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Is Spotify Killing the Top 40?

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Re: Is Spotify Killing the Top 40?

#191

Post by n0rbwah »

squiggleblaz wrote: post #164
freyr wrote: post #140

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Has "pop music" ever been anything other than this? Since the beginning, it has typically been manufactured by producers and songwriters for mass appeal.

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…

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.

Re: Is Spotify Killing the Top 40?

#192

Post by ehnto »

UncleMeat wrote: post #183
ehnto wrote: post #166

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Complexity in pop music is driven by timbre and instrumentation rather than harmonic or melodic complexity - but timbre and instrumentation are no less valid forms of musical expression and complexity (talk to Ravel or Varese). The desire to judge all music based on the dominant ideas of 16-19th century european classical music seems to exist not to better understand musical expression but instead to let people feel…

I don't think exploration of timbre has been novel for just as long. EDM has been around for decades now which is where a lot of that exploration happens, yet count how many Top40 tracks just use the 808 and call it a day. Modern artists and classic artists all explored timbre, and there are modern artists doing just as much with timbre and musicality.

Re: Is Spotify Killing the Top 40?

#193

Post by Jach »

CincinnatiMan wrote: post #173
svantana wrote: post #149

Earlier quoted context omitted.

On the other hand, music has historically been a very social thing that have brought people together. The decline into a sollipsist "service" has been gradual since the dawn of recorded music, but Spotify et al are definitely making it worse than ever. My 11-year old daughter loves music but she and her friends all listen to different things, there is no music that they all know. I may have hated top40 stuff in my da…

Damn that’s scary. A world where no one has anything in common. I’m in my 30s and my friends and I reference songs from our childhood all the time. Shows and candy and all sorts of things.

Remember the 90s? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5pa6SGYWADU

E.D. Hirsch, Jr. wrote "Cultural Literacy" in 1987, with an update in 2002 as "The New Dictionary of Cultural Literacy". It's a huge collection of thousands of words/phrases/concepts/devices/people/places/etc, across multiple categories, that most Americans will already know the majority of their meanings, or at least find them somewhat familiar. I personally like randomly looking at the proverbs and idioms and sometimes finding parallels in other languages. It'd be interesting to go through it at random with a 7th grader and see what they've picked up -- like who says "there's more than one way to skin a cat" these days, but also who grew up in the US and doesn't understand its meaning? The book contends that about 80% of the knowledge shared by the literate has not changed for over a hundred years. Meanwhile for the 20% that changes (or is brand new) Asimov once wrote a chapter (9 in http://www.arvindguptatoys.com/arvindgupta/asimov-on-numbers...) on how so much once-common knowledge has been happily forgotten -- who needs to know about compound addition?

For the professional context, https://apps.dtic.mil/dtic/tr/fulltext/u2/a219064.pdf et al. claim you need to know 70k plus or minus 20k things in your field to be an effective expert. I think it's also why it can be easily rewarding to chat about work with colleagues, you both have a lot in common just on the basis of the shared profession.

In short, I wouldn't worry about running out of shared knowledge, nor even shared preferences and tastes, for yourself or for the world.

Re: Is Spotify Killing the Top 40?

#194

Post by 3np »

wmil wrote: post #135
3np wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's almost like there's some force of nature making animated-to-live adaptations terrible. There are a few exceptions, though. I think Netflix did kind of OK on Erased (僕だけがいない街). The first movie that was made from that great source material was excruciatingly bad.

The whole animation to live adaptation idea is equivilant to remaking the original with a new cast, bigger budget, and shorter run time if you're going TV series -> film. Hollywood studios have certain expectations about pacing and storyline. The writter and director will either have their own ideas about the story, or they will be cashing a paycheck and not care. Basically it's a bad start creatively. You're almost…

It's not just Hollywood, though. Japan especially is great at butchering live adaptations.

Re: Is Spotify Killing the Top 40?

#195

Post by notsuoh »

wfme wrote: post #5

Personally, I used to be able to listen to a large portion of the top 50 on Spotify without skipping too many. As of late last year, though, I've found that the top 10 are almost exclusively songs made popular on TikTok. I can't stand to listen to these songs, not because I necessarily dislike the songs (or TikTok for that matter), but because there are 15-30s sections of the song that I have heard dozens of times, p…

Different observation, but I usually just listen to my playlist. I listened to Discover or whatever Spotify puts together and it was good for a bit, but then seemed to devolve into songs that YouTube personalities had made and posted on Spotify. It was really odd and sounded like it was made for edgy teens.

Re: Is Spotify Killing the Top 40?

#196

Post by tobr »

ehnto wrote: post #166
tobr wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

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…

> pop music lacks musicality, most of what they listed were to do with sonic tricks that are not really tied to musicality or musicianship

This is a paradox, though. You’re saying that one of the most popular types of music “lacks musicality”. The only way that can be true is if you start with a narrow and arbitrary definition of what “musicality” is.

If you examine the history of ideas of what is “real” or “authentic” or “objectively good” in music, who has been a proponent of those ideas through history, and why, you will find is that a lot of it is rooted in white supremacy. The idea is that a certain style of white European music is the only true music, and that other music is only valuable to the extent that it happens to fit within the theoretical frameworks developed around those styles.

I guess what I’m saying is, please watch this excellent video, “Music Theory is Racist” by Adam Neely: https://youtu.be/Kr3quGh7pJA

Re: Is Spotify Killing the Top 40?

#197

Post by CydeWeys »

squiggleblaz wrote: post #164
freyr wrote: post #140

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Has "pop music" ever been anything other than this? Since the beginning, it has typically been manufactured by producers and songwriters for mass appeal.

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…

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.

Re: Is Spotify Killing the Top 40?

#198

Post by rhodysurf »

chrisseaton wrote: post #143
heavenlyblue wrote: post #133

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Do people not generally have radios in their homes where you live? No. > And you must have a phone or laptop to be typing this where you could listen to the radio! Do I need an RTL-SDR?

No I mean every radio station I know streams over the Internet as well.

Why would I choose listen to the radio with ads when I can listen to music without ads instead?

Re: Is Spotify Killing the Top 40?

#199

Post by CydeWeys »

awalton wrote: post #88
jimbob45 wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think you’re right and I’d argue that American Idol proves that there is a surplus of talent for labels to choose from, allowing them to be picky in regards to secondary requirements (ethnicity, backstory, work ethic).

The difference being that American Idol contestants are often actually quite artistically good - they only managed to get where they are because of skill and looks and luck, instead of just the latter two. (This isn't universal; it's often the case they pick someone up who is actually pretty awful but is interesting for the whole mechanics of the show, either being very attractive or standing out in some other way...…

I think a lot more of them can hold a tune than you give them credit for, it's just that pitch adjustment in the studio is stretching them beyond their natural vocal range, so when they try to reproduce it live, quality suffers. Unless you're specifically talking about artists like T-Pain, but their whole thing is that autotune is their vocal instrument.

Re: Is Spotify Killing the Top 40?

#200

Post by CydeWeys »

CincinnatiMan wrote: post #173
svantana wrote: post #149

Earlier quoted context omitted.

On the other hand, music has historically been a very social thing that have brought people together. The decline into a sollipsist "service" has been gradual since the dawn of recorded music, but Spotify et al are definitely making it worse than ever. My 11-year old daughter loves music but she and her friends all listen to different things, there is no music that they all know. I may have hated top40 stuff in my da…

Damn that’s scary. A world where no one has anything in common. I’m in my 30s and my friends and I reference songs from our childhood all the time. Shows and candy and all sorts of things.

If you don't have anything in common with others then you're both mutually doing a really bad job of sharing your favorites with each other. I love getting musical recommendations from friends, and most of my very favorite music ever comes by way of friends, rather than me having "discovered" it "independently" (whatever that even means).
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