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> ...someone else actually makes it. ...which sort of applies to a lot of Hot 100 artists as well. A good songwriter writes it, a talented producer makes it so

> ...someone else actually makes it. ...which sort of applies to a lot of Hot 100 artists as well. A good songwriter writes it, a talented producer makes it sound good, and a well-known personality sings it (with varying accuracy) and has their name put on it as the "artist". It's a spectrum. At one end you've got The Velvet Underground playing around a single mic hooked directly to a reel-to-reel, and at the other end you've got neural-net generated lofi hip hop beats to relax/study to. If you sort artists by play count on Spotify, the top results will be all over this spectrum (but mostly in the middle, I think).

ChrisMarshallNY 5y ago
I remember listening —really listening— to a Debbie Gibson song, in the early nineties. She was never an artist I cared about. I just assumed she was a “teenybopper queen.” The song clearly had one -maybe two- musicians in the background, playing a sampler, while she sang. Maybe she played the sampler. I realized it probably cost almost nothing to record that song. She didn’t have a regular band, and probably threw one together, when she toured. I suspect that many artists do the same.
- kQq9oHeAz6wLLS 5y ago
  There are musicians for hire to play in studio and on the road. Very common practice.
  - dylan604 5y ago
    Similarly is the Beach Boys where one brother never left the studio and wrote all of the music while the other guys learned to perform the tunes to take on the road. Not quite the same, but in that world though
- tkgally 5y ago
  A lot of music these days is produced by one or two people with a computer sitting in a room by themselves. I sometimes listen to the Music Introducing programs on BBC Radio, especially BBC Music Introducing in London [1]. The music is submitted to the BBC by the musicians themselves—hundreds of tracks a week, apparently—and the DJs choose the songs to air on the program. Many of the songs, which are in a variety of genres, are created in the artists’ homes—hence the genre “bedroom pop” [2], which has been around for a while but seems to have taken off since COVID. I’m an older guy with musical tastes formed in the 1970s, but I find a lot of this new independent music stimulating, enjoyable, and very competently made. When there’s a song I particularly like, I’ve sometimes looked up the artist online, and often he or she has had only a few hundred plays on YouTube and a few dozen followers on Instagram. It must be really tough for young musicians trying to make a career out of music now. [1] https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p025tszp https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p025tszp [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lo-fi_music https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lo-fi_music

ChrisMarshallNY 5y ago

I remember listening —really listening— to a Debbie Gibson song, in the early nineties. She was never an artist I cared about. I just assumed she was a “teenybopper queen.” The song clearly had one -maybe two- musicians in the background, playing a sampler, while she sang. Maybe she played the sampler. I realized it probably cost almost nothing to record that song. She didn’t have a regular band, and probably threw one together, when she toured. I suspect that many artists do the same.

kQq9oHeAz6wLLS 5y ago
There are musicians for hire to play in studio and on the road. Very common practice.
- dylan604 5y ago
  Similarly is the Beach Boys where one brother never left the studio and wrote all of the music while the other guys learned to perform the tunes to take on the road. Not quite the same, but in that world though
tkgally 5y ago
A lot of music these days is produced by one or two people with a computer sitting in a room by themselves. I sometimes listen to the Music Introducing programs on BBC Radio, especially BBC Music Introducing in London [1]. The music is submitted to the BBC by the musicians themselves—hundreds of tracks a week, apparently—and the DJs choose the songs to air on the program. Many of the songs, which are in a variety of genres, are created in the artists’ homes—hence the genre “bedroom pop” [2], which has been around for a while but seems to have taken off since COVID. I’m an older guy with musical tastes formed in the 1970s, but I find a lot of this new independent music stimulating, enjoyable, and very competently made. When there’s a song I particularly like, I’ve sometimes looked up the artist online, and often he or she has had only a few hundred plays on YouTube and a few dozen followers on Instagram. It must be really tough for young musicians trying to make a career out of music now. [1] https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p025tszp https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p025tszp [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lo-fi_music https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lo-fi_music