Too Many Songs, Not Enough Hits: Pop Music Is Struggling to Create New Stars
billboard.com
billboard.com
For the music listener, there now exists music as nieche as possible and platforms like Spotify provide access to it. My music tastes have only gotten more obscure since using streaming.
For wannabe celebrities, they get to have their quanta of fame and everyone uninterested can just ignore that.
For musicians, they are no longer forced into contracts that force them to give up control entirely. They get to keep a far larger share of the revenue from what they create.
No matter how much RIAA and MPAA are struggling to keep middlemen relevant, the world is slowly marching towards getting rid of middlemen in publishing music, video and literature.
Personally I think the music industry is missing the point. Music has become universal - we carry it everywhere and the scarcity that used to drive music sales from the physical production of product is gone and the old mechanisms of driving "hits" went with it. They can't just churn out 100 clones of whatever is hot anymore and hope that the video, featuring some greased up pop starlet in a bikini, is going to save them.
I think that is wonderful myself. There has never been a better time to enjoy music and killing the old publishing system is helping that, not hurting it.
The music industry traces the beginning of its problems to Napster but that was also the time that autotune started to become ubiquitous. The industry doesn't want to hear it, because autotune speeds up production, but autotuned music washes over people without making any impression. You can put it on the radio or on a playlist but from the viewpoint of people engaging it you might as well mute the volume completely.
The fact is that "wildly successful" today is against a background of reduced expectations. Thriller sold 70 million copies, Bat out of Hell (somehow) sold 43 million copies. That's on a different order of magnitude than what seems possible today.
I think part of what makes music interesting to listen to is the subtle imperfections and nonidealities. It hurts to listen to a pure sine wave but FM synthesis adds some richness, as does the three strings on a piano that are just slightly out of tune. Numerous artists that were productive and commercially successful in the 1970s failed to make a transition to the "music word processor" in the 1980s. They kept releasing albums but fans ignored them and will boo if they try to play anything but the old favorites. I think MIDI and the click track are part of the same problem as autotune... "Snap to grid" and a lot of what makes music interesting is just gone.
Why is overt use of autotune a less valid artistic choice when T-Pain uses it than when Daft Punk uses it?
> Thriller sold 70 million copies, Bat out of Hell (somehow) sold 43 million copies. That's on a different order of magnitude than what seems possible today.
This is mostly due to the monumental changes in the sales model for music since those days. Sales suffered massively at the hands of iTunes and Spotify - there's little correlation with trends in the actual music.
> I think part of what makes music interesting to listen to is the subtle imperfections and nonidealities. I think MIDI and the click track are part of the same problem as autotune... "Snap to grid" and a lot of what makes music interesting is just gone.
There's nothing wrong with feeling that way, but I would be cautious of projecting your preferences onto the rest of the world. I think it's clear that many, many people enjoy music produced in this style.
After all, someone living a century before us could make the exact same arguments decrying recorded music in favor of live performances. Who wants to listen to the same thing over and over again? The subtle variations and imperfections between live performances are what gives music color - do away with them and all we have is a cold, mechanical, unfeeling facsimile of proper music.
However, I don't really think that the music industry's woes are because of social media, viral breaks, or whatever they are attributing it to. If they didn't have their heads so far up their own asses it should be obvious to them why they are not breaking new artists. Every song in the top 100 approaches this new monogenre of R&B/trap/electronica that was clearly produced with GarageBand starter packs and autotune.
People who are passionate about music, buy records and merch, and go to concerts are probably more of the type of person who has niche interests and very deep and genuine love for a few artists / genres. They are not the kind of person who listens to the vapid musical fast food that major labels are shitting out.
When was the last time you heard one of those songs?
Rick Beato commented recently that the death of the "record" also caused the death of the single. Many of the top 100 songs weren't released as singles. Yet, they became popular because of proximity.
When was the last time you heard a song, bought the album, and discovered something else good on it?
And, at the bottom, neither TikTok nor the record companies want to create megastars--megastars wind up with leverage. And that's actually anathema to making more money.
As MTV said some 20 years ago: once is not enough, recycle. A lot of the "new" hits are recycled songs. This will get worse with record labels (sic) buying song rights from artists. The quality of music has declined considerably.