4 ms·

I think the comparison is quite apt, given that the most popular artists are usually not the ones that have "mastered their craft" the most. One can argue that

• munificent 6y ago
  > One can argue that White Stripes' 7 Nation Army or Andy Warhol's Campbell's Soup Cans are not feats of technical mastery by any stretch of imagination, but the key is that there is no correlation between technical difficulty and monetary value in the first place. I see arguments like this a lot and it think it conflates two very different kinds of "technical difficulty"—design difficulty and execution difficulty. Given the sheet music, any guitarist can play 7 Nation Army in a few minutes. It is not physically difficult to play. Also, it's not hard to come up with a completely original melody or artistic work. Just throw a couple of random unrelated things together. But it is extraordinarily difficult to have such a mastery of composition and understanding of what music is already familiar to people to be able to find a melody that is both original and enjoyable to a wide variety of people. The level of cultural, musical, and historical knowledge required to do that is extremely difficult and rare. It's like taking your boat to the world's most popular fishing hole and knowing where everyone else fishes so well that you can still manage to stake out an unvisited spot that hasn't been fished out and reel in a giant.
  • lhorie 6y ago
    > But it is extraordinarily difficult to have such a mastery of composition and understanding of what music is already familiar to people The problem with this argument IMHO is that if it were true, one would in fact be able to just bang out hits by developing such mastery. But music hits get popular primarily on the basis of luck, survivor bias, branding, etc, not strictly based on artists' composition skills. There are plenty of very talented one-hit wonders, and even criticisms that popular music is "manufactured" (implying that it is relatively easy to just follow some vague formula of 4/4, II-V-I chord progressions and lyrics about love and end up with something that resembles a hit).
    • oriolid 6y ago
      > if it were true, one would in fact be able to just bang out hits by developing such mastery. Isn't this exactly what Max Martin has been doing for last 20 years?
      • lhorie 6y ago
        I mean, it's certainly possible that he is one of a select handful of people that has mastered a skill that almost no one else in history has been able to. But given how many musicians and producers exist and how utterly small is the percentage of people who are comparable to Max Martin, I think it's reasonable to speculate that his success might be partially/majorly attributed to factors of luck/survivorship bias/branding/popular-music-as-a-mass-produced-product I mentioned.
        • zimpenfish 6y ago
          There's also a certain amount of positive feedback, I suspect - once you've had one hit, people will want you to write for them and, because it probably sounds hit-like (which stands to reason since your style has already been a hit), it'll stand a good chance of also being a hit which means more people will want you to write for them and rinse, repeat, cash cheques for 20 years, etc.
    • moron4hire 6y ago
      Uuuuh, that's exactly how the music industry works. I think you might be surprised to learn how many hit pop songs were written by a very small community of artists, completely separate from the ever changing faces that perform them.
  • IQunder130 6y ago
    The big iffy assumption being made in your post is that any kind of foreknowledge of the outcome exists. In reality you're probably looking at survivorship bias at work. A thousand artists throw their output at a wall, one manages to stick and rakes in the big bucks.
    • golergka 6y ago
      If the same artist has several shits stuck on the same wall, it's statistically improbable that he's just lucky. White Stripes were not a one-hit wonder.