It is astonishing when you realize it. Since the MCM times, we’ve transferred music bands from sound to image, and we noticed the commercial drums (and repetition on radios in particular) produced linear return in investment, and music characteristics hadn’t much to do with it. To the point that today, any music will do. It’s much easier for the labels, since they can pimp anyone among the 1-10% of the population who can sing, and therefore they can choose people on character and ethnicity. Studies on thousands of pieces showed that melodies recouped more and more, the chorus started earlier in the song, songs got shorter, and instrument-based tricks reduced. Meanwhile loudness increased (screams and whisper are at the same volume) to make it fitter for bad-quality players (radio, speakers etc.)

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?

It means pop has turned into a social psychology experiment designed to maximise the return invested in production, and not an individually expressive art form.

The obvious end point will be AI-generated muzak which tweaks all the right receptors but is devoid of any disturbingly non-optimal fleshy surprise.

Commercial art in general has been that way for centuries. Doesn't mean that it's intrinsically devoid of quality. Many of the classical masterpieces were made to order to cater to the fancy of some rich patron.

Many? Virtually _all_, either for a rich individual or the church. An artist just making a thing, and seeing if people like it, is a pretty new invention. Probably a big part of why post-19th century art is so much more interesting and diverse; Western art pre-19th century was largely about technical competence in whatever the current fashionable style was.

> An artist just making a thing, and seeing if people like it

I sincerely doubt if that's how it works even nowadays. You need to be discovered by a well-connected and well-heeled patron who thinks what you do can be marketed with just a few tweaks. Very seldom does the artist become the patron of their own work is my guess. Banksy might be one of the few exceptions that prove the rule.

I think the difference today is that the normal path is that an artist does a lot of stuff, potentially quite innovative, and is _then_ discovered (or not; see Van Gogh for instance). And at that point, maybe discovered by the market, not a single patron; I believe an artist having a single patron has been rather unusual for at least the last century.

A few hundred years ago, by contrast, artists tended to get into it via, essentially, apprenticeship to another artist, and attempt to get a patron that way. Some artists ended up being technically proficient, but stylistic innovation was very, very slow and minor by comparison to the late 19th century on.

Art has been democratized in recent years. And not just the drawing type of art either: music, videos, 3d modeling, animation, digital print, literature, etc can be produced on a computer. So today, pretty much anyone with a computer can create whatever random idea is spinning in their brains.

You don't even need "talent" anymore. Music can be created by ear using drag-and-drop interfaces. Illustrator makes it dead simple to do vector art without any drawing ability. GTAV comes with an animation toolkit for making films.

Most people create art for fun or their own pleasure. Tiktok is full of "modern art" in the form of short videos.

> You don't even need "talent" anymore. Music can be created by ear using drag-and-drop interfaces. Illustrator makes it dead simple to do vector art without any drawing ability.

I'd argue that that's still talent, if the product is any good. You don't need technical expertise, but you still need creativity.

The talent has moved from your actual technique to your message. How many 10-20$ words can you shove into your statement about the art.

She switched out of painting when the someone in class used pain straight from the tube (no mixing) and just made a vagina that was smoking a cigarette but then had some real good fluff backing it up.

She deeply respected the impressionists so it was rough for her. She's happy in her new medium tho.

source: sister with a masters in fine art from a very prestigious university.

Art is subjective. I never found Guernica aesthetically pleasing, so by your standards I could judge it as a bad painting with "some real good fluff backing it up".

Art is always about the message and the emotions it impresses on people, not raw technique. Or do you think that literature is the art of typesetting?

You're still talking about this smoking vagina, how many other pieces from this class do you mention in casual conversation? Clearly if it was meant to be a provoking piece, it worked to a certain extent.

That's why I said "talent." You don't need to play an instrument to make music anymore. You don't need to draw to make digital illustrations. You can get away with a computer, the right software, and your imagination.

"has" should be "is" right. Most mainstream music has been, from what I understand for a few centuries, a combination of artists expressing themselves while trying to cater to an audience. Otherwise it's an art or a hobby. I don't know any "music as a (pure) art" and I guess with me most causal listeners.

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 degrading ever since.

Now, as for me, I would think all commercial music is worse than all traditional music. If you can talk, you can sing. But here someone in this thread has suggested that perhaps as little as 1% of the population can sing well enough to be autotuned! (This is insane. The proportion of the population who can sing well enough to be autotuned is much closer to 100% than to 90%.)

Someone else might say that commercial music has done quite well, and it keeps doing better. Certainly there's more and more detail added to it.

But the fashionable story is that at some point, probably in the 1960s, music became brilliant, and then all these grubby gen-xers and millennials got their grubby hands on it and turned it all into the most dreary computer driven sounds imaginable.

> And then someone invented the wireless and the record player.

Even before that, you had music halls as popular entertainment (and music hall music was indeed very formulaic, arguably more so than modern pop music).

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.

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.

if the question is whether pop music has ever been anything other than muzak written by AI to tick a number of emotional boxes, I think the answer is pretty obviously yes. That's a ridiculous conclusion. We don't have to dig very deep in the well of incredible pop music...all of Motown, psychedelic rock, etc. was the pop music of the time.

Have you listened to the album Artpop by Lady Gaga? It plays with this idea in an intelligent and musically interesting way. IMHO.

If it were an experiment, it would be more interesting than it is. Experiments can be fun.

Pop as we know it started as a social psychology experiment in the 1960s or earlier. It has now reached the phase where the experiment is over and the results have been published. That is why pop sounds so boring and samey now: the record execs know precisely what works, and all songs must contain certain elements if they are to chart, all while swapping superficial details around to sound "fresh".

The last time there was experimentation going on in pop music was probably the 80s. That's why Michael Jackson's chart-topper "Thriller" sounds so much more layered, complex, and interesting than nearly anything shat out by the chart toppers of today.

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. But most of the time it's the same four chords, a riskless melody, and four to the floor percussion.

> 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

I had watched that a bit earlier, it is excellent. I am definitely aware of the vast expanse of music culture though, I think my use of the word musicality could better be replaced by the word substance.

I think saying western Top40 lacks musicality within the context of western music is a totally fine thing to do though, because it's not that it's something different and good. It's trying to be western music, but it's derivative and shallow interpretations of it. Western music being a broad brush, including many of the subcultures of music contained within somewhere like America.

Top40 is often the crap versions of the good stuff that's out there, cheap versions of the culture that dwells beneath. My main point is that it's popularity is not because of musical excellence regardless of what that excellence is for the given genre/culture, it's manufactured popularity through repetition and distribution. Sometimes they pick good songs to pedal, so I'm not saying Top40 contains zero good music. It's just not a good representation of the state of music culture by any means.

It's hard to talk about music without seeing it through your own experience, because it is a language you share with those who know it. Adam Neely about his Jazz Ambassador tour, said he felt he could connect only tangentially with the Mongolian performers. There was some crossover and they could speak some of the same musical terms, but there was much of their musical language that wasn't immediately compatible. Sort of like a French language speaker sometimes interjecting English words, you can hear them but you can't intuitively know the context, and unless you knew both you couldn't really comment on how well the sentence was executed. But of the genres that end up in Top40, I typically know good music in those genres, so I feel I am able to comment on their quality.

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 superior to others.

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.

Ooorr... because those measures correspond to something in the experience, that humans have been found to value.

This is obviously wrong, because there are entire classical traditions (centuries or millennia long) from outside of Europe that prioritize musical features beyond traditional western harmony. Any claim that harmonic complexity is fundamental to human experience or uniquely valuable among musical expression is ignorance at best.

All words in my mouth.

A lot more goes into writing a song than a chord progression. Writing pop hits is an art few people master. That’s why so many hits are written by the same people. See Max Martin for example.

I thought writing a pop song was 10% talent and 90% marketing? Written by the same people because they gatekeep those marketing dollars.

There is massive competition to be a chosen producer or song writer. Being chosen as the one who is marketed is where the competition is. Their positions are earned.

They're earned the same way big movie star roles are earned -- by knowing the right people or sleeping with the producer.

> Anyone with even a vague understanding of music can write a song on the same level as a pop song.

Ok, why don’t you prove it by writing a hit pop song? Come back to this thread when you have your gold record, I’ll wait

The entire point is making the song isn't the hard part. Marketing and managing the artists image is.

I don't even care about the actual gold record or any accolades of any sort. I'd love to hear the gold record level pop song written by someone with only a vague understanding of music. I have 0 respect for most modern pop music, but that's complete nonsense.

As the other commentor said, that's my point. I could write a song that sounds just like a hit pop song, but it wouldn't be a hit because the music that gets popular isn't the best examples of music, it's just the music chosen to be pushed and sold.

But those characteristics are all things that can be mechanically tweaked by a music producer, rather than innovations that make one recording artist more valuable than another.

You can even see the difference with individual artists in their studio vs live performances.

For some unknown reason I’ve been geeking out on Miley Cyrus lately. Her studio releases have that glossy, overproduced sound of too many cooks in the kitchen. Her live performances on the other hand rely on the power of her vocals and a really tight band that has been together for a stretch now.

Just compare the studio release of Slide Away [1] with what they did on the BBC Live Lounge [2]. Lyrically the song is what it is, but there’s so much more energy and feel (to me anyway) in the latter.

[1] https://youtu.be/rrvFv6j3-sM

[2] https://youtu.be/liRu4mhUF7I

Then of course her Backyard Sessions have been a treat for a while now, but would never grace the airwaves:

https://youtu.be/wOwblaKmyVw

Then there's Katy Perry, whose studio releases sound fine but on stage, she sounds like someone strangling a cat.

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... but it still holds that the show has actually managed to scout real talent on the whole - just look at how many of the people who didn't win managed to snag successful music careers afterwards.)

But that's beside the point here. My biggest peeve is that there are plenty of "Top 40" "artists" that can barely hold a note. And it's been that way since the 90s, thanks to the magic of Auto-Tune. Anyone with a marketing budget and access to an industry insider who can make the right moves can just start dropping albums and buying hit slots.

What's changed is that now, anyone with a YouTube or Twitch channel can just start publishing music. Create a Soundcloud and you can get rotation in any one of a dozen DJs podcasts. TuneCore will put your stuff in the Music Stores. Spotify and Pandora are a little harder to break into, but not much. Setup a Twitter account and talk directly to your fans without needing a publicist.

A whole industry's worth of Kingmakers have been turned into online services, and that's really changing the landscape of the industry.

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.

That was definitely the way he marketed himself. He knew exactly what he was doing and is a great example of marketing vs music. T-Pain knows music, and is a fantastic musician, check out his NPR gig with just a keyboardist and his natural voice https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CIjXUg1s5gc

I think it's going to be better for it in the long run. I know it's hard for bands to make ends meet off album sales now, but on the other hand it doesn't cost 100k to produce and distribute anymore. Some people don't even have to spend a dime, it can be home produced and still have an audience.

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 day, but at least we all knew it.

I'm not sure that's entirely bad. I met up with my cousin (nearly 20 years younger than me) and one of her first questions was "Show me your playlists! Music is how I get to know people." We spent ages talking about genres, recommending bands to each other, scrolling through each other's Spotify libraries and offline MP3s. I was thrilled that she was interested in a wide range of genres, across several decades. Far more diverse than when I was the same age. It's still social to be recommending music and trying to find new bands your friends will like.

As for knowing the same songs, I made friends through genre-related social groups - the goth/industrial nightclubs, and the Eurovision fanclubs / events. It's nice that generally everyone knows the same Max Martin songs, but there's deeper friendships to be had at clubs where everyone knows your obscure niche - whether it's arguing that Euphoria is still better than Heroes, even if Mans & Petra are the best hosts. Or if it's goths bitching over the shared experience of falling down the stairs trying to get onto the goth club dancefloor before Dero from Oomph yells "Gott Ist Ein Popstar" or "Augen Auf, ich komme"....

Don't worry, they still rally together around songs as they go "viral". Music has always had a big social component and always will. It's wired into us.

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).

Interesting point. What helped you become friends with those people in the first place? For myself it's usually a common background or shared interest in something, which for example enables us to jokingly rank the best video games, which we are all familiar with from our childhood.

Honestly it's mostly about collocation, which studies have shown to be the most powerful factor in friendship formation. My best long-running friends that I'm still in regular contact with are all people that I met freshman/sophomore year of college because we lived on the same floor in the dorms. Now obviously most of the people on my floor I didn't make friends with, but I did make friends with the ones that I got along with. And yes there's some shared interests involved as part of that, but proximity was more important. I was in the CS major and I actually didn't make a lot of friends in the major at all; we didn't gel well for whatever reason and the classroom environment wasn't suitable for getting to know people. So my college friends ended up being a diversity of majors plus a lot of landscape architecture majors, because my most outgoing friend was in that major and he made a lot of friends in the major because of the nature of it (lots of time spent together in close quarters in the studio doing project work).

So I wouldn't say I've explicitly made many if any friends over shared interests in music, but then once I had friends for whatever other reasons, we shared a lot of music with each other. Hardly any of them weren't "in" to music, and indeed some of them quite the opposite; they ended up in a band together (and I would occasionally incompetently noodle along with them on vocals/bass/guitar, but I wasn't remotely good enough to play out like they were).

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.

In a way, that would just be a return to before the second industrial revolution, when popular music and consumer products were more more regionalised. "Everyone in the world, or even the country listens to the same thing and drinks the same cola" is a recent phenomenon, and arguably not that valuable a phenomenon.

In practice, though, I'm sure there's quite a bit of sharing musical tastes between friend and interest groups; it wouldn't be literally everyone listening to different things.

I would wonder does increasing consumer choice ultimately erode generational identity a bit, though. So much of the "what is a boomer/gen X/millenial" is founded in what popular culture everyone was consuming in a given decade.

Ha thats a sweeping statement mate.....No one has anything in common?

I'm in the UK and in my 40s. For me the Top 40 used to be one of the few places where you could hear stuff that wasn't just pop radio - because in the UK it was a sales chart, not an airplay chart and genuinely represented what people were listening to, not what the pluggers and labels had successfully pushed.

However, since streaming, that equation has totally changed.

What labels pushed on the radio did certainly feed into what people bought, though.

Yes - but the Chart Shows (both the BBC and the commercial stations) were the places where the stations were obliged to play songs, during the daytime, that weren't on their playlists.

We have the same thing here with JJJ hottest one hundred. It is still mostly local underdogs so that is rad, but like you noted, the tides are changing thanks to streaming and every year gets a bit more mainstream.

Top 40 was born in an era where a large part of the economic equation in music was album sales. The tribal signal helped overcome the activation energy required to shell out the equivalent of a half day’s labor for a teen at the local music store.

Streaming services have killed the album, so the top 40 really has no calling.

It hasn’t killed the album, it’s just changed the rules of the game for marketing “popular” music by reducing the power of radio and increasing interest in the long tail.

Streaming didn't kill the album, but something did.

https://www.visualcapitalist.com/music-industry-sales/

Looks like piracy did it in.

I don't think focusing on album sales paints the full picture on how modern artists find success.

I've heard artists mention how albums don't really make them much money. Things like touring and merch sales account for the bulk of their income. I'd guess with streaming, podcasts, social networks, etc. artists have found ways outside of releasing a traditional album to stay relevant to the listener.

That was my point about killing the album. It’s no longer a particularly relevant milestone or attribute. The songs stand or fall in their own merit.

Yup, exactly like democracy and "big government". It's not good, it's just the "common denominator".