One Man Has Written Virtually Every Major Pop Song Of The Last 20 Years.
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Okay I get we don't have a lot of backstreet boy or Britney fans here (not one either) & I get the whole "pop music sounds the same lament, but at the same time, there's a market for it & he's excelled at creating something that sells that.
Just because it's pop music doesn't mean you can't give the guy credit for understanding his market & dominating his field.
There's also a market for black tar heroin, nuclear missiles, drones, slaves, and so on.
>Just because it's pop music doesn't mean you can't give the guy credit for understanding his market & dominating his field.
Is pop music a good thing for the world? (It obviously isn't as bad as any of the things I listed above to avoid claims of hyperbole, but) should we think people who make pop music are doing a good thing?
The point I intended to make is that there are markets for everything.
I don't even think pop music is that bad, but being successful in a marketplace is never cause alone for accolades. Blindly worshipping people who are successful at some business venture blinds us to the ethics of whatever they're doing. Success shouldn't disable critical thinking.
Completely agree, but I don't think anyone in the article or this forum could be considered "worshipping" this guy. The article was more of an observation about a not immediately apparent fact that was intellectually curious.
Thus you, are really really bad, so the world doesn't need you, right?
I disagree that pop music is some how damaging, bad or undesirable, thats just snobbery. Its not my thing, but then I dont expect other people to like my taste in music. Its stupid, its like arguing that blue is good, and yellow is bad.
I wouldn't say pop music is damaging or bad, but it does seem undesirable in that it's very obvious that you can do far better. Listening to pop music (not necessarily popular music, but branded pop music like the Backstreet Boys and other groups mentioned in this article) seems like a waste of time in comparison to all the other things a human could do with their mental cycles.
I have pretty broad taste in music, and many other things, but it's still obvious even if I don't like something whether or not it's worth someone's time or not. This is also contextual; i.e., someone who listened to pop music and had an ear for the evolution of pop over time, was aware of people like the subject of this article, and understood the musical justification for things like catchy pop songs is probably doing a much better job of listening to pop music than I was at age 11 when I liked the Backstreet Boys.
Humans are amazing creatures full of potential. Is pop music really the best we could do? I doubt it, which is why I dislike it, and think that it's a pretty bad market to participate in.
That said, it still brings all sorts of benefits of music, and the sheer popularity of pop music makes the shared experience so much broader and possibly more powerful. So in balance, maybe pop music isn't -the best- type of music for people to listen to. But I don't really think it's -bad-. We can't really expect for everyone to wish to be challenged in all their activities and all the experiences they consume.
...and the tech industry is any better? We're mostly driven by advertising and consumer software/electronics. (Yes, exceptions exist, but they aren't the rule).
Out of curiosity, what industry do you work in?
I don't think I said that.
E.g. the speck in your brother's eye vs. the plank in your own.
I was admittedly assuming you work in the tech industry, just given that most HNers do.
Which, yeah, I was going to have to eat crow if you work in orphanages all day.
Is Facebook a good thing? It just lets people stay in contact with one another, they could already do that with a phone, Facebook just makes it a little more pleasant.
Is Snapchat a good thing? It, well, I don't even know what it does, but it takes pictures and lets you share them with people or something, right? Is that really any more valuable to society than pop music?
I'm not saying Facebook and Snapchat are bad, just that they aren't really any better or worse than something like pop music. The idea is to make people a little happier, or let them do something that makes them happier. Get off your high horse. Bringing people joy or making their lives a little more bearable is just that, nothing more, nothing less.
In the world I want to live in, would 90% of the stuff produced by HN readers, software, comments, and everythign else be good things? Sure. So in that sense, yes, they should be. Are they? Definitely not.
Is Facebook good? It definitely meets a market need; but what's the social implication of confining discourse into the channels it does? What will the generation raised on the 'like' button be like? How has social media affected journalism -- would people use phones to share linkbait about 10 Things You'd Never Believe We Found in Justin Bieber's Trash?
Snapchat is definitely a good thing. It's single-purpose enough that it doesn't replace anything else, but it add something to the toolkit of how people can communicate. It also brought the concept of ephemerality back to digital communication, which I think is invaluable. You might disagree about that, but it's definitely significant in the way that Call Me Maybe isn't.
I disagree that the idea behind pop music is to make people happier. The idea behind pop music is to make money. Sometimes these values align, and other times they don't. I've never met someone deeply fulfilled on a personal or spiritual level from playing Candy Crush; I've never seen anyone moved to tears by an N*SYNC song.
Assuming that people who make pop music are trying to make people's lives a little more bearable, I definitely think they could do a lot better. This guy is probably incredibly musically gifted, and what is he doing? Writing crap that nobody will remember to make a few bucks, in exactly the same way the greatest minds of our generation are using fantastic computing power and computing over insane amounts of data, thinking faster and deeper than any human ever could, to get people to click ads.
I think he could do better. I wish we lived in a world where he could.
I would point out that, in a capitalist system, nothing is produced to make people happy, everything is produced for profit (http://www.brainyquote.com/quotes/quotes/a/adamsmith136391.h...). And that is really what I was trying to get across, pop music may be crap, but it is what is profitable, to the extent that people want to buy it (presumably because it somehow makes them happy). People who live in glass houses shouldn't throw stones, and a bunch of people building social networks and ad-targeting systems live in very fragile glass houses...
Katy Perry's voice could be swapped for Avril Lavigne's and many people would barely notice.
This accusation is not new in pop music, and I do like his work, but it seems no more skillful by now than finding the right formula and milking it to death with marketing machinery.
It find it negative for creativity in music, and even a number of Ke$ha fans agree with that: http://www.idolator.com/7485711/kesha-fan-petition-free-dr-l...
Here's my point: I can identify a song as being by Dr Luke far more confidently and readily than I can identify the named artist, and I doubt I'm in such a tiny minority there.
What an absurd statement. They sound nothing alike.
But I do recognize and appreciate how good this guy is, writing and producing a hit is not trivial and also follows a portfolio approach, the difference being that his portfolio has way more successes than average.
If it were that simple to produce pop hits, any producer would do it. Consider that most of the costs are promotion (like many startups) and that the record company could get just about anyone to produce Katy Perry, but Martin's track record is beyond just about any other producer, so I think there's little doubt about his skills.
"I kissed a girl" sung by Avril Lavigne wouldn't be the same thing; Perry's persona and style was perfect for it. These guys know this and that explains half of their success. The other half is deep pockets for promotion.
Unfortunately, social norms prevent us from listening with our ears.
Great username, great band.
In this case, could it be at least in part a function of the likelihood that people will listen to and/or perform a piece of music after the copyright on that work has expired? Assuming such a thing is possible, of course.
It's fine to expect the sales of a work to go up if someone performs it well for a large enough audience, but is that measuring the value of the work, the performance, or the exposure? And basing the function on a period after copyright expires reduces the influence of stakeholders in the work who might pay for exposure.
http://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=cover+teenage+dr...
Check out the blues available on archive.org sometime. It's pretty amazing, in my opinion.
Also, the article reminds me of a parody video about the prolific nature of Bob Dylan: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MumScDIZMJc
Many of the important names are on this list: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inductees_of_the_Songwriters_Ha... and a really obvious example is a guy like Paul Williams http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paul_Williams_(songwriter) who made The Carpenters and Three Dog Night famous.
At the low end of things, some songwriters end up selling their songs completely to the label and don't keep songwriting credit or royalties and those end up getting attributed to an artist or producer.
Go dig for names of people who write incidental music for TV shows (especially soap operas) and you'll find people who ghost wrote songs for major rock bands where no one will ever know about it. It's something I wouldn't have even known about myself had I not worked with a guy that did just that.
I'll add parenthesis to make it more clear.
Songwriters and producers don't get their due though (unless they also sing). Back in the day, I used to read CD liner notes to get to know the producers behind the songs I liked. But I always paid more attention to producers than songwriters: for some songs it's hard to know which one out of the five listed songwriters was the real creative force; songs with samples will often have lots of unrecognizable names; and I've always valued producers as being more critical to a song's success than songwriters.
Well, the article like argument that the process going is less creative than it seems. I suspect hackers would love if software could 5% of pop songs. If a person with a formula writes 5% of pop songs, somehow it appeals less and seems less creative. I agree though articulating exactly why might be hard.
And the Monkees pretty much ceased to exist.
Pretty much the same story for David Cassidy.
Also, Carole King wrote Pleasant Valley Sunday. Here's her original demo: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FtyqPzeso5A
Now, I'm not saying that the Backstreet Boys have the musical genius of Bach. But neither should you discard their music because it is popular and overplayed. Would the world be better off had they never sung?
"The [Café Zimmerman] was destroyed during an air raid on Leipzig in December 1943." [1] I would have loved to stand inside it.
At least there is Meshuggah and other good Swedish stuff to be proud of. And yes, some of that is pop.
It's its popularity, alone, that forces me to have to listen to it. Sometimes.
I don't believe that people can have "bad taste in music", or that pop music is bad. But I'd rather listen to what I like, which I guess is why I shun the radio.
On the flip side, Dr Dre is known to have his lyrics ghostwritten & is primarily known for his production skills.
I think nowadays he's more know for his overpriced headphones tho.
They might be overpriced to you, but to the thousands of people who've bought them, they seem worth the value.
It's brilliant marketing, sure. But it's like taking a $2 bottle of wine, rebranding it, and saying it's worth the value at $19.
That's like complaining that Nike can markup a pair of Jordans for $150 even though they're objectively "just as good" as a pair that costs $70-$100. A "brand" is valuable.
Case in point - that "rebranding" of the wine, just got you an extra $17 in margin.
It's far more commonly known that people buy beats from producers.
[0] Look at the writing credits on Yeezus. http://www.stereogum.com/1385792/yeezus-credits-revealed/new...
He has a few classic pop songs, no doubt, and clearly a very lucrative career writing and producing tracks for A-list pop stars. But in the last 10 years I'm not sure he's written any of what I'd call the best pop hits. Looking through his discography on wikipedia I suspect there's some of those songs I know by melody and not by name, but I think he's long past his songwriter peak. And obviously there's dozens off great pop songs that he didn't write (which were smash hits).
edit: I missed all the Katy Perry ones, so I guess maybe he's still got it. But still, I don't see any work with Rihanna, who is probably the biggest pop star of the last decade.
It's absolutely destined to be a classic album in every sense of the word, and I find it funny that most music heads I know can't see that because (imho) they are too afraid of being seen as someone who enjoys Katy Perry. Oh well, the kids who were 12 at the time will grow up appreciating it. I suppose it's for them anyway.
I tend to view rock and pop and most other mainstream genres as simply one super-genre: modern song. It amuses me slightly when rock fans look down on pop music when really the difference is very small.
I remember coming across Max Martin and Denniz Pop prominently figuring in just about every single one of my favourite songs. I would be amazed to find a song I liked that didn't mention at least Max Martin. I was amused to find this consistent across BSB, NSync and Britney Spears (and I didn't like very many of her songs). I always thought to myself "This man, whoever he is, whatever he does, is a genius, because he seems to be the only real common factor across all my favourite trashy pop songs. Why isn't he the most important man in pop music?"
I got over my obsession over the backgrounds of pop musicians shortly. But I still find my favourite songs (within my understandably terrible taste according to those with a finer appreciation for the arts) to often be Max Martin produced.
He deserves a lot of respect and credit for not only dominating his field and picking the right talent to work with, but moreso for keeping up with the trends and times (or defining them?), entertaining teenagers and youngsters for multiple generations even as he grew older. That is definitely no easy feat, in music, movies, social media (hi Facebook) or any other industry.
As a game designer, I hope I can develop that talent to cater to the most important demographics in my industry even as I outgrow it.
Same with Diane Warren.
Very few people can come up with catchy tune on consistent basis.
He reminds me of a prolific young Japanese orchestra-style music composer Sawano Hiroyuki who has written some terrific soundtrack for TV, though I'd consider him many level above Max Martin.
Just a few of his work.
http://youtu.be/GiL5_FCbstk?t=19s
(my personal favorite)
A lot of these songs have much more musical merit than a lot of pretentious indie songs, which tend to be repetitive and lacking in melody. Contrary to unpopular belief (by the "hip" minority), you're not necessarily unsophisticated if you enjoy a wildly popular band like Coldplay.
Is there a particular holy grail magical formula for mobile and web apps that produces more hits than losers?
Easy,make something really usefull that solves a real problem and people will pay for it... Unlike Pop music there is no formula,but knowing the right people helps I guess.
Pop music today is about using the same recipes that have been used for 30 years+ ,and i'm including "rap" in it, remember when rap was about something else than Btches and Bttles ? no? me neither...
He doesn't even compare to someone like Kara DioGuardi let alone "writing virtually every major pop song" http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kara_DioGuardi#Professional_son...
http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2012/03/26/120326fa_fact_...
when I was learning piano in the late 90's, I bought classical sheet music for training, and pop sheet music to play for friends and family. at the top of most of the pop pieces said "max martin"
classical music taught a lot to me, but so did max's music. point being, inarticulate insults such as saying the music is crap, are not worthwhile criticisms.
1. http://www.npr.org/2012/01/15/145233608/ryan-tedder-a-hit-ma...