The music industry has become utter shit, and I will present you with the reasons why.
One of the major changes to the music industry is that they now use computer programs to determine two factors in songs.
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Is the song catchy?
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Is the song sticky?
Catchiness is based upon an analysis of hits of the past. Most hit songs have a chorus that rises to a VI or vi (if you know chord representations). I'm sure there are several other factors.
Stickiness refers to how comfortable a song is. If a song is uncomfortable, people tend to turn that shit off. In the right context, this means switching stations.
This computer analysis method has produced a highly controlled music industry that is boring and predictable. Combine this with using a small portion of writers that feed their cookie-cutter garbage to professional performers who perform very well and generally look good. You also have a similarly small portion of producers. This results in music where most of the idiosyncrasies that really make it diverse and interesting are filtered out in favor of a uniform, predictable set of songs that zombie-like listeners are perfectly okay with.
This industry has been created by a love for money, and the desire to remove risk and failures from the industry. All of the best studies and tools are used to make the perfect music industry that never pushes a lame song, yet there is no study and no tool but the human experience that testifies to the destructive effect this has. It is akin to considering what will happen to baseball if batters never miss. You might say it is good; you might say it is bad. Ultimately, it is certain that baseball will never be the same again.
I didn't even mention the loudness wars and the destruction that has produced. You can search for loudness wars to verify this. This was based on the studies that mindless radio listeners prefer songs that sound louder. So in order to produce this loudness sound, there is a one click process applied to entirety of the song to increase the levels of everything. The RHCP albums get this loudness boost now. It actually isn't that bad for them since their instruments stay pretty distinct from each other for most of the song. During the loud parts my car's speakers tend to get all rattly from this overproduction method. Compare this to high quality recordings of the 80s that tended to put the sound at a low position. This enabled the sound to be clear and dynamic by allowing sounds to be quiet as well as loud in comparison to typically moderate sound levels. Perhaps the base moderate level has been increased in more modern albums without receiving the loudness treatment.
When Axl was recording Chinese Democracy with whoever was in on the project at the time, there was a someone who created 3 different versions for them to sample. One of them was left as is. The other two had the loudness adjustment, one moderately and one fully. When sampling these three different versions, all the musicians present agreed that no loudness increase sounded the best to them.
Pop music, country, popular rock, popular rap. They're all genres that have been manipulated to be perfect for music zombies with no real refinement. The presence of music as opposed to silence, the motivation to dance, and the love of musically-enhanced, emotional words is what drives these people to turn on the radio. They have no refined or informed appreciation for music and musical creativity. They are responsible for this monstrosity that is the modern music industry. Such people should fuck off.
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[–] Nofatpeople 0 points 4 points 4 points (+4|-0) ago
I think you mean to say, why commercially produce modern music sucks. Saying all modern music sucks is retarded.
[–] Whitemail [S] 0 points 2 points 2 points (+2|-0) ago
Yes, the popular stuff. The radio stuff. It's garbage. There are good albums and artists underneath the mountain of shit. You just have to be willing to dig for them. Maybe people have better extraction methods than me. Really, though, with all the old bands and artists I keep up with and the old bands I'm willing to dig up and listen to, the last thing I need is to find more music.
[–] Nofatpeople 0 points 1 point 1 point (+1|-0) ago
The guy who makes my coffee gave me a CD last week, other than that i haven't found anything worth while.
[–] R34p_Th3_Wh0r1w1nd 0 points 3 points 3 points (+3|-0) ago
"So, here it is ladies and gentlemen, the late 1970s going on 1985. So much of the music we hear today is preprogrammed electronic disco, you never get a chance to hear master blues men practicing their craft anymore. By the year 2006, the music we know today as the blues will exist only in the classical record department of your local public library.
So, tonight ladles and gentlemen while we still can. Let us welcome the blues band from Rock Island Illinois. Joliet Jake and Elwood Blues, The Blues Brothers." - Elwood Blues (aka Dan Aykroyd) - Briefcase full of Blues - Can't turn you lose pt1 -1978
[–] Whitemail [S] ago
Stevie Ray Vaughan and B.B.King are both dead now. Eric Clapton is almost there.I think blues, blues rock, and rock blues should all be retired. Nobody's going to do it better than the King used to do it. Nobody could touch SRV's ability to reorganize and improvise on the spot.
[–] wahala 0 points 2 points 2 points (+2|-0) ago
Very well said, although I do agree with @Nofatpeople's caveat that it's commercially produced modern music that sucks. Indies are still out there and know how to play their instruments. It's just way, way harder to find.
It feels like more and more, I am subjected to advertisements (mostly during live sport events, which can't be fast-forwarded) that contain a ton of shitty (what I thought were) jingles. Then later on I'm in the grocery store or a waiting room and hear the 'jingle" but it turns out that it was a full song. Apparently it's a thing now to cross-promote "pop" songs through the ads for beer, cars, etc. Hyper lame.
I read an article along these same lines relatively recently that studied the structure of modern music, which showed that instrumental introductions to songs are diminishing. See: Has music streaming killed the instrumental intro?
And auto-tune can die right now. Die, auto-tune, Die!
[–] Whitemail [S] 0 points 1 point 1 point (+1|-0) ago (edited ago)
I don't listen to enough shitty pop music to notice the lack of musical intros. To me I find it unusual to start singing right or away or after a short bit of music. That is also the first song on the album, so you turn it on, and he's singing within seconds.
[–] Whitemail [S] ago
There aren't any musical instruments or technology that I think are inherently bad. Synths in the 80s and auto-tunes in recent decades have been abused by shitty pop musicians. On the LIVE (the band called LIVE) album Distance to Here there is one part of one song where auto-tune is used, when it was something new. That was perfectly fine to have one or two lines auto-tuned into some kind of distinctly different sound from the rest of the singing on the whole album. After that the pop musicians got a hold of it and turned it into some retarded fad. Shitty musicians and people who can't sing kept using it until it was something detestable.
A lot of advertisements use songs from a specific generation to catch the attention of the target audience. Modern pop songs have been too expensive to use, though.
[–] wahala ago
Good point on LIVE. I loved that album when it came out. Thanks for the reminder on that.
I was also being a bit facetious when it comes to auto-tune. I completely agree synths and other electronic means of music can be amazing if used musically and not as a substitute for music. For example, when Jerry Garcia would break out the MU-TRON, aww yeah.
I disagree that modern pop music is too expensive for ads. Right now, Fitz & The Tantrums 'Hand-Clap' is being used in a Fiat ad. A Phoenix song is being used in a Calvin Klein ad. Honda is using Empire of the Sun's 'The Dreamer: Fantasy' in their current ads. I could go on, but I think you see where I'm going with this. They cross-promo on purpose.
When it comes to formulaic music, just give me a nice I-V-vi-IV and I'm good. Please tell me you've seen this - Axis of Awesome, 4 Chord Song
[–] wayofthedragonite 0 points 1 point 1 point (+1|-0) ago
Paul Joseph Watson: The truth about pop music https://youtu.be/IP0wuwJBdMI
Seems to cover the same content.
[–] [deleted] ago (edited ago)
[–] Whitemail [S] 0 points 1 point 1 point (+1|-0) ago (edited ago)
I found a British band called Random Hand. They've got a few songs I really like, and the same label has the New Town Kings. They sound pretty good, but I could see the band members being a bunch of liberal faggots, though. The singer is a Jamaican in the UK. That song is about fake news, but it sounds more like it's focused on tabloids rather than BBC and CNN.
[–] Whitemail [S] 0 points 1 point 1 point (+1|-0) ago
Alright. I'll check it out. I still like quality musicianship and also it sucks to hear good music with a terribly bad recording. It's getting pretty cheap and common for people to make acceptable recordings now, so you don't hear a lot of really bad stuff these days. You might have to pay someone who knows what they're doing to mix it and master it right,
[–] Teeder ago
Music has sucked for a long time. Accepting nostalgia the mid 70's is when good music ended. There's been and continues to be good bands and it's far easier to find them these days but having lived through the 80's it's a long downward spiral. Once music companies decided the buck could be made with pretty people instead of good musicians it was over
[–] Whitemail [S] ago
The 80s produced Michael Jackson and Madonna, who were really interesting pop artists.
Iron Maiden, Guns N Roses, Metallica, and Megadeth all got started in the 80s and are all household names now.
I was old enough to start liking real music around 1990, so I really like the 90s rock style. The grunge bands and Silverchair. I like what Silverchair became. Live is considered post-grunge rock.
One thing that has happened, though, is a lot of good musicians that like edgy, intense music have gone into metal. There are types of metal that can't be pop metal like 90s Metallica stuff.
[–] Teeder ago
I'm not saying there weren't good bands in the 80's, but that the mainstream radio and top 40 was flooding with crap. Until Whitesnake's Still of the Night, and Metallica's One the hardest rocking music you'd hear was Sammy Hagers Van Halen, which wasn't. As far as Michael Jackson was concerned he was a household name in the 70's already. Iron Maiden produced 4 of the best metal albums of all time in the 80's yet unless you were into metal you had no idea who they were, and that included The trooper being on a year end best of album. Pink Floyd was still selling out everywhere and nada on mainstream radio.
[–] moremetalguitar ago
My take on modern pop including hip hop is it's all become so simplified, which is probably my interpretation of the comfortableness you mention. There are no surprises in the songs, not musically, lyrically, or rhythmically. You can tell how overproduced they are and how the studio has taken little snippets only a few seconds long, layered them, repeated them, and loudened them. Then you've got the singers, many of whom who have a very limited vocal range and style so the songs are written with very simple, repetitive melodies, and then the vocals are autotuned to sound even less interesting.