music in circulation is continually growing. I would say the "modern era" of music (when record labels figured out how produce and distribute decent-quality songs at scale*) didn't start until the late 60's. All that music is still in circulation, and each subsequent decade there is another decade of "modern era" music to compete with.
* To clarify this point, I mean there is a huge gap in the sound-quality between the early 60's and the late 60's. Compare the difference in sound quality between the Beatle's first album and the Beatle's last album. Earlier music (like big band stuff) is even worse-quality, and there is much, much less of it
If the absolute number of new streams really is dropping year over year, that is concerning, but a single year's worth of data - a year with massive confounding factors to boot - isn't enough to convince me, and the full report is behind a paywall.
Having the market share of new streams drop as a percentage is completely expected, and nothing to be concerned about. The early adopters of streaming services were younger, listening to what was new at the time. Now as they get older, even if they add new music at the same rate, the are still listening to the streams the created earlier, so the mean age increases. In addition, as the services become more mainstream, wider segments of the population sign up, and bring their listening habits with them. So you would expect a general shift towards older music. And as that occurs you would expect the music industry to invest more in older music portfolios.
That doesn't mean that newer music is in decline, just that the industry has a new way to monetize older music that it didn't have before. Musical preferences and purchasing have always peaked in ones teens and 20s, and as you get older you tend to buy less music and listen to more radio, or the music you already have. Maybe rebuy a tape or CD or MP3 version of the album you already had. But as consumption moves away from radio and towards streaming, the long term revenue for a hit doesn't drop off as quickly as it used to. This isn't a zero-sum game, and increases in revenue for old music doesn't necessarily imply a decrease in revenue for new music.
Likewise, for some of his other supporting evidence. I concur that the rock radio stations around here have pretty much completely stopped playing new music (country stations aren't so stale, can't speak for hip-hop), but that is largely because young people don't listen to radio much anymore, so why cater to them?
And yes there is risk that music industry could focus too much on the old music that is making them lots of money now, and not invest enough in new music that will make them money in the future - but his own testimony is that they are still pushing new music hard.
There might be something here, but the article didn't convince me.
Just like what radio turned in to.
In the meantime I listened to more and more music from friends, the library, the internet, and all sorts of live venues. Great music is flowing like water it’s crazy.
So yes, legally speaking you’re supposed to pay royalties for playing 20 seconds of a song, or even 10, or 5. The only time at which you don’t have to is when there is no way for the rightsholder to confidently state that you’re using the piece they holds rights to.
Bob James successfully sued rappers using a single note sampled from his original songs.
Sampling requires copyright clearance. Flat.
The EU precedence is basically that if a sample can be recognised, then it is copyright infringing. That says exactly nothing about how long it is, and that is obviously an issue that scares the big records into legally checking everything, but just burns all the small ones into not sampling unless they're extremely certain.
The US precedence is that you require the original copyright holder to approve the sample and its size. Which is somewhat worse than the EU rulings.
Their definition of "new music" is to blame. Most of this "new music" is cookie-cutter junk that is artificial, derivative, simplistic, on-the-grid, auto-tuned, four-chord (or less) drivel. The labels intentionally manipulate the "top 200 tracks" so that this is nearly the only thing that makes it to the charts.
The young audience has had enough of it. They have streaming. They don't listen to the "top 200" anymore. Their tastes have broadened not only into new music which is not being tracked by the "top 200" but they are mining the music of older eras which is, by almost any measure, superior. It's not auto-tuned. It has a dynamic tempo because it's not beat-matched in a DAW. It often has complex chord progressions and key changes. This is also true of a lot of the "new music" the charts don't track.
And this is why the Grammys are also irrelevant. No one cares. We don't listen to that crap.
For example, look at the current top of the Billboard Hot 100.
1.) Easy On Me - Adele. Adele's music is always far from empty. She is a true artist.
2.) Stay - Kid Laroi. This may not be your type of music and there are certainly a lot vocal effect here, but there's a lot going on here rhythmically and melodically. The chord structure is also pretty unusual.
3.) We Don't Talk About Bruno - Lin-Manuel Miranda. LMM is a genius, but it's a Disney song, so let's skip this one.
4.) Glass Animals - A rare indie hit to make it to make it to the top, this one is arguable the "simplest" song on this list. It still feels like it has character and that the artist has put their stamp on it.
5.) Shivers - Ed Sheeran. If Sheeran's music feels tedious now, it might just be because his music has been at the top of the charts virtually non-stop for more than a decade. Still it's hard to deny his talent or argue that his songs are simple musical drivel.
It's fair to say that MOST of what is produced is derivative drivel, but I would say that's probably true of pretty much any era. There were tedious grunge artists, tedious metal artists, tedius disco artists, tedious arena rock artists, etc.
Going through those 100 songs, pop music doesn't seem to be noticeably worse than 20 years ago - except when it comes to the sheer volume of mumble rap. It stands out to me as uncharacteristically bad/monotonous/derivative/etc (and I say this as someone who was a big hip-hop fan all through the 80s/90s/2000s).
I don't think it's just a matter of taste, either, because I definitely don't like most of the chart (Adele/country/indie/etc), but I would never say it's lacking in musicality. Mumble rap is just irredeemably bad.
Funnily enough, there is an '80s revival going on with some modern pop right now, but again then you would have to compare the original '80s new wave, synth-pop music to it and not '80s rock.
https://www.bbc.com/news/newsbeat-52109397
As far as why there isn't as many modern rock top hits to compare to '80s ones... well, this decade didn't kill rock. That's a historical phenomenon that dates back to the 2000s or so.
Should have picked something more synthy like "I Ran" A Flock of Seagulls or A-Ha. Those are at least similar, and worth conceding their superiority to. But even that's still incomplete. The Ed Sheeran song has certain R&B beats and a sound that wasn't really present until like the late '90s imo. The Glass Animals song is even more R&B and is literally about loss and longing, so would be flattened by any song that's upbeat, completely incongruous from "Jump". Not too dissimilar, "Stay" is a mopey teenage relationship song, and thus would have a certain angsty lower energy.
So, not even the wrong genres, but wrong emotional beats entirely.
There are probably better, higher-energy, modern songs to compare with "Jump." Here are #19 and #20 in the current top 40.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cVaG6adE2mA
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4Oq4heYOdQ0 (an actual rock band, from Italy)
But again, because rock has ceased to be the influential force it used to be, comparisons are going to be very imprecise. And Top 40 itself is a snapshot, not necessarily the best an era has to offer. For reference, here are some pop songs in the past couple years that have been bigger hits both in terms of the charts and the critics:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4NRXx6U8ABQ
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TUVcZfQe-Kw
There has never been a time in history when more great music was being created and made accessible to the masses than today. And I say that as a crotchety jazz nerd.
I listen to old music because it bangs and it’s real. I feel like this article posits a perceived problem and then makes no attempt to read between the lines to understand why no one is listening to a garbage product.
> Some people—especially baby boomers—tell me that this decline in music is simply the result of lousy new songs. Music used to be better, or so they say. The old songs had better melodies, more interesting harmonies, and demonstrated genuine musicianship, not just software loops, Auto-Tuned vocals, and regurgitated samples.
In fact the second part of the article (after that paragraph) is much more interesting than the first. It argues that the music industry tries very hard to bury and hide genuinely new music (and ways of making it), by fear of cannibalizing the old (?), and that it is killing itself in the process.
There is no particular reason for that except that the 20 yo artists have to try something new and they are the models of the 10 / 15 yo.
What's interesting is that the new models don't seem so hugely more interesting than the best of the old ones. Maybe young people got wiser, maybe the music industry got enough material to play safe, minimize costs and keep advertising and selling the old tunes.
I read it a bit more nuanced: that the industry is failing to discover and promote new music because it's too preoccupied with making "safe bets" to profit from old music, and part of that is using lawsuits to defend it against plagiarism, which has the side effect of actively stifling new music.
For reference check this: https://youtu.be/jzgLavD4vD4 vs this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SFDOSIecALU
Bob Dylan couldn’t make proper songs. That’s enough HN for me today.
> September 29, 1961 / 20-Year-Old Singer Is Bright New Face at Gerde’s Club / By ROBERT SHELTON / https://archive.nytimes.com/www.nytimes.com/books/97/05/04/r...
> Resembling a cross between a choir boy and a beatnik, Mr. Dylan has a cherubic look and a mop of tousled hair he partly covers with a Huck Finn black corduroy cap. His clothes may need a bit of tailoring, but when he works his guitar, harmonica or piano and composes new songs faster than he can remember them, there is no doubt that he is bursting at the seams with talent.
To be absolutely clear, more people preferred Dylan's songs as a cover because, from that same 1961 review, "Mr. Dylan’s voice is anything but pretty. He is consciously trying to recapture the rude beauty of a Southern field hand musing in melody on his porch. All the “husk and bark” are left on his notes and a searing intensity pervades his songs." Or from his Wikipedia entry: 'Many early songs reached the public through more palatable versions by other performers, such as Joan Baez'
That you don't recognize it as talent seems therefore more a matter of personal taste. That same review ends with "But if not for every taste, his music-making has the mark of originality and inspiration, all the more noteworthy for his youth."
Your reference is to a 2016 recording of 'All Along the Watchtower'?? Surely you should juxtapose Dylan's performance with that of Hendrix, recorded only 6 months later than Dylan's.
But even then, when I think of "Mr. Tambourine Man" and "The Times They Are a-Changin'", I think of Dylan, not The Byrds or another cover.
In any case, the comparison seems rather pointless. I like Disturbed's cover of "The Sound of Silence" better than the original. That doesn't mean Simon and Garfunkel didn't have a shred of musical talent.
Forget complexity or originality, just use the same patterns as the last 10 years.
Modern production can be good some people pull it off, but not without singers who sing in a similar cadence and timbre. People who want to sound like someone else rather than being influenced by other people's sounds.
Out with the new back to tye new-old?
Why go outside and listen to some guy in the street or go at a concert in an abandoned factory if you can just lazily put on a pair of headphones and have hundreds of years worth of genius compositions impeccably recorded ready at your fingertips?
Some of you may say that taking inspiration from other artists is a big part of making new music, so the fact that any young lad can access such a catalog must mean he can get creative right away, right? Nope, because before recorded sounds if you took inspiration (and maybe lessons) from a matured and acclaimed musician you would then go back to your town and do your own thing. Few people would have known the original artist and after his death maybe a few sheets of music would be all that remained of him. Having learned from him you would have killed it after his death and your creative endeavor wouldn't get buried just because people have a better record playing at home
Recorded music is one of the very first automations, and it has slowly automated 99% of professional musicians out of a job.
Your argument of recorded music vs. live music also doesn't make sense- why is a record more recorded than sheets music? If a piece of music is literally written down and can be replicated, it's no less recorded than the most pristine lossless sound file.
There is ample evidence you are simply wrong. Recorded music is replacing live music in every possible way. People play recorded music at their weddings and parties - once a staple of live musicians. People play recorded music while working - one of the main places where people used to hum and sing themselves. Where once one might pull out a guitar, today they are more likely to pull out a phone.
Sure, live concerts still exist - but this is more like the difference between going to cinema vs watching a movie at home, or eating out at a restaurant vs cooking at home.
Writing (and copyright) has been snuffing out oral traditions for thousands of years. Music was the last bastion of folklore for a long, since reading and writing sheet music has never been a widely taught skill, and recording technology only appeared very recently.
But today we are essentially living in the first era where there is no folklore, no art of and by the people. The way this will impact culture moving on is extremely hard to predict, but scary.
It was reasonably common for people to have a piano in the parlor (if you were affluent enough to have a parlor), or some other instrument, and to entertain yourself by playing the latest "hits" from sheet music.
There's also a flip side in that when comparing what we read with a heard performance, we become far more intuitively aware of the additional improvisation-based elements that a good, 'inspired' performance can bring to the music. The sheet music itself is a bit like a structural sketch, a blueprint that ought to be suitably "ornamented" in a good performance.
Also in my experience the correlation between "likes music" and "likes to go to concerts" for people is not direct.
One more point, I'm one of those people who are not heavily into improv, so if the band is performing a version of a song I like that is very different from the album version there's a good chance I might dislike it. I'm not proud of that and of course they're free to do what they wnat with their music, but I like "a live version of the song" and not "a live reinterpretation with everything different", maybe that's also why I dislike jazz.
Why go to a live concert at all, then?
There are vocaloid concerts, and I would not expect the live to diverge from the recording, so people don’t attend for different takes on the song they know.
EDM was quite possibly the biggest genre for live music this past decade, and it came with many memes of Skrillex "performing" by pushing a single button on a MacBook at concerts.
There's a lot of good new music nowadays, but you have to look for it, and it doesn't have the same impact as, for example, hearing White Rabbit for the first time. It's nearly all acquired taste.
So, I think the problem here is that we lack impactful music because of a decaying culture, over-commercialization of the industry, and a lack of technical innovation.
What can we do about it? That's the same question everyone is asking about nearly everything else these days.
Something I have noticed about the old radio hits from the 50s-70s is how fun many of them are to whistle. Most contemporary pop, rock, r&b, country can’t hold a candle to the popular songwriters of that era in terms of whistle-ability.
What I take away is that the popular songwriting style in that time was very “melody-forward” like in the days of tin-pan alley. Today I can tell that many songs are written in a more “mood-forward” way, and artists are more interested in exploring tambre than to make an absolute ear-worm of a melody. The result IMO is that those mid-century songs will have a lot more staying power.
My gut feeling is it came down to money - music producers / distributors realized they could separate the working musicians from the pretty face. As far as I'm concerned, this is the basic problem with movies too - the majority of movies are just a vehicle for whatever flavor-of-the-month pretty face they need to splash on a billboard. There's very little artistic about either music or movies, they are just "new" and industry expects us to eat what they feed us.
That isn't to say there isn't great music out there, and I'd argue it is the golden age if you are someone who wants to produce anything creative and take it directly to an audience. It just means that there's a breakdown between the "mainstream" and the "good".
When suddenly it wasn't about the music any more, it was about the video showing the music?
It follows the bands that inherited the mantle of seminal New York bands such as Sonic Youth. For the most part it's what you expect, with some great historical cuts, interviews, the new bands reflecting on and praising their predecessors, etc.
*SPOILER*
But it has a surprise ending. Suddenly there's a different tone from the old bands. They disparage the newcomers: The older bands completely rejected what their predecessors did; they destroyed it. The new bands that copy their music completely miss the point; what they are doing is antithetical to the art.
And I agree: We still have people playing rock'n'roll and hip-hop generations later. Are you kidding me? How shameful! How boring! Heck, someone play big band at least. Rock and hip-hop were revolutionary artforms; they didn't try to sound like Frank Sinatra or (for hip-hop) the Beatles - in fact, they tried to sound completely different, to demonstrate their rejection of the prior generation, to throw it in everyone's faces. Until I hear someone completely reject rock and hip-hop, burn them down to ashes (artistically), and piss me off, it's all bullsh-t. (And I mean it; I haven't listed to this crap in years.)
Isn't that electronic music? No recognizable instruments, often no lyrics or song structure.
Just because there are no lyrics and it is no longer technically a song does not mean that the music has no structure. Saying so is needlessly pedantic.
There has been zero innovation or new genre in Electronic music in the last 7 years. the 90's popularized techno, house, trance, abstract hiphop and drum'n'bass. 2000 popularized minimal techno and dubstep. Since then? Nothing.
Music is not like a new phone. There are no "upgrades".
Maybe it is futile to conceptualize old / new music? We have music, and then just an expansion of the catalog.
This is how it is when people can pick their music more freely instead of fed by the industry and from a seemingly endless list not just from those stamped as 'new'.
No killing is going on here. Music that people like will be listened to still, regardless of their age. It is just much much more out there from earlier than now, due to longer period and more people throughout the history.
Disagree. Listen to "I'll Be" by Edwin McCain, then "You and Me" by Lifehouse.
Ed Sheeran upgraded "Thinking Out Loud" with "Perfect."
"Girlfriend" by Avril Lavigne is an improved "Hey Mickey."
For me “stories” (acoustic covers by the Scary Pockets crew and the same model of rotating guest singers & musicians — without the fixed members though Lerman is generally on guitar) is a daily with a 95% hit rate, but about half the originals I wouldn't listen to at all.
Even though his version reached a decent #35 on Billboard, Aretha's version completely eclipsed it. Reportedly, Redding conceded that "it's her song now" (paraphrasing).
To me, he could mean she gets used to living without him when he's on the road and treats it like her home when he gets there, instead of theirs. If he's going to give her most of his money, at least she could make nice.
I've also seen it claimed that Leonard Cohen thought Pentatonix' cover of Hallelujah was the best he'd ever heard but I can't find any confirmation for that.
I think the 70s are also around the same time that a lot of familiar genres started to emerge, while music from before then is often dismissed as "oldies" or saved for special occasions - e.g. old crunchy recordings of Christmas songs.
Alas, this is BS.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pRjsu9-Vznc
Thanks for the information though, I'll do some A/B testing to see if it makes any difference to me.
I like old music because old music really is better. Most of the (non-"alt") music that I listen to was written and recorded before I was born.
It's not that old music is "killing" new music. It's that new music has been slowly killing itself since the 2000s. Even the Backstreet Boys and Three 6 Mafia seem fresh and interesting compared to the stuff I've been hearing on the radio over the last decade.
Even probably the best (IMO) pop artist of the current era, Stromae, writes songs that are mostly the same hooks and background elements repeated over and over for 4 minutes, with no change in dynamics or structure.
I'm honestly pretty sick of all the 60s-80s stuff I've been listening to, but what else is there?
Don't get me wrong: there was plenty of stupid garbage in those decades too. But the great stuff truly is great beyond most of what we get today, at least when it comes to stuff that's considered "mainstream".
But if the record industry wants to destroy itself, who am I to stop them? Keep listening to (and paying for!!) alt stuff, that's where the personality and creativity is.
Listen to a whole album. This is THE fundamental problem with streaming.
Any band that produced one good song probably produced quite a few other good ones. Bands that got pigeonholed into a "sound" probably produced other songs on their albums that weren't in that sound.
Even for mega-popular bands like "Journey", for example, 3/4 of the songs on their albums never get played anywhere. You'll probably find something you really like in that set.
Sadly, this seems to break down starting in the late 1990s.
The best place too look for these (since the pigeonholing is often at the very start of their commercial recording, with the label pushing them into a particular niche) is stuff later than their most popular works (which are often what fuels their ability to ditch the narrow commercial optimization strategy that the label would impose for riskier, more diverse approaches.)
It's probably because this guy wrote it:
Well, as you mentioned yourself, there are lots of great musicians doing their thing, but mostly flying under the radar - you just have to find them, which has become easier thanks to Spotify et al. But then it's sad to see that they only have 30.000 or even 3.000 "monthly listeners", while Ava Max has 30.000.000. And, I did notice that even for new music I tend to be attracted to stuff that sounds more or less "retro", but I guess most music that's not > 90% electronically processed sounds retro nowadays.
Ultimately, curation matters. If iheartmedia doesn't care about your personal interests then none of the toplists are going to be useful to you. Find individual curators who are principled and like what you like instead.
Just a thought.
The proportion of people younger than 30 is shrinking everywhere there is 4G and more.
Those mixes and masters were optimized in a world where everyone listened to vinyl, radio, home hifi, and crappy car stereos. This biases the whole production in certain ways, which together with fashions of those time colour the sound and dates it. Remasters (I think) remove some these biases. The new targets are headphones and streaming.
New recordings can and should sound very differently unless they are pastiches.
Some people like the old sound because it's already etched in their brains, and they want to hear it again. They've associated it with "genuine" and "honest" and whatever.
No, music back then wasn’t better in general, we’re just not listening to the shit songs from that time. In 20 years time we’ll still be listening to all the good music from today, have forgotten about all the crap, and then decide that music from the 20’s really was better that whatever we’re producing in the 40’s.
Listen to "One After 909" from Anthology (or the 1963 'bootleg' release).
Then listen to the version from Let It Be.
"Production" such as it is is, I'd think, 'minimal' in most senses - there's some mics in front of singers and amps. One was outside, one inside. But the sound is different. The performance is definitely different in 1969 - so much looser, relaxed, and more accomplished. In some ways it's hard to think it's the exact same band a mere 6 years apart (yes, excepting Billy Preston added keys in 1969).
I'd always wished they'd have re-visited a few more of those early ones (originals or covers), just to get that sense of development, progress and transformation in such a short time. It's interesting that we ended up getting at least one song captured so 'far apart' from itself.
Nowadays audio professionals are looking for any new technology that will help imprint the analog artifacts of these years on the clean digital recordings.
computers can take us there but not so long as MIDI is the standard. the 'problem' (which is really more of an opportunity to improve and go beyond) is not MIDI but the conceptual theoretical framework of the 12-notes keyboard underlying all 'western' traditions.
but don't get me wrong, it's no coincidence that this 12 notes system is so widespread, it really is very well made. anything that attempts to take music beyond it needs to be even better, which ain't easy as it's quite something already.
in summary, computer technology has so far just made cheaper and easier to do the same things that were already possible. no new things have been tried yet regarding the choice of notes to use.
However, putting on my devil's advocate hat for a moment, this leans heavily on the idea that humanity didn't already explore non-12T music already, which is a difficult argument to make.
It is false that the 12T model originated on keyboards.
Finally, it also fails to note the reason why we have 12TET. Western music is relatively unique among world music cultures in the dominant role that harmony plays (contrast with the highly evolved classical musical forms from India, which are incredibly rhythmically and melodically sophisticated but lack almost any notion of harmony (let alone harmonic movement) at all).
If you want to make music that is rich harmonically, it is likely that at some point you will want to be able to modulate between similar relationships (call them "scales" if you like) but starting from different initial tones. Doing this without it all going horribly wrong requires ET.
If you're going to do purely melodic, or purely modal, work, then sure, you don't need it and you could argue that it's even "harmful".
That said, a lot of music today is over produced- levels set too high, etc.
Also, a lot of pop and r&b music today doesn’t seem very creative to me- pounding bass line, trivially simple melody, chanted, simple, explicit lyrics, and then depend on production to try to make it interesting. This obviously appeals to a lot of people but maybe not so much to others.
Mass market music is intentionally formulaic; search the web for “Doctor Hook”.
On the other hand, there are some super creative things out there. I like genre-bending remixes personally like Pentatonix’ cover of Fleet Foxes’ “White Winter Hymnal”, or Steven Seagulls cover of “Thunderstruck”.
Point is, that the stuff that will fall in your lap is mass market and not as creative IMO as pop was in earlier generations. However there’s great stuff out there; you just have to look for it.
Also the tools to find music you might like are better than ever, eg you can hum or sing into Shazam or Siri a snippet of a song you liked, online you have lyric searches. And all the music services have ML to find songs you might like based on songs you like.
if there's not as much money to be made selling new music I think it's mostly because there is so much new music. anyone can record an album now, or whatever, release it, do the whole nine yards, without having to go through that ridiculous hurdle so many years ago of "getting a deal with a label". if you're into a whole genre of music, that's great, but there's like 18 thousand other genres that are all just as valid now, unlike in the 1980s when there were something like five. All the bands that you think are great and have changed your life listening to are not anyone else's in your town. it's as though the music industry has spread across the whole galaxy to millions of planets and it would be impossible for there to ever be some artists that are as important as names like the Police or Madonna were in the 80s.
It was widely understood that even then, while "getting a record deal" was the only way you'd have a career, the publishing companies were generally in it to rip the musicians through a shredder and extract as much cash as they can before discarding the talent, except in the very unlikely case that said talent did well enough to still be viable for more albums.
I'm sort of amazed that industry hasn't just thrown in the towel at this point, they were basically gatekeepers on recording and distribution technology.
I have a thought, which is that modern music production and distribution have blurred the lines between "recorded" and "live" music.
I'm a musician. The only way to hear my band is to attend one of our concerts. There's no reason for us to even attempt to commercialize our music. It doesn't need to have any lasting or widespread appeal. If we get an audience of 100 people, that's huge for us. Because of the novelty of our performances (never the same mistake twice), we don't have to be perfect in order to interest the audience. Nothing we play is "produced."
Prior to online music distribution, there was a sharp distinction between live and recorded music. If you wanted to reach beyond those 100 people, it cost an arm and a leg to get your music into commercial distribution, so it had to be targeted to a mass audience, or at least a big enough audience of enthusiasts to cover your costs. There was an economic reason to be good in the sense of having that widespread and lasting value.
Today, it costs no more to stream your music than to play it live. Maybe less. So it may just be that the financial incentives weigh towards creating throw-away recordings that last long enough to replace them with the next one. Just like with live music, your job isn't so much "the performance of a lifetime," as it is, "get them to come back next time."
Today, if you move outside of mass commercial music, there is plenty of great new music just like there always was. That's because, while the economics of popular music have changed, the economics of great new music really haven't.
Disclaimer: When I'm not playing jazz, I'm accompanying fiddlers and folk musicians. I've opted out of the popular music scene.
Music is too disposable now. With my spotify subscription, I can still listen to those albums from the 90s/early 2000s over and over again, but there's just so much new music. Even new albums that I really enjoy, I'll listen to them a handful of times and forget about them.
Anyway, I spend thousands of dollars on amazing music on bandcamp, and the artists get a higher percentage from bandcamp than a studio, so I'm making the best choice for me and the future of my music.
Producing music is easier than ever so there's more music out than ever. Listening to music is easier than ever.
If you're relying on mass media (tv/radio) and big labels to find music you'll enjoy, you're doing it wrong.
The curators nowadays are Youtube channels and Spotify playlists and indie labels on Bandcamp, I'm following music subreddits, finding stuff on Soundcloud.
New music isn't dying, it's striving.
For Bandcamp, I follow artists and labels there. Whenever an artist I like has a release on a label I don't know I check it out.
There's also this tool from the Hype Machine that finds Bandcamp links from a Spotify playlist.
Are there some specific kinds of music you're looking for?
Personally I think autotune sucks all the emotional connection out of music. It is one thing that Miku Hatsune sings like that, it's another thing that Miley Cyrus does. (Not to pick her out as a particularly great musician but she is a competent singer with a beautiful voice that stands on its own without processing.)
Autotune music just washes over people without having any effect.
When there is autotune music on at the gas station people can't tell you who the artists is sometimes they aren't even sure if it is rap or country music. Ask people on the street to actually name a Kanye West song and most of them struggle. I'm almost tempted to say that "Kanye West doesnt't exist or that he's just famous because his wife is famous."
I am highly skeptical of this assertion.
People can burrow into a specific small set of bands and music styles and never ever need to move outside of it now.
It's seems quaint that 20 years ago my primary source of new music was SNL and late shows.
Now, spotify/pandora will give you entry to exactly what you want and keep giving it to you, forver.
And similarly, your dislike of auto tune likely reflects your cultural upbringing more than anything else.
There is even research showing the variations in timing follow large macro cycles.
None of this is random or mistakes when we are talking about high level players.
Some is deliberate. Some is totally unconscious.
But not mistakes.
Whether GP’s thesis has merit, I have no idea.
If you haven't at least tried to listen to My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy with an open mind, you can't really trash on his music. If you have, and still don't like it, that's fair.
Any ignorance of Kanye West song names may simply be a reflection of his more avant-garde new albums not having the same memorable hooks as old ones, but I can at least think of one recent song by him ("Donda").
The go to software is Meloldyne. It's...crazy capable. It can even return single notes in polyphonic music.
Watch this from about the 3:00 mark on: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=smOmTZWddrE&t=185s
(Note this video is very extreme editing, it absolutely possible (in fact easier) to use Melodyne in a way that sounds utterly natural)
It can be set to be very subtle to the point of imperceptible, keeping the vibrato and the portamento, to the point it is impossible to pinpoint its usage. But it kinda has a sound: vocals that go trough it sound absolutely flawless.
Whether regular people can perceive it, I have no idea.
If the singer is somewhat good (so that the correction is small) and it's applied well, you have no chance. Even musicians will have a hard time.
But you can definitely notice it in sum - everything sounds pitch-perfect and all the little misses, which might be stylistic in and by itself [0], just go missing.
[0] A good sound engineer will of course know when not to use it, but the unintentional characteristics go missing.
It’s not just autotune, but also the fact people today can make almost infinite punch-ins, a lot of music is time adjusted, samplers and modern synthesizers are in perfect tuning (compared to orchestra/guitar/synths of the past).
IMO “perfect music” has its own sound, which is a good sound, but there isn’t much to go after it. Maybe the next wave will be a little looser when it comes to this.
Yes. What you're thinking of is "autotune" as in totally overdone, which is the signature sound people know. What the parent is referring to is autotune as in tone correction (which is, funnily enough, what the autotune software did, unless you turned it to 11). And that's everywhere; it's basically a standard part of a post-production pipeline right now. The thing is that you really can't notice it; it's just that singers hit the tone just a bit better.
And even live concerts are not safe, you can easily (and cheaply!) do that in real-time by now.
In summary, it was used a lot longer (like old Mac 68k days) by a lot more artists than you realize. T-Pain turned an aid for lackluster artists into a form of art all its own. And the industry was pissed.
Used sparingly it can turn people with terrible pitch into reasonably good singers. Turned up a bit more gets you a pristine sound, which sometimes pops pleasantly but often enough ends up bland and less memorable. You may have to have an ear for music a bit to notice it.
Once you notice it, it is everywhere.
I am not a record producer, but I feel like Autotune is a big part of the reason that we don't have many modern classics. I would love some producers' hot takes on this article.
Who are the biggest artists today? Off the top of my head: Taylor Swift, Ed Sheeran, Adele, Billie Eilish, all of them use pretty much natural-sounding vocals.
And the big artists that use Autotune and vocal effects like The Weeknd, Kid Laroi, and Post Malone don't do it to the same degree. Their voices certainly retain some unique character
I think Kanye may be a terrible example for your point since people tend to listen to his music for the lyrics, which are often well crafted. Your point makes more sense for mass produced pop music where the lyrics for almost every major song are written by ~6 different groups. In that case most of the lyrics tend to have similar tone and themes and so it matters much less who is singing them.
Can you not create emotionally resonant music without vocals? You'd be hard pressed to find someone who doesn't think you can. What about with no vocals and only electronic instruments like synths. You can. So why does adding a level of "electronic" feeling production to vocals do anything different? Sure, there's _bad_ autotune. There's also bad singing without it. But there's nothing inherently wrong with autotune.
But Autotune/Melodyne being used to make vocals flawless is sort of “removing” flaws from vocal tracks. This would be similar to replacing an orchestra with Gemeral MIDI instruments. It is technically perfect, but there’s less expression.
Whether this is good or bad I don’t know, but part of the charm of old recordings is the infinite variations of tuning and timing.
As a producer, my sense is that people who refer to "autotune" generally don't know what they mean when they say it, but they really want to identify some point in the history of music where things became "artificial". That's not how it works. Plus, people don't just throw a vocal track through some magical automatic tuner and get a perfect result. There is an unbelievable amount of manual work involved to produce a high quality vocal track.
This stuff has been going on since the beginning of pop music. Most pop hits since the 70s have had spliced vocals where ideal takes are combined. Since advanced sampling began in the 80s, we've had manual pitching and adjustment of tiny vocal clips. That became easier in the 90s with computers. In the 2000s, when full-featured DAWs and plugins became practical, we've had more automatic pitch correction, like the auto-tune vocal effect you heard from T-Pain and others. But there's always something manual involved, and there's a lot of work from the vocalist to make this happen.
Max Martin, the producer of countless pop hits starting in the 90s, has detailed many times that he combines dozens of vocal takes and corrects pitch throughout the entire vocal tracks. This is normal. People actually want this.
While pitch correction software is used subtly in a lot of recordings, OP is obviously meaning the sound that started with Cher snd Daft Punk in the early 2000s, and is now ubiquitous on modern radio.
EDIT: This guy is right about both of those tracks using Auto-Tune.
I'm also aware of what a vocoder is - even own a couple.
It's extremely widespread, even in classical music, but "literally all" is simply not true.
I knew someone who spent a lot of time in a small town in Alaska and told me how the people there were obsessed with guns. If there was a story in the newspaper about vandals shooting up an outhouse the story would be full of juicy details about what exact kind of ammunition was used because the people in that small town wanted to know.
Really I am not offended by artists who use vocoder effects that are in character like Kraftwerk. I do think though that there have been a few phenomena in music production that I see from a distance.
One of them is that the vocals are really different than they were before 1990. I don't mind that Cher song because it was fresh at the time. I never liked T-Pain and I can't stand modern rap. I got into an argument on the phone with the DJ of an urban music program at a local college radio station and told him I wanted to hear some rap that wasn't auto-tuned. (I am a big fan of rap up until M.F. Doom or so.)
He put on a track from Three feet high and rising and I was struck with how completely out of place it was compared to newer rap.
Another thing I noticed was how many artists who were highly productive in the 1970s became irrelevant in the 1980s. I love synth music like Depeche Mode and Information Society but it seemed like the pervasive use of synths and a "music word processor" had something to do with why Billy Joel and so many others got "too old to rock and roll."
Here is a circa 1980 track which I think is one of the best engineered tracks of all time
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kYGQe0kRb4o
what I like about it is how the vocals are kept distinct from the instrumentals such that the vocals have a strong effect almost like a-capella that you just don't see in the Punk genre that this track appears to be part of. I think there was a labor intensive process involved in "cutting holes" in the instrumentals in time-frequency space so that they didn't stomp on the vocals. Today I see technology used not to improve music but as a labor saving device and I think the quality suffers.
Whatever you can glean from that complaint (that they don't know about the intricacies of music production) isn't really a counter to that. I still think that overly-quantized tones from the vocals sounds like shit.
Kind of like a digitally altered image "being photoshopped" is a valid phrase, even when GIMP or some other software was actually used.
"Auto-Tune" is meaningless if you use it to refer to anything other than the specific effect popularized by Antares Auto-Tune.
That judgement is an aesthetic one though, and entirely subjective. Many people like the pitch "corrected" sound and there's nothing wrong with that. Personally I'd take Adele or Voces8 (the latter really know a thing or two about vocal pitch) over it any day of the week.
It's a very distinctive sound, horrendously overused and occupies a completely separate area in most people's minds than pitch tweaking.
I just listened to the current top 5 pop songs, and 3 of them would definitely fall in that category:
- Heat Waves, Glass Animals
- Need to Know, Doja Cat
- Stay, The Kid Laroi and Justin Beiber
Happily the #1, Adele's Easy on Me, has a very beautiful, human-sounding vocal track.
Meanwhile, breakdowns of Billie Eilish mixes show that Finneas, the producer, is using mostly techniques in principle reproducible on tape. Today's equipment and DAWs save time and space, but they are not what is creating the magic. It's easy to see.
To me, modern 'robotically accurate' music feels like creating food using salt, sugar, lemon, MSG and coffee powder. It technically covers all 5 flavors and should be able to create any culinary experience out of them. However, it shows the hubris of food science to think that the food experience can be summed up as some simple y = f(x) style mathematical equation of narrowly defined base variables.
It is great in the moment, but one-dimensional and shows the human hubris of thinking that the entire musical experience can be captured within these mathematically accurate beats and notes, ignoring all the nuance that a trained musician either accidentally or intentionally inserts into a playthrough.
> People actually want this.
I'll extend the food analogy a little bit. People want more MSG on their chips because that sells, and people want more sugar in their coke because that sells. But, it is never a person's answer for the best meal of their life. It is usually one that keeps rewarding you for revisiting it every time and one that evokes a deep sense of nostalgia, memories and emotions.
Tool's Wings for Marie hits as hard as it does, because you can hear the imperfections and crackle in Maynard's voice when as he mourns his mother through the song. It's emotion conveyed through musical nuance. You remove nuance, and you're stuck with songs that are the equivalent of 'eating chips'. Freddie Mercury's big performances and Van Halen's Eruption still cause goosebumps, decades after their heyday, and part of it is because they are nowhere close to 'perfect'. But, the heart of their music is found within those exact imperfections.
All pop music now feels sanitized. I recognize that it takes a LOT of effort and talent to continuously create sanitized works that everyone will like. I also recognize that this isn't exclusive to music. Marvel Movies and COD games are a reflection of that exact phenomenon in other media. But, that media is not made to last. I love the experience, but I want to move on to the shiny new thing within a week.
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I suspect that this was always true with commercial pop, but every half-decade there would be a new genre that would be created, whose pioneers would rule the pop world and stand above the commercially sanitized works for the duration of their reign. Backstreet boys, Spice Girls and Bon Jovi were just as sanitized as any artist today.
I went back to look the top selling albums of each year, and the sales numbers completely betray the narrative of our musical history. The albums that go on to become the highest sold over time [1] are rarely the ones that topped the billboards for their year [2]. A fraction of the top selling albums of all time are their highest selling album of the year.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_best-selling_albums
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_best-selling_albums_by...
But one thing you can see in the highest selling albums of all time that don't make it onto the yearly charts, is that they were usually popularizing a new musical movement. Nirvana, Metallica, Led Zep and Linkin Park were scratching new itches that their pop counterpoints did not touch. (I stick to rock, cuz I know more about rock).
Now, getting to anywhere near the top 10 needs a level of virality that can only be facilitated by huge marketing budgets or a short hooks that organically spread on the internet (tiktok recognized this and made an entire platform based on it). This means that a full albums from artists without a marketing army is shit out of luck if they want to enter the zeitgeist. Becoming a moderate success in their sub-genre is the best they can aspire to be. It is a double edged sword, every artists regresses to the mean sales afforded by a certain marketing budget.
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It is not all doom and gloom. Pop music may sounds creatively bankrupt, but there is so much amazing music right under the surface.
Clipping. ,The Dear Hunter and Vulpeck are moderately successful bands that I've gotten pop listeners effortlessly hooked on, and they're all doing really creative stuff. If these bands had the sort of marketing budgets that pop artists do, then I would not be surprised if they started topping charts too. If anything, I think they would live far longer in our cultural memory than any one of the dozen milquetoast albums that are topping the charts right now.
What is "pop music" even? Maybe the Top 40 crowd is just always going to be a certain style for mass market audiences, and will always sound sanitized and overproduced because of production styles. But that's not all pop music.
> Nirvana, Metallica, Led Zep and Linkin Park were scratching new itches that their pop counterpoints did not touch. (I stick to rock, cuz I know more about rock).
Hybrid Theory was the first album I ever bought, and even as much as I appreciated it then and I do now, I do not think they were the opposite of commercially sanitized. The production sounds as fancy and artificial as any pop band created in this era. Their sound was far more family-friendly than contemporaries such as Korn. Heck, even the original band's name was Hybrid Theory until Warner suggested they change it to be adjacent to Limp Bizkit in alphabetical order.
I think rock is being over-lionized in this discussion in general. Everyone remembers grunge fondly, less so hair metal.
Sure, most people outside of music production (unless they've, say, seen the documentary on it) probably don't know that the sound they are referring to is the characteristic sound of a particular extreme setting in Antares Auto-Tune (which may or may not now actually be produced by other software), but I think they know exactly what sound they are talking about when they say it, rather than referring to some kind of fuzzy transition in the overall feel of music.
And it's kind of weird that as a producer you wouldn't be aware of that (upset, perhaps, by the publix characterizing the tool by that particular use, I could see, but not even recognizing the public association is odd.)
Max Martin certainly has a nose for hits, but it's almost self-fulfilling. When he's producing everything, he sort of dictates what people "like" and other producers follow. I quote like because what's played on the radio is not necessarily what people actually like, it's what they're made to like through various marketing schemes. So I sort of balk at the notion that people want Max Martin style music. It's just what they're given.
It's also a bit misleading that people have been recording this way since the beginning of pop music. Yes, lots of takes and doubles, but these Max Martin and similar production style DAW sessions have literally hundreds of tracks that actually get mixed down into the final song.
https://www.soundonsound.com/people/sandy-vee-recording-katy...
Not sure what autotune has to do with anything. It's over-use in the top hits can be annoying, but who gives a fuck. You don't have to listen to that music. The vast majority of music I listen to, across a wide spectrum of genres, doesn't use it.
Also, in different decades, different styles were mainstream. Today you can find music for any genre that was popular in any decade and the best of it will also sound great; it's just not present everywhere or readily picked out for you. It's quite likely that you don't like the decade, you simply like the music style and didn't find the niche that is still producing it.
The Monkees were more popular than the Beatles, but you'll never get the Mojo magazine audience to admit that.
Not a great example - whilst Kanye is undeniably a vacuous prat these days, he was one of the most influential music producers in his generation and has two, arguably three, albums that are widely regarded as having raised the bar for hip-hop. He's won 22 Grammys.
Have you heard "Jesus walks"? The man was brilliant.
He has certainly contributed more creative talent to the world than Kim Kardashian. They were both extraordinarily famous before they married.
It'd depend on the generation of course. Maybe GenX/Boomers would struggle with Kanye ( and I say this as a GenXer ) but I'd guess a lot of millenials/genZ's would struggle a bit with the Rolling Stones. I'm not sure what either proves.
My parents are in their 70s and were never that into music. My dad kind of liked the Beach Boys, but if I asked either of them to name a Beatles song they would struggle as they were pretty much out of school by the time they reached superstardom. I, on the other hand, listen to tons of new music, but if you asked me to name a random song on the radio, I probably wouldn't be able to name the artist primarily because I don't give a shit about the kind of music they play on the radio. I don't think new radio music is any better or worse than old radio music. It's always been corporate-driven pablum, autotune or not. As for autotune itself, it can be effective when used appropriately as a texture, and not necessarily as something to pitch-correct a bad singer.
I entirely disagree on music dying, though. The bland stuff that washes over people is made to be bland and wash over people. You don't have to listen to it.
We're living in a golden age of music production if anything, with every conceivable taste catered to. The challenges are on the consumption side: finding the music you like and forming a meaningful relationship with it can be challenging in a time of such excess.
It might be survivour bias and was always the case that most music sounded similar within a given time period, but it could also be a result of high prompted and manufactured artists. The article does sort of touches on this subject when talking about which artists get promoted. That’s really what we’re seeing in movies, TV, design and much more. The risk is eliminated and only the safest option is push forward.
The reason music "died" around the time of Napster, is that editorial distribution died. Before Napster, if you wanted to listen to music you either had the radio - which played the same thing for everyone, or you really had to dig record crates. Now it's completely possible to exclusively listen to hyperpop-house-vaporwave artists and not know who is charting. In short if you were expecting someone to curate your music, that mechanism no longer exists; likewise if the algorithm of your streaming service of choice is never playing Kanye for you, you might be confused to why everyone thinks he's so famous.
Photos of people now show a perfect, clear, soulless and uncanny skin. It is the same thing when I hear autotuned artists.
As opposed to the 1960s, when nearly every popular album was actually recorded by the Wrecking Crew, not whatever muppets happened to be on the cover.
Me: Hate to say it, but I don't think it's VH1 that's changed.
::pregnant pause::
Him: Ouch... My youth.
You say music died not when Buddy Holly and the Big Bopper went down, but with the advent of one musical effect among many in the recording signal path (and I bet a lot more of your favorite artists use Autotune than you realize). Emotional connection is just what you like about the music. Many people think Death Metal has no feeling, or that Yacht Rock is dead-eyed pablum, or that any toddler could make a dance music track. After all it's just a drum machine, or cocaine, or screaming, and where's the love?
>Ask people on the street to actually name a Kanye West song and most of them struggle.
It's been a long time since my phone set on shuffle allowed me to memorize the title of anything. There just isn't the repetition that fixed-format radio and "I can afford one 12-song album per month," gave people. That's how you memorize song names, or you hum it into Vocaroo and hope an internet stranger helps you out. It's absolutely irrational to blame Autotune for this state of affairs, and if anything it made songs more identifiable! It just so happens that people and song titles aren't as tightly connected anymore. I don't know how you can say that without knowing a song's title the music doesn't even exist.
>it's another thing that Miley Cyrus does. (Not to pick her out as a particularly great musician but she is a competent singer with a beautiful voice that stands on its own without processing.)
That's funny because my way of dismissing her is to call her a Brenda Lee ripoff. Thus, emotion gets sucked out in many different ways. There's no accounting for taste.
My free advice is to check out the stuff people don't think is music, because not-music is the future of music, and I feel there's probably always something valuable in evolution. If you don't like it, that doesn't mean you're closed-minded, but if you reject everything about it out of hand, you might be. Not that there's anything wrong with that.
https://www.reddit.com/r/WeAreTheMusicMakers/comments/s6l9tk...
Not about autotune per se but about what makes a great singer is not the perfection of their voice but the imperfections, that make it recognizable.
Autotune irons out imperfections; so does the grid. A big problem of new music is it's too perfect, which makes it sound dead.
To be fair, "Old Town Road" is sort of both.
I care about privacy, so I opted out from having a youtube/instagram/facebook account. I never used streaming because I listen to albums and want to own my music.
The result is that I don't even get notified when my favourite musicians recommend a band or even release a new album.
Where is the product for me? I am not in any of their data and just sit here listening to an offline library I built more than 10 years ago, desperate but struggling to find new stuff
Oh, you didn't lose much. My playlists are decimated monthly by "video deleted/unavailable" and "not showing 3 unlisted video" or something along the lines. And there is no way to know which video that was. I don't even care to add music to playlists anymore, I just search for it.
Also, algorithms stopped delivering new stuff long ago. The right column is full of tricking you into watching some promoted bs unrelated to the video.
Am I somehow in the minority of people happy with their stuff? I never go to youtube for music. Should I?
Anecodtally, YtM seems to be better for EDM these days; my friends, who are mostly spotify, complain that they're not presented with the same quality and variety of music as I am via YtM. (EDM is just a portion of my tastes, but it's where I have noted a difference in perception between YtM and Spotify).
Sounds like Spotify works for you; if you're finding that "albums you might like" is giving you sufficient good new picks, then why change. If you feel that it's not giving you enough, it might be worth trying YtM (I've been using it for years, and don't know how much that impacts its ability to offer me new music I like, so obviously YMMV).
I suppose there are still some magazines about music on the news stands, but I'm not sure if they cover "new music" instead of "new releases" of the same old music. I looked into my podcast app and there is a music category. Perhaps there are some interesting podcasts presenting new music. You could still use streaming and then buy the physical releases of the music you like.
You've said you're against streaming, but you could just use it as a way to find new music before buying the physical albums. I use the radio feature in Spotify all the time and often end up finding new music through it - you basically pick an artist or song you like and it makes you a playlist of similar music. You do need to change the radio start point occasionally if the algorithm starts getting repetitive, but it works well enough
For new Metal releases, I used to subscribe to the RSS feed for a Metal torrent tracker, I mostly stopped listening to bigger bands, but before that, the notifications were better than what I could find elsewhere.
If he keeps releasing more stuff, I might actually have to buy an external CD drive to rip his music instead of waiting till I visit my parents ;)
If you're focused on a getting a multi-track experience, I would strongly recommend looking up live show recordings of some of your favorite artists. You will have to use YouTube or SoundCloud or wherever because it's rare that an artists release a show on something like a bluray. I have seen it in Kpop but not much in the west. Netflix and Disney plus have gotten into releasing documentary concerts like Taylor Swift's Folklore: The Long Pond Studio Sessions.
The Billboard's top 100 is still a pretty decent way to expose yourself to new releases.
Personally I miss Google Play Music and its automatic playlists A LOT.
for just one of many examples, may I present Dark Side of the Moonshine by Poor Man's Whisky?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qF_nYQE1K3I&ab_channel=PoorM...
or Time/Breath by Greensky Bluegrass?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Uw1bJrFdCjY
New music is reviving old music. Makes the original Floyd recordings sound slow, ponderous, pretentious, and boring, even to the ears of this old fan.
Early 90's is also when various underground styles and genres--house, techno, rave, jungle, industrial, were a thing enough to be easily discoverable even without the Internet. It was also then when 70's music was old enough to be called classic rock.
Then:
- Rap, techno, and other electronic-based styles of music showed that one-person music groups could be a thing.
- Music production technology started a trend of getting cheaper and cheaper as PCs became capable of real-time audio processing and non-band genres proved themselves viable.
Combine that with the Internet and it's not surprising we have an oversupply problem.
Then you have the Internet's effects on any type of media - almost costless to distribute, streaming and mp3 players enabling people to listen to exactly what they want anywhere they want, and social media's bubble effects. So it's not surprising we have a problem with things attaining cultural significance.
It wasn't like this in the past so music from the time when it wasn't has a special nostalgia.
It has never been a better time to get new music if you are willing to escape your bubbles and look, though.
> So the problem isn’t a lack of good new music. It’s an institutional failure to discover and nurture it.
It really looks like the music industry as an institution is failing, and I'm fine with that. It's not needed anymore.
I read Gioia's book, and respect his opinions on music. I think he is missing at least one point:
This finding makes complete sense if you assume there is nothing fundamentally better about new music than old music, but that there is much more old music, and that it is better curated.
There are many more of what we could call "great songs" from the last 100 years than in the last 18 months, not because music was better in the past, but because there was so much more of it. It's also really easy to find this old music now, because everybody knows about it, has written about it, has put it in lists, has included it in soundtracks, and so on. So, if you only cared about quality, and you picked your playlist more or less at random from a collection of "great music", you would expect the vast majority of what you listened to to have come from the past. Which is what we see.
That's even setting aside recommendation algorithms, which give you more of what it thinks you want. How many songs from the last few months are there that are similar to the one I said liked? A few, probably. But, compared to the number of songs from the last 50 years, it's probably a small number. So, if you catch me randomly listening to music Spotify thinks I like, it's going to be mostly older music, even if I have no preference regarding the age of what I listen to.
The relative prevalence of new music makes sense in the past, when you got all your music from a few sources, and those sources were incentivized to push your toward the latest products. MTV, radio stations, record stores, current bands: all these people want you to listen to new stuff, so as gatekeepers, they're going to push you toward it. Now, those pressures aren't as strong, so we're seeing more like a "fair" distribution of listening behavior.
To be clear: I don't think people listen to music at random, but I think recommendation algorithms tend to unlock more of music history as a side effect of needing to keep giving you more things to listen to.
The future of music is bright folks.
One, pull a Weezer and release a lot of covers of favorites. Remake Toto's Africa... etc... Do this, you give up the composer's royalty but you sneak in the playlists.
The other solution is to focus on an increasingly small market for new music which seems to be less and less appealing to the larger market or genres, but appeals more and more to people who like "new music".
A lot of people are pointing out that a lot of new music is autotune or genre bending stuff that is kind of hard to love. Music has always been full of stuff made to ride a trend, or enabled by new instruments or new tech. It's the search spam of music. It catches on for a minute. Some of it sticks and becomes part of "the catalog".
When I was a kid I would have to listen to the radio or watch MTV to be reached by youth culture.
I have this theory that by democratizing music through on-demand services, it's harder for music to hit a critical mass where enough people know the song to sing along at a piano bar a decade later. It's great that smaller artists get more attention, but I miss having the cultural touchstone.
Then listen to an album from the 70's by a great singer, like Karen Carpenter. What a difference!
It isn't just autotune. It's the electronic modification done, like the color "adjustments" done in modern movies that turn every movie into blue and orange tones.
I even saw a documentary on autotune where a music executive remarked that they don't look for great singers anymore, because the sound engineers can "fix" it. They look for pretty people.
Like the Monkees.
I shudder to think what a modern sound engineer would do to "fix" Robert Plant's totally unique voice.
In the mainstream: Adele, Sia, Ariana Grande, just to name a few.
> I even saw a documentary on autotune where a music executive remarked that they don't look for great singers anymore, because the sound engineers can "fix" it. They look for pretty people.
That was never different. Madonna is an absolute terrible singer, for instance, and that was fixed long before autotune existed. For recording, you just make heave use of vocal comping. Live, you can use a combination of (soft) playback and background singers.
But at least Pop was never about "perfect" voices, but unique, recognizable voices that can convey emotion, and that hasn't really changed. Bowie, Björk, Leonard Cohen, Thom Yorke, Damon Albarn, these are simply great voices, but they can barely hold a tone.
Madonna has great tone.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U3ASj1L6_sY
The tone sounds manipulated to me. There's a weird effect I hear a lot these days that seems to remove the smoothness.
> Sai
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CW6-0PhCkGs
Lots of electronic effects applied.
> Ariana Grande
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tcYodQoapMg
obvious autotune
> Madonna
Why do you say she was terrible? Are you listening to the stuff she did in the 80's, or now?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s__rX_WL100
This video shows her tone:
So what you are actually complaining is how modern music is produced. I can certainly agree that autotune is overused nowadays. That's a fad that will go away eventually, just like the talk box, gated reverbs or heavy chorus effects.
> So what you are actually complaining is how modern music is produced.
Well, sure. That's what I hear. To hear good singing, I have to go back to the 80s and earlier.
I still don't hear anything that can compete with the singers I listed. I listened to the singers you suggested. Listen to the links I suggested :-)
https://youtu.be/KrG8okV9R3w?t=724
The early Madonna stuff is really easy to sing, and she's really struggling. She has no control over her breathing and does the usual tricks to compensate: finish early and let the background singers take over, vocal fry, "squeeking" and other kinds of ornamentations to avoid holding notes. She clearly has had no formal training whatsoever at that point.
Which is fine. As I said, this is pop, good singing is overrated, other stuff is much more important, and I actually vastly prefer Madonna over Whitney Houston any time of the day.
(How do I know they lip sync them? Because their "live" singing exactly matches the radio cut of their song! Nobody ever sings a song exactly the same way twice.)
Secondly, Madonna's tone still comes through as great. Breath control comes with training and practice, but you can't fix anyone who doesn't have great tone.
But you have to look for them, they’re not chart toppers, they haven’t been for more than a generation.
If you’re not looking for them and are just waiting for them to be spoon-fed to you, well of course you’re not going to get them. It’s not what sells and majors can polish the product in post, so that’s what they do, as with movies, they have no reason not to.
And with the rise of modern tech and social medias, they don’t need to sign up to majors to make their art and a living (though they’ll often associate with such for publishing e.g. Collier is self-produced and has the personal label Haganja but partners with Geffen - universal - and Decca).
Exactly. They're out of fashion.
Bell-bottom jeans are out of fashion, too. They might as well not exist today.
We're in a golden age for music creation, you don't even need a garage and a band to get started (though it certainly helps for the more complex acts or if you want a band), people like Bo Burnham and Jacob Collier got their start (and part of their early fame) making youtube videos at home.
And probably most importantly you have no need whatsoever to be "discovered" by an "agent" or somesuch, you can have viewers and listeners from the other side of the globe, from your room.
I mean just look at this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IcVEx6UrtF8
That's a teenager in england (skillfully) playing with dissonant harmony in split-screen multitrack. The top commenter is a californian who'd go on to found Patreon the following month (or had founded it a month after the video was posted, youtube doesn't show exact dates for comments).
But hey, let's look at the first on your list, Beyonce:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2pPe7sxMVAY
Autotuned all the way. It sounds sweetened, as her tone changes from song to song. It sounds "adjusted" in a way I never hear from older songs. This is apparent around the 48 minute mark. Sometimes she pushes too hard and it sounds a bit screechy.
I saw (and heard!) A Star Is Born. I was so impressed by her singing, I rushed out and didn't buy the soundtrack, and can't recall anything she sung. Oh well. Julie Andrews she ain't.
Julie Andrews is probably the greatest female singer that ever existed. (Well, Marni Nixon who was so good she secretly dubbed the other stars deserves accolades!)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LUrjHF_vaY4
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=siPZOWMhXdA
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AVER6hyoyJo
And just for fun, from 1987, best cover evar:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2AUOAGlASRQ
> if you just looked for
It's sad to have to dig for them.
Most of those videos are easily found simply by searching “$ARTIST [no autotune | acoustic | live]”.
But don't you think it's sad that a modern movie has to reach back in time 35 years to find a good song to use?
(I bought that Sanctuary album back in the 80's, when Brain Pain was broadcasting their metal show weekly. I miss Brain Pain.)
As others have noted, it's certainly possible that modern production styles skew too heavily towards hiding natural voices, but to say that modern culture deemphasizes great natural vocalists makes no sense.
Meanwhile several massive stars who have become household names (Taylor Swift, Katy Perry, Kesha, Justin Bieber etc.) have arisen more-or-less the old fashioned way; via good marketing and viral music. And then there's Disney (Ariana Grande, Selena Gomez, Olivia Rodrigo, and Britney ofc, though she's another story...).
None of these stars became big by virtue of having particularly stellar vocals. But their voices were unique and suited to their music (and the likes of Kesha and Bieber made auto-tune part of their signature....what's T-Pain been up to recently?).
Honestly if one is looking to make it big in pop music, they'd be wasting their time participating in any of these talent shows, even if they do win. These days you just start a TikTok account...
I'm not sure raw technical talent in singing or playing was ever particularly emphasized in popular music, rather just a nice perk and fodder for stan wars.
[0] More musicians that received early publicity from singing shows:
https://www.openmicuk.co.uk/advice/famous-singers-from-talen...
https://www.eonline.com/photos/19891/stars-who-got-their-sta...
So far, the counter-examples given of great singers turned out to be electronically manipulated to sound better.
C'mon. Post a link to a popular modern one with better tone than Whitney Houston, Karen Carpenter, Grace Slick, Madonna, David Cassidy, (I can name many more), and didn't electronically "enhance" their singing.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uC21yoI8Di8
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iWGyVNriJ78
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PGN1ST87x-U
It is absolutely insane to claim that there are no prominent modern artists with singing abilities comparable to those in the past. Just trivially disprovable. If we were to go beyond the domain of winner of song competitions, there are plenty of acoustic or live performances from other pop superstars that demonstrate singing capability.
BTW, autotune can and certainly is used in live concerts. Musicians have personally told me they use it! They also pump their vocals through effects pedals. What else are they using?
I don't know about competitions.
> You haven't even bothered to provide any evidence to the contrary.
I can't prove a negative. But I've provided many links to popular songs of old, and compared them to popular songs of today.
> absolutely insane
Cool your jets, dude! This is a friendly discussion. I actually want to be wrong here. I listen to popular music all the time, on the radio, Pandora, various streaming stations, and of course I hear it in the movie soundtracks. I want to hear a singer that sounds like an angel, not a Cylon.
Carry Underwood - she should never have tried to upstage Julie Andrews! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uo6o1bhWlD8 It's good, but she is just not in the ballpark of JA. No chills there.
Jordin Sparks - nothing but good things to say about her singing. Is she great? Not sure. I think she needs a better song to showcase her abilities. But thanks! P.S. the link is from 14 years ago. A long time in the music biz.
P.S., while it’s perfectly for to personally believe that Julie Andrews is the best female vocalist of all time, it’s far harder to consider it a matter of empirical fact. One can easily assert that Ella Fitzgerald, Etta James, or Celine Dion is better. One’s mileage always varies.
The only problem with Andrews is her songbook is kinda small. She burned very brightly, but all too briefly.
But I have a suggestion for you. Get the bluray of Sound of Music. Put it on play. Forget about the schmaltzy plot, the sappy lyrics, the saccharine emoting, the cardboard characters. Just listen to the music. You'll be blown away. I envy anyone hearing it for the first time. If you're up to it, figure out which character is Marni Nixon without looking it up.
And lest I forget, check out Roberta Flack. She gives me chills, too.
Thanks for the Flack rec.
Roberta Flack:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d8_fLu2yrP4
Enjoy! It just doesn't get any better than that. Just perfection.
As far as my ear can tell, Lady Gaga, Adele, Pink, Beyonce, Rihanna, Christina Aguilera, and Miley Cyrus all qualify for the purposes of this subthread. I'm not going to claim they're "better" than Whitney Houston - that's kind of an impossibly high bar. I do think they're excellent, and to the best of my ability to determine via the internet, they don't use autotune.
> that's kind of an impossibly high bar
So true. But so is Karen Carpenter, Julie Andrews, Grace Slick, etc., that all predate autotune. I suspect a cause and effect there.
That and artists needing to make big singles too monetize their work - so the approach to making music is different. Getting a movie/show themesong or leveraging another artists popularity to drive song plays
Musical instruments becoming quite inexpensive increasing the competition while the market place is increasingly fragmented. Former gate keepers don't have that much cloud [record labels].
As a former music head it really sucks to look at music from a business market perspective - but it really does frame what's going on.
There's a confluence of forces making new music difficult that and you would also think a lot of the items i posted above would make there being more higher quality music.
In ye olden times one had to actively choose music to listen to, lending itself to the newer albums, and a relatively weakened aggregate power of one's back catalogue. Spotify and similar services lend themselves to a very passive means of listening however (shuffle and go) that will naturally give more listening to the music which has greater quantity (old music of course).
Rick Beato had a recent video[1] ranting over the quality of the Grammy entries this year. Now I'm fast approaching the get-off-my-lawn age, but I have to agree. Surely there must be way better songs made in the last year, regardless of category, than what ended up on that list.
Personally I find lots of great music being released on places like Bandcamp. I love listening to their Bandcamp weekly[2][3], even though not everything might be up my creek.
It's not hard to find great new music. I guess the issue is one has to care to look for it.
[1]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fLB2FSLp4Ec
Before, big labels could rely on ignorance to sell something old as "fresh". It doesn't work today when it's really easy to distribute and share old music.
EDM is in need for innovation, yet rely heavily on nostalgia. It's not going to help younger artists if they don't invent something of their own.
That said, the absolutely killer bit of this article is:
I learned the danger of excessive caution long ago, when I consulted to huge Fortune 500 companies. The single biggest problem I encountered—shared by virtually every large company I analyzed—was investing too much of their time and money into defending old ways of doing business, rather than building new ones.
[...]
But senior management hated hearing this, and always insisted that defending the old business units was their safest bet. After I encountered this embedded mindset again and again and saw its consequences, I reached the painful conclusion that the safest path is often the most dangerous. If you pursue a strategy—whether in business or your personal life—that avoids all risk, you might flourish in the short run, but you flounder over the long term.
This is sage advice. For your career, for your business, whatever. I'd spin it as this:
When an industry is on a downswing, it becomes cluttered. Market demand is falling so existing players are fighting for share of a shrinking market. For new entrants, there's no opportunity. So for example if you are trying to get a job in this industry, you won't find openings. If it's a market you're trying to enter as a business, you won't find demand/customers. Whereas in a growing market the opposite is true. Therefore we can say it is a truism that any opportunity is more likely than not to be a good one, because opportunities only exist in an upswing, and are pushed out in a downswing.
There's more to it, of course. Bubbles, for example. But the fact remains: opportunities signal a rising market and in general you should seek them out as the payoff, over time, is likely to be worth it.
The Beatles and Grand Master Flash didn't bother to compete with Duke Ellington or Bach.
I just can't turn on the “new songs” radio station in Apple Music because 90% will be hip-hop & rap.
I imagine how modern music producers are fed up by an endless stream of demo records from ‘new hip-hop stars’ - my condolences.
If streaming services will add the button “Do not propose music of this genre”, then new music will be more discoverable. But right now the only two things I saw in Spotify and Apple Music are “I like this genre” and “I love/hate this song”.
I hope it will become a killer feature of some new startup.
Looking for new music doesn't occupy much of my time, so my tolerance for the choice presented to me is fairly low.
It was likely unbalanced in the beginning when these platforms first came out
The mass reactionary trend permeates and defines the perspectives of most people I know, even if they reject the political aspect. People have transformed: Creative, open-minded people now reflexively scorn creativity; the power of individuals and freedom (including their own power); learning, knowledge, and original thought. They actively promote despair and depressive outlooks, and I am a non-conformist to say anything that even indirectly challenges that. The first requirement for any idea is not to attract ridicule. As an example of many, when I suggested to a college student that they could do something about a local problem they objected to, they mocked the idea of anything being accomplished by people acting voluntarily (so much for democracy, FOSS, and much else!).
All of that is antithetical to innovation and creativity. Artists and innovators don't thrive by avoiding ridicule - in fact, it's commonly experienced that 'first they laugh at you', etc. - or by conforming. They thrive, I think, in environments where challenging, non-conforming ideas are prized and encouraged, and where innovative individuals are prized over powerful ones. I think it may kill SV too.
Either that, or interconnectedness is suppressing the creation/germination that comes from isolation. It's all just a big cacophony of grey now.
A band cranking out four or five great albums/sets of music seems dead.
Music tools, processing, remixing, sampling, it's all way more accessible than it used to be. And yet creativity of popular music is far behind, say, the 1980s and 1990s. And publishing/serving tail audiences. That should be producing crossover / surfacing hits, but it is definitely not.
But it also could be the reassertion of dominance of the popular channels of music by the big boys.
Also, since the 1970s music, it doesn't sound alien to new kids. Elvis sounds old. The 60s is weird and primitive. But Led Zeppelin? Still just awesome. So large catalogs of great stuff, back when better germination and career dedication/craft was followed, makes for a lot of base competition for new music.
But it goes in cycles, we'll see.
* Extrisic quality: does it sound "better" as a production, autotune, analog vs digital recording and play-back means, etc. -- I personnaly have mixed feelings about this one, as autotune and programmable drums are probably the worst thing that happened to contemporary music by taking away their human components (but that's mostly an unsubtantiated opinion), and on the other hand, so much progress in the recording and play-back hardware/software that reduce the gap between live and recorded performances
* Intrisic quality: is the music "better" in an absolute sense, covering mostly philosophical questions such as the nature of musical beauty, its objectiveness or subjectiveness, the existence of music as abstract compositions, etc. -- I'm firmly of the opinion that there are such things as 'beautiful musical compositions' and 'well-written music', and though I'm barely able to describe what that means in words, I can certainly say that I have heard less and less such pieces in mainstream music as years have passed, and that in non-mainstream music, most attempts to create original things end up in pieces that may be well thought but rarely in 'beautiful musical compositions'.
* Discovery bias: a topic that is well covered by the OP
* Acquired taste: despite everyone claiming that they look for something new and exciting and original, tastes do become ingrained with age, and I believe this is all the more true with music given the kind of physical feelings that it generates, which can sometimes be very powerful -- the 'feedback loop' that also ends up in the discovery bias above is probably reinforced by the fact that our tastes in music vary little after a certain age, and that we rarely seek something that is 'that much' different from what we like.
In the past, new music has often been inspired by new instruments (e.g. the electric guitar, synthesizers). Strictly speaking, that often was not even new music, but a new sound.
Today we can create all sorts of sound digitally, including the "original" sound from the 60s, 70s, 80s. New music productions often adapt a sound from a soecific era.
The linked post brings up one important point about old music: it's much lower risk to market than new productions. You know already that the songs work, and you can be reasonably certain about intellectual rights ownership when you bought the catalog.
It's the same with movies by the way: Most successful movies these days are sequels or remakes.
Seems that conservative mindsets prevail in the mainstream of art. And THAT is not new, either :D
I personally like the effects of this trend, specifically the rediscovery of forgotten artists like the band Fanny[0], which arguably can be considered as the first major label all-female rock group. They already faded into obscurity but became popular again when one[1] of their old live recordings became viral.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fanny_(band) [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=imZUqkPlUaQ
I'm just not sure how an aspiring musician would connect and build a young audience outside of social media. I doubt they could consistently build engagement in a streaming platform alone, it's just too hard. They're just one recording along with decades of other recordings.
The social media era hasn't really included musicians very well. I can't really think of a single case where I discovered music via social media. And I'm not even sure how I'd go about finding it. A lot of this is just that the music industry itself is kind of small and insignificant to big tech. And it's not like any of these platforms want to send people to streamers like Spotify or Apple Music.
In the past, there was enough of a barrier to just getting music onto disc and out on the airwaves that labels would have to invest in 100 acts just to have one breakthrough. So they'd need to take some of the winnings from their biggest selling artists and reinvest them in new acts to stay in the game. But now they can get income from streaming rather than sales - there's much less incentive to keep new records and artists coming through. If anything it makes more sense for them to just sit on their back catalogue and squash anything new.
So nobody's going to invest the comparatively large amounts needed to get unknown bands into good studios to record albums any more, let alone fund them through the difficult second and third albums often necessary to get traction. Emerging musicians can only do what they can at minimal cost - hence much more of a move towards electronic and bedroom production. That can have great output now due to tech advances in home recording, but it's not gonna be the same as putting musicians in fully kitted studio. (And things like a shift to high-loudness, low dynamic range are another side effect of the ways that music is distributed and consumed, plus advances in what's possible with digital recording and limiting).
The article kinda touches on this stuff but what it doesn't really seem to acknowledge is this is just what's good for the industry. Big labels are perfectly happy picking the winners that blow up on Youtube - it just saves all their development costs. The whole thing just works for them - their interests aren't in having a diverse range of music produced, allowing for a living for artists that aren't their big cash cows, preserving particular genres or recording styles etc.
The declining TV audience is not just a Grammy issue, it's affecting all kinds of live awards shows, including the Oscars, as well as broadcast/cable television in general which has been hammered by shifting audience preferences and viewing habits (https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2021/03/17/cable-and-s...).
The author should take a look at the social media/YouTube followings many new artists have, and not just the superstars. That's where the engagement is taking place.
A generation of wealthy nostalgics overspends on the same old music.
A generation of hard-up youth (and there's nothing wrong with that in strictly origin-of-media-cultures terms!) won't pay anything the "music market" can easily measure, for what they actually value.
Musicians aiming for commercial appeal really seem to be scraping the barrel now. There are people with new ideas but the profusion of barrel-scrapers makes "try to sell big" a poor use of an inventive musician's time.
Where do we go from here? No idea, but it probably needs to involve inventing (or reinventing) some different kind of engagement.
I don't think my preferences for what kind stand much of a chance, but no matter.
Well, maybe the reason should be the love for music as an art form?
> So the problem isn’t a lack of good new music. It’s an institutional failure to discover and nurture it.
This is absolutely true. Most of the stuff that's pushed to the top is a bunch of lifeless, riskless, perfect crap. Moreover, everyone involved knows it: musicians playing the parts (if there are any), producers, sound engineers, label representatives, artists and, sometimes, listeners.
I agree with the main idea of the article: music is treated is an asset and it does no good.
He loves hard rock or metal. He recently sang along to queen, running around on the playground singing Beelzebub has a devil put aside for him, which is a bit worrying even if he doesn't understand much English. Things like Arsenal, R.E.M. and K's Choice are also welcome.
But he doesn't care at all about more modern stuff, even if there is more of it on the radio. It just bores him. We sometimes let him choose from a playlist, and he always ends up in different genres from the same periods.
Sure, we still have good tracks here and there. Good artists are still there but it’s pretty hard to compose something « new » without being « strange ».
It’s mostly impossible to do better than the masters of your musical genre because most genres exists for more than 60, sometimes 100 years so, statically speaking, they may have been mastered by one or multiple artists since then.
Even if an artist managed to be greater (for what it could mean) than his masters, well, he could never have the advantage of novelty.
I don’t think it’s an issue (except maybe for the industry), after all, there is already enough music to enjoy an entire life, and still pretty good new artists.
Are they so complex? Personally I can listen to popular music from up until 2015 and "get it", but after that, what's supposed to be popular music starts to sound more extreme than what I listen to alone. And it's not just a "me" thing, we have a wide variety of tastes in the family, and we agree that most of that plays on the radio these days is not what any of us would listen to. I don't know what niche this music is optimizing for, but I think that most people are out of it.
In parallel, lots of less-known artists continue putting out great stuff.
There used to be a few genere based radio stations. It was easy to find new music, because there weren't many places to look.
Today we have an infinite number of places to find new music. Far more than any person could ever hope to actually listen to.
And to complicate that, music creation as a whole has become something that anyone can do with a laptop and distribute into the mainstream platforms (e.g. spotify, etc.)
SO, the hours of music that exists keeps increasing exponentially, while the number of hours in a persons lifetime stay the same.
"Programmed by a sucker in a suit — a slick back hair / And he don't even live here" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iiGOXmSmf9E
It is extremely unlikely that anyone reading here knows as much about this stuff as Ted Gioia. He's an award winning music historian, journalist, author, and performer. I personally have five of his excellent books. He knows of what he speaks.
Lots of this is just people getting into streaming and able to access anything they want. Ultimately they are making playlists of what they want to hear, not is what is pushed. From the mix tapes days to the streaming days, people will choose what they like when they have the ability to.
Music enhances moments in work or play, and nostalgia is a hell of a drug.
These days it seems investors are focused on rent seeking, they are not looking to build. Why nurture new talent when you can sell an NFT of some classic music cover art. Please don't blame the young artists, they are doing what they need to do to survive in this situation, we should blame our own greed.
There are also deep, numerous niches to dive into.
Music making itself is more accessible now than ever with the software, computing power, and educational resources available.
This results in a much different landscape: rich, egalitarian, and diverse, but with less obvious landmarks and different ways to make money.
I might be biased, because I was raised on 90s music and most stuff today seems so tame by comparison.
Or say a band like Radiohead who can be considered a 90s band. Their 00 and 10s albums are brilliant as well.
I dunno -- would anyone care if superstars vanished? A much better result would be for lots of artists to make, like, middle class wages on Bandcamp or whatever (not saying this actually happens, just thinking about possible better end results).
I won't argue that streaming is totally transforming the music industry but whining about it won't change a thing. Make something people want to hear or shut up.
The old songs still have a (known) value, while new songs are still an unknown quantity. Since the copyright on the old songs lasts such a long time, there is less of an incentive to invest in new songs.
1) According to MRC Data, old songs now represent 70% of the market share
2) The 200 most popular tracks now account for less than 5% of total streams.
3) The current list of most downloaded tracks on iTunes includes CCR and The Police etc.
Not going to touch 1), because I don't feel like going hunting for that data. But a single data point is useless. Let's see the trend, please.
2) has nothing to do with old versus new. The average music consumer today has so many music discovery avenues open to them on a level that is completely unprecedented. Should we really be surprised that people are listening less and less to the top 200 songs when the sheer catalog of music accessible to (and actually discoverable by) them has grown by orders of magnitude in the last 10 years? This data point tells us nothing about old versus new, because there's so much new music that is never going to hit top 200 that people can find and easily listen to now.
3) I mean, really, are you surprised? You're looking at music people bought on iTunes. _Of course_ that would biased towards people old enough to actually pay money for tracks. This is equivalent to trying to figure out the most popular porn categories by looking at DVD rental data, ignoring the fact that 99.99% of porn consumption has moved to online streaming platforms..
Before clubs had ubiquitous sound systems, these were provided by live, working bands everywhere.
The number of hours played by working bands has never been lower in history.
Are you referring to a decline as a result of the pandemic, or a larger trend that was occurring even before ~spring 2020? If the latter, I would be curious to see any data you have to support that.
Per working musician, they may gig more, but there are just vanishingly few now.
https://www.census.gov/history/www/homepage_archive/2017/apr...
My guess is that the “music teacher” ratio has gone way way up. I think that’s broken down elsewhere.
I don't remember radio having songs that played that many months
Does the author explore the reasons at all? Should we just guess? One jumping out at me is the share, population and disposable income-wise of boomers, who might just be buying music that was popular when they were growing up. Are people rebuying their current collection of old tracks in new formats? Does the current lack of a mono-culture around music mean that new music can't get the same traction old music had enjoyed? Do fans of new music spend less time/money enjoying music compared to other things that fans of older music don't like, like twitch subs, games, whatever?
Combine that with new or rescued recordings meaning a greater range of _really old_ music is available to people prone to falling down musical-history rabbit-holes... and you really do have a recipe for it becoming hard to spot the evolution of music happening vs. the surrounding (pardon me) "noise". Yet it is still happening...
> ... the 200 most popular tracks now account for less than 5% of total streams.
I often hear it said that "new music sucks", and suspect it to be true, but now I have empirical evidence to back it up.
The music industry has been feeding us this crap more and more since the last 2 or 3 decades. Shoving it down everybody's throats is easy when they have no choice, but I guess people are getting tired of the sameness and looking for things with more nuance. Streaming gives us control over what goes into our ears and it seems that we like good things even if they are not as well produced.
Also, there's JoJo's Bizarre Adventure teaching kids about great music!
You really just need a music platform to sample referenced acts, which YouTube is the universal one. It's really not that difficult.
I've done this before- with Spotify, I've even picked albums based on their cover art, the name of the record, the name of the artist. Occasionally the aesthetic vibes align and I find a new artist that is actually enjoyable. Usually not. But if you're just trying to find new music, there's ample methods to do so.
In general, I find search engines to be a really poor discoverability resource for anything, not just music.
> You name it, there is somebody out there making good music in that genre today. You just have to look beyond what is talked about on TV.
Sure, but that assertion doesn't actually help with finding those musicians. It could both be true that 1) great music is being produced AND 2) the horizons of the commercial/mainstream music industry have contracted, making those musicians harder for most people to discover. Sort of like how the movie industry is focusing more and more on easily exported comic book blockbusters, at the expense of middle-budget dramas and comedies.
Then there's also the fact that the streaming revolution has made crap easier to find, and there's a lot more crap than good stuff, which hurts discoverability. As an example: I've been looking for kids music on Spotify recently, and it's a sea of low-effort auto-tuned garbage from people following the economics of spam. It's pretty much impossible to find a good version of a classic song unless you already know the artist.
How do people continuously fall into this trap? "New X sucks" No, it doesn't. You just don't make an effort to seek out new things and wish everything stayed the same as when you were young.
On the thread of mass-consumption stuff, I think we all underestimate the effect of "mass" becoming a significant portion of the available market - when you measure your success against the top 100 earners in a space like that, it almost boils down to skinner's box style output.
I didn’t listen to music as a sheltered kid. Once I began listening to music in my late teens, I started with Velvet Underground and Joy Division. From there it was all modern music. Like say “indie music” of the times of the 00s was abundant for me. I’m almost 20 years into listening to music now and nothing has changed for me. I still don’t like most of the the top charting songs, but I didn’t like them 15 years ago either. I might actually like popular music more now as I used to not like most of it. While now I enjoy artists like Lil Uzi Vert and especially Playboi Carti.
Similarly, Star Wars films appear to be completely mediocre films. I didn’t watch them [properly] until I was older.
Some semblance of me not being pushed into the normal popular stuff as an easily influenced young person makes it very easy for me not to yearn for older stuff being better.
I just checked the billboard top 100. It appears to mostly be your basic standard pop culture popular music. It seems like what would be at the top decades ago too if zooming out and seeing things as a whole.
Half an hour digging on a site like Bandcamp will prove there’s a vast amount of good new music, too much to comprehend. It only feels like there’s less good music because there’s vastly more music of all quality levels available now.
You’ve just got to steer away from the mainstream and look for it.
I got deep into niche online electronic artists over the pandemic and there's just so much creativity from young kids publishing stuff on soundcloud with only a few thousand listens.
Later, i got a PC and a friend of mine was letting me his CDs with mp3s so I can pick songs. I did not have lots of space and he was gone for 6 months at a time to uni, getting new stuff was quite an event and all of it was prefiltered by his taste.
Fwd to today, i can listen to my metal or to Two Steps From Hell and get recommended Mecina by an algorithm. I can listen to some old Romanian songs, or some crap i would never understand. I can listen to those nice lads that drink in the same pub as I do or to these other guys from Mongolia. And the best part is that all of this takes 1 click and if I don't like what is currently playing, i can skip because there are so many other options. The music lover in me is very very happy.
This can be said to apply to cheesy rock-pop 60's hits - electronics weren't involved but same difference.
It’s no wonder the songs these days say nothing, to anyone, unless you’re a brain dead teenager or emotionally stunted adult. The tastes of which have driven the industry for decades now. I just want something that’s relevant.