13 ms·

You say “music characteristics hadn’t much to do with it” but then you list a number of specific characteristics that make music more likely to work on radio. T

by tobr 6y ago

You say “music characteristics hadn’t much to do with it” but then you list a number of specific characteristics that make music more likely to work on radio. That suggests the opposite of “any music will do”. Only music with very specific qualities will do. Or maybe you just meant to say you don’t like pop?

TheOtherHobbes 6y ago
It means pop has turned into a social psychology experiment designed to maximise the return invested in production, and not an individually expressive art form. The obvious end point will be AI-generated muzak which tweaks all the right receptors but is devoid of any disturbingly non-optimal fleshy surprise.
- wjnc 6y ago
  "has" should be "is" right. Most mainstream music has been, from what I understand for a few centuries, a combination of artists expressing themselves while trying to cater to an audience. Otherwise it's an art or a hobby. I don't know any "music as a (pure) art" and I guess with me most causal listeners.
- simias 6y ago
  Commercial art in general has been that way for centuries. Doesn't mean that it's intrinsically devoid of quality. Many of the classical masterpieces were made to order to cater to the fancy of some rich patron.
  - rsynnott 6y ago
    Many? Virtually _all_, either for a rich individual or the church. An artist just making a thing, and seeing if people like it, is a pretty new invention. Probably a big part of why post-19th century art is so much more interesting and diverse; Western art pre-19th century was largely about technical competence in whatever the current fashionable style was.
    - stareatgoats 6y ago
      > An artist just making a thing, and seeing if people like it I sincerely doubt if that's how it works even nowadays. You need to be discovered by a well-connected and well-heeled patron who thinks what you do can be marketed with just a few tweaks. Very seldom does the artist become the patron of their own work is my guess. Banksy might be one of the few exceptions that prove the rule.
      - rsynnott 6y ago
        I think the difference today is that the normal path is that an artist does a lot of stuff, potentially quite innovative, and is _then_ discovered (or not; see Van Gogh for instance). And at that point, maybe discovered by the market, not a single patron; I believe an artist having a single patron has been rather unusual for at least the last century. A few hundred years ago, by contrast, artists tended to get into it via, essentially, apprenticeship to another artist, and attempt to get a patron that way. Some artists ended up being technically proficient, but stylistic innovation was very, very slow and minor by comparison to the late 19th century on.
      - mywittyname 6y ago
        Art has been democratized in recent years. And not just the drawing type of art either: music, videos, 3d modeling, animation, digital print, literature, etc can be produced on a computer. So today, pretty much anyone with a computer can create whatever random idea is spinning in their brains. You don't even need "talent" anymore. Music can be created by ear using drag-and-drop interfaces. Illustrator makes it dead simple to do vector art without any drawing ability. GTAV comes with an animation toolkit for making films. Most people create art for fun or their own pleasure. Tiktok is full of "modern art" in the form of short videos.
        rsynnott 6y ago
        > You don't even need "talent" anymore. Music can be created by ear using drag-and-drop interfaces. Illustrator makes it dead simple to do vector art without any drawing ability. I'd argue that that's still talent, if the product is any good. You don't need technical expertise, but you still need creativity.
- freyr 6y ago
  Has "pop music" ever been anything other than this? Since the beginning, it has typically been manufactured by producers and songwriters for mass appeal.
  - squiggleblaz 6y ago
    Not only that, but it's such a young form of cultural expression that saying it isn't what it used to be is kinda pointless. For thousands of years, we had people singing songs badly in pubs. Maybe someone could afford an instrument. And then someone invented the wireless and the record player. According to the myth, it quickly reached its optimum time when some fashionable person was in their youth. And it has been degrading ever since. Now, as for me, I would think all commercial music is worse than all traditional music. If you can talk, you can sing. But here someone in this thread has suggested that perhaps as little as 1% of the population can sing well enough to be autotuned! (This is insane. The proportion of the population who can sing well enough to be autotuned is much closer to 100% than to 90%.) Someone else might say that commercial music has done quite well, and it keeps doing better. Certainly there's more and more detail added to it. But the fashionable story is that at some point, probably in the 1960s, music became brilliant, and then all these grubby gen-xers and millennials got their grubby hands on it and turned it all into the most dreary computer driven sounds imaginable.
    - rsynnott 6y ago
      > And then someone invented the wireless and the record player. Even before that, you had music halls as popular entertainment (and music hall music was indeed very formulaic, arguably more so than modern pop music).
    - n0rbwah 6y ago
      Saying that before the Top 40 music was reduced to people singing songs badly in pubs and the few who could afford an instrument is a pretty reductive view of musical history.
    - CydeWeys 6y ago
      These 90/100% figures really vary by society. I'd argue that in Ireland, because of the public singing culture, there's more people that can sing passably than in the US. Like learning another language, you're much better off doing it young. I know many fellow Americans who never sing (and are embarrassed to, even though no one has any great expectations) and as a result aren't even passable at it. Relative pitch recognition and vocal pitch reproduction are both nontrivial and better learned young. Fortunately I had some music classes in elementary school that involved singing and I've been singing along to music ever since and thus am OK at it, but many people haven't and aren't.
- darkerside 6y ago
  Have you listened to the album Artpop by Lady Gaga? It plays with this idea in an intelligent and musically interesting way. IMHO.
- bitwize 6y ago
  If it were an experiment, it would be more interesting than it is. Experiments can be fun. Pop as we know it started as a social psychology experiment in the 1960s or earlier. It has now reached the phase where the experiment is over and the results have been published. That is why pop sounds so boring and samey now: the record execs know precisely what works, and all songs must contain certain elements if they are to chart, all while swapping superficial details around to sound "fresh". The last time there was experimentation going on in pop music was probably the 80s. That's why Michael Jackson's chart-topper "Thriller" sounds so much more layered, complex, and interesting than nearly anything shat out by the chart toppers of today.
quietbritishjim 6y ago
But those characteristics are all things that can be mechanically tweaked by a music producer, rather than innovations that make one recording artist more valuable than another.
ehnto 6y ago
I think they mean pop music lacks musicality, most of what they listed were to do with sonic tricks that are not really tied to musicality or musicianship. Anyone with even a vague understanding of music can write a song on the same level as a pop song. Every now and then a great musician makes it into the pop scene, and you get interesting chord progressions, melodies and rythms. So it's not the pop style that's bad. But most of the time it's the same four chords, a riskless melody, and four to the floor percussion.
- rorykoehler 6y ago
  A lot more goes into writing a song than a chord progression. Writing pop hits is an art few people master. That’s why so many hits are written by the same people. See Max Martin for example.
  - readred 6y ago
    I thought writing a pop song was 10% talent and 90% marketing? Written by the same people because they gatekeep those marketing dollars.
    - rorykoehler 6y ago
      There is massive competition to be a chosen producer or song writer. Being chosen as the one who is marketed is where the competition is. Their positions are earned.
      - blaser-waffle 6y ago
        They're earned the same way big movie star roles are earned -- by knowing the right people or sleeping with the producer.
        rorykoehler 6y ago
        https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y22Dx3jvafY https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y22Dx3jvafY

by tobr 6y ago

TheOtherHobbes 6y ago

It means pop has turned into a social psychology experiment designed to maximise the return invested in production, and not an individually expressive art form. The obvious end point will be AI-generated muzak which tweaks all the right receptors but is devoid of any disturbingly non-optimal fleshy surprise.

wjnc 6y ago
"has" should be "is" right. Most mainstream music has been, from what I understand for a few centuries, a combination of artists expressing themselves while trying to cater to an audience. Otherwise it's an art or a hobby. I don't know any "music as a (pure) art" and I guess with me most causal listeners.
simias 6y ago
Commercial art in general has been that way for centuries. Doesn't mean that it's intrinsically devoid of quality. Many of the classical masterpieces were made to order to cater to the fancy of some rich patron.
- rsynnott 6y ago
  Many? Virtually _all_, either for a rich individual or the church. An artist just making a thing, and seeing if people like it, is a pretty new invention. Probably a big part of why post-19th century art is so much more interesting and diverse; Western art pre-19th century was largely about technical competence in whatever the current fashionable style was.
  - stareatgoats 6y ago
    > An artist just making a thing, and seeing if people like it I sincerely doubt if that's how it works even nowadays. You need to be discovered by a well-connected and well-heeled patron who thinks what you do can be marketed with just a few tweaks. Very seldom does the artist become the patron of their own work is my guess. Banksy might be one of the few exceptions that prove the rule.
    - rsynnott 6y ago
      I think the difference today is that the normal path is that an artist does a lot of stuff, potentially quite innovative, and is _then_ discovered (or not; see Van Gogh for instance). And at that point, maybe discovered by the market, not a single patron; I believe an artist having a single patron has been rather unusual for at least the last century. A few hundred years ago, by contrast, artists tended to get into it via, essentially, apprenticeship to another artist, and attempt to get a patron that way. Some artists ended up being technically proficient, but stylistic innovation was very, very slow and minor by comparison to the late 19th century on.
    - mywittyname 6y ago
      Art has been democratized in recent years. And not just the drawing type of art either: music, videos, 3d modeling, animation, digital print, literature, etc can be produced on a computer. So today, pretty much anyone with a computer can create whatever random idea is spinning in their brains. You don't even need "talent" anymore. Music can be created by ear using drag-and-drop interfaces. Illustrator makes it dead simple to do vector art without any drawing ability. GTAV comes with an animation toolkit for making films. Most people create art for fun or their own pleasure. Tiktok is full of "modern art" in the form of short videos.
      - rsynnott 6y ago
        > You don't even need "talent" anymore. Music can be created by ear using drag-and-drop interfaces. Illustrator makes it dead simple to do vector art without any drawing ability. I'd argue that that's still talent, if the product is any good. You don't need technical expertise, but you still need creativity.
freyr 6y ago
Has "pop music" ever been anything other than this? Since the beginning, it has typically been manufactured by producers and songwriters for mass appeal.
- squiggleblaz 6y ago
  Not only that, but it's such a young form of cultural expression that saying it isn't what it used to be is kinda pointless. For thousands of years, we had people singing songs badly in pubs. Maybe someone could afford an instrument. And then someone invented the wireless and the record player. According to the myth, it quickly reached its optimum time when some fashionable person was in their youth. And it has been degrading ever since. Now, as for me, I would think all commercial music is worse than all traditional music. If you can talk, you can sing. But here someone in this thread has suggested that perhaps as little as 1% of the population can sing well enough to be autotuned! (This is insane. The proportion of the population who can sing well enough to be autotuned is much closer to 100% than to 90%.) Someone else might say that commercial music has done quite well, and it keeps doing better. Certainly there's more and more detail added to it. But the fashionable story is that at some point, probably in the 1960s, music became brilliant, and then all these grubby gen-xers and millennials got their grubby hands on it and turned it all into the most dreary computer driven sounds imaginable.
  - rsynnott 6y ago
    > And then someone invented the wireless and the record player. Even before that, you had music halls as popular entertainment (and music hall music was indeed very formulaic, arguably more so than modern pop music).
  - n0rbwah 6y ago
    Saying that before the Top 40 music was reduced to people singing songs badly in pubs and the few who could afford an instrument is a pretty reductive view of musical history.
  - CydeWeys 6y ago
    These 90/100% figures really vary by society. I'd argue that in Ireland, because of the public singing culture, there's more people that can sing passably than in the US. Like learning another language, you're much better off doing it young. I know many fellow Americans who never sing (and are embarrassed to, even though no one has any great expectations) and as a result aren't even passable at it. Relative pitch recognition and vocal pitch reproduction are both nontrivial and better learned young. Fortunately I had some music classes in elementary school that involved singing and I've been singing along to music ever since and thus am OK at it, but many people haven't and aren't.
darkerside 6y ago
Have you listened to the album Artpop by Lady Gaga? It plays with this idea in an intelligent and musically interesting way. IMHO.
bitwize 6y ago
If it were an experiment, it would be more interesting than it is. Experiments can be fun. Pop as we know it started as a social psychology experiment in the 1960s or earlier. It has now reached the phase where the experiment is over and the results have been published. That is why pop sounds so boring and samey now: the record execs know precisely what works, and all songs must contain certain elements if they are to chart, all while swapping superficial details around to sound "fresh". The last time there was experimentation going on in pop music was probably the 80s. That's why Michael Jackson's chart-topper "Thriller" sounds so much more layered, complex, and interesting than nearly anything shat out by the chart toppers of today.

quietbritishjim 6y ago

But those characteristics are all things that can be mechanically tweaked by a music producer, rather than innovations that make one recording artist more valuable than another.

ehnto 6y ago

I think they mean pop music lacks musicality, most of what they listed were to do with sonic tricks that are not really tied to musicality or musicianship. Anyone with even a vague understanding of music can write a song on the same level as a pop song. Every now and then a great musician makes it into the pop scene, and you get interesting chord progressions, melodies and rythms. So it's not the pop style that's bad. But most of the time it's the same four chords, a riskless melody, and four to the floor percussion.

rorykoehler 6y ago
A lot more goes into writing a song than a chord progression. Writing pop hits is an art few people master. That’s why so many hits are written by the same people. See Max Martin for example.
- readred 6y ago
  I thought writing a pop song was 10% talent and 90% marketing? Written by the same people because they gatekeep those marketing dollars.
  - rorykoehler 6y ago
    There is massive competition to be a chosen producer or song writer. Being chosen as the one who is marketed is where the competition is. Their positions are earned.
    - blaser-waffle 6y ago
      They're earned the same way big movie star roles are earned -- by knowing the right people or sleeping with the producer.
      - rorykoehler 6y ago
        https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y22Dx3jvafY https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y22Dx3jvafY