141–150 of 198 posts
Sounds like TikTok/YouTube/etc now has the same role as a music label had before; providing access to an audience.
This 100% they are new gatekeepers and far richer.
So the idea that they want to "gatekeep" instead of promote new artists with engaging content is suspect.
This is a much observed secular trend as Ted Gioia points out, tech platforms are disintermediators, Ben Thompson has been writing about it for ages. Platforms give creators the possibility to directly interact with consumers and it's the traditional distributors who are getting canned. In some cases this has arguably significant downsides, say in the news industry where traditional outlets have many social functions…
If this is true, why are the distributors making bank while the (median) creators are barely scraping by? Your ideal doesn’t match reality.
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What is "pop" if it's not popular?
It’s a musical genre, a sound, it has many definitions depending on context. It isn’t just a literal abbreviation of the word “popular”, not since about the 1950s anyway.
But if you are going to claim its an actual genre, like I've seen many do, then you will need to provide a description of the style that manages to include what people generally consider pop while excluding what they don't. And I've yet to see someone succeed. Because pop isn't a genre.
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I can imagine a lot more stories like the one of Billie Eilish and Finneas producing her first album at home... > This is no humblebrag bedroom studio that turns out to have been professionally outfitted. It’s just a regular bedroom, with a bed against one wall, where Eilish sat to record her vocals, facing a desk and bookshelves and O’Connell’s modest production setup: Apple Logic Pro X, a Universal Audio Apollo 8 i…
On social media, the common story is bedroom producer because it is so easy for a major entity to promote anyone they want to stardom with a solid budget behind them. Many of the most popular influencers on social media are corporately backed with songwriters and million dollar production units behind the bedroom cameras. You can usually only tell this when you search BMI and see how many songwriters and engineers na…
It doesn't cost $45B these days to be loved by a few bot accounts.
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It’s a musical genre, a sound, it has many definitions depending on context. It isn’t just a literal abbreviation of the word “popular”, not since about the 1950s anyway.
No that's exactly what it is. It used to be if it was on the radio, it was pop. Now I guess it would be if it goes viral on Tiktok or trending on streaming platforms. But if you are going to claim its an actual genre, like I've seen many do, then you will need to provide a description of the style that manages to include what people generally consider pop while excluding what they don't. And I've yet to see someone s…
> Identifying factors usually include repeated choruses and hooks, short to medium-length songs written in a basic format (often the verse-chorus structure), and rhythms or tempos that can be easily danced to.
BTW, Wikipedia also draws a distinction between "pop music" and "popular music", where the latter is defined as you describe.
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It's not committing suicide - it's just fighting over the rights to the tide pool where the water receded entirely unaware of the tsunami barreling towards them. When the software world can convincingly create new songs that sound like the hit songs people like, but sufficiently different to dodge copyright law, then it's game over. We don't blink an eye at efforts to do things like complete one of Beethoven's sympho…
My god everything about this eventuality just sounds absolutely awful. Just more and more recycling of the same meme-tastic trash (which isn't that far off from the current state of pop music), writ even more large and just plain worse. I'd like to think the future is the opposite -- artists/bands managing themselves as disparate entities, forming around small labels or even their own labels, and having someone in ch…
Those platforms more often than not demand constant care and effort in order to build and maintain an audience the artists can live off. Gone are the days where a band retreated into hiding to work on a new album while the label had their backs. If you stop feeding whatever opaque algorithm the platform runs on, you'll just slowly disappear. Worst case is that artists are forced to release nonsense because it's faster to produce.
Of course, that exact same problem always existed. But I think it's not hard to see how algorithm-driven platforms push this trend to the extreme.
And good luck appealing to Google when some bot decides to demonetize your videos.
I don’t get why artists even use record labels anymore. Is there something that Facebook/YouTube/iTunes etc doesn’t provide?
It is a lot more complex than it seems from the outside. If you want to play a live show somewhere big (reach the most fans, sell merch and earn the big bucks), Live Nation owns the venue. Live Nation is Clear Channel and Ticket Master. Live Nation also owns radio, where your show would be advertised. The big labels all have deals with Live Nation. It is all super super shady.
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>Digital is cold and thin compared to analog. Claude Shannon emphatically disagrees. When sampling at twice the highest audible frequency they are mathematically equivalent.
Being a musician and audio engineer right now for 30 years, I see all this and I simply shake my head. I've long given up the hopes of monetary success for my music. One thing that remains is the energy exchange between an artist and the audience in a live setting. If you love music and you are not an emotional robot you know what I am talking about. Software can't replicate that and the artistry in the performer kno…
This made me laugh pretty hard for a few minutes, I had tears in my eyes. Thank you.
Your humour is of course all the more pithy for exactly capturing the situation. Further, it applies everywhere that industrial-scale (internet-scale?) culture exists. Music, art, film, tv-shows, news, writing. We min-max everything at the altar of the algorithm, because... "reach". Or something. Money. I don't know. Whatever. It's hard to care about taking a shit.