Especially as many venues now restrict how loud music can be to avoid lawsuits regarding hearing damage.
Heard the latest? Indie musicians are quietly getting behind what’s left of the record industry because Google, who wants stuff to be all, like, free and stuff, is now the Big Media to fear.
Hey, you can’t spell artists without R I A A ! Or aartists, anyway.
No S**T !!!
I’m a 62-y-o geezer and concur with the experts :rolleyes:
Yrs truly is also a hardcore blues fan(atic) and, yes, it’s all supposed to be 12 bars, AAB rhyme, & sad … and it ain’t!
That last remark is probably irelevant, but I just had to post it …:smack:
It is possible for a Mama to be a geezer now, is it? Never mind modern pop, it’s modern medicine that scares me.
This is the old people-iest thread on the internet. 
Probably in absolute terms - there are more people, there’s more music - but I’m not sure that it’s spiritually correct. e.g. this photograph from 1953, which has some young people clearly getting their freak on.
Now, that photograph wasn’t all of 1953. (waves hands) But, yes, I’d say that most early rock’n’roll was dance music, designed to make people wiggle their uptight 50s asses off; the sitty-down-thinky stuff didn’t emerge until rock, and prog rock. Prog rockers did not dance unless they were into Hawkwind, who weren’t prog, they were space-rock.
My perspective on this is coloured by the fact I grew up with acid house. I was 13 in 1989. This was what my generation danced to. And this. A few years later there was a dad-rock counter-revolution that elevated Paul Weller and Oasis to godhood. A reactionary tendency which produced a huge amount of landfill Britpop and Indie that no-one remembers today. The mistake that commentators are making is to assume that that a decline in the diversity of transitions between note combinations is a bad thing.
It’s just a thing. I mean, Mike Oldfield’s Incantations had transitions between note combinations up the wazoo; Yes’ Tales from Topographic Oceans had so many transitions between note combinations that they actually ran out of notes and started using new ones. And they were both awful monuments to misguided cleverness. In contrast, Talking Heads’ Remain in Light had almost no transitions between note combinations, and it was awesome. And clever. Yeah, there’s the jazz thing, the “short history of modern african-american music” that pops up every now and again; jazz and hip-hop are two different things, with different goals, from different eras.
There has always been dancing. It is a basic human activity. Every culture, every musical style, throughout all of human history. People have been dancing their asses off for millennia before pop music was ever dreamed of, much less modern techno.
Pop music is such a nebulous term to use that it is nearly meaningless. I assume the study used something like the Billboard top 100 by year and analyzed that. It is no surprise then that there has been a lot of homogenization; the people who actually pay for music has become a smaller and smaller set. It should come as no surprise that pop music caters to the people who buy it.
“The results indicate that teens and college-aged consumers have the highest per-capita sales rate.”
" the NPD study asserts that the biggest decline in music sales in 2002 occurred in the 36-and-older age brackets"
In other words, you old people stopped buying music, and now you’re complaining about how radio pop music caters to kids.
However, the sheer volume of new music being made is overwhelming and diverse. This is this week’s top 10 album list from a private torrent tracker:
- Wild Nothing - Nocturne
- TNGHT - TNGHT
- Rick Ross - God Forgives, I Don’t
- Flying Lotus - Between Friends
- Crystal Castles - Plague
- Bonnie ‘Prince’ Billy - Now Here’s My Plan
- Sebadoh - Secret EP
- Shed - The Killer
- Boddika & Joy Orbison - Faint / Nil (Reece) / Moist
- OM - Advaitic Songs
That list is diverse as shit, and that is a good sampling of what all people are actually listening to this week. Youtube a few of those and tell me it all sounds the same.
They found that modern pop music sounded the same. Dig a little deeper and you’ll find much diversity.
Whatever happened to Altern8? They were great.
I picked one at random from the list, number 4, and to be honest it sounded like a million other songs I’ve heard on the radio these days.
So I picked another and surprise! Same result.
The increased frequency of mass shootings correlates with the degeneration of modern pop music.
Or maybe it’s the vaccines.
K, I’ll get off ur lawn.
Ha! I read an article recently on the subject: The Song Machine | The New Yorker
The story explains why Kelly Clarkson - Already Gone and Beyonce - Halo are the same song.
And it seems it’s going to get even worse.
Does this mean that convergent evolution is going on in pop?
We may then end up with “the best” ever tune and random oscillation around it.
I wonder whether that would be a local maxima or a global one. I suspect the former in which case maybe what musicians have to do is get seeding with completely different sound forms that are nothing like current music…
I call horseshit and shenanigans on all this subdivision. Pop music has always at least since the days of the Big Bands and before then to “Light Classical” tended to sound similar. The only difference in the past twenty years are aggressive techniques used by mixing and mastering engineers to compress everything to shit.
I can’t really give an easy explanation of compression – all radio stations use their own compressors. It makes the soft sound as loud as the loud sounds soft. Even though Johnny Winter on Second Winter said his goal was to make the music as loud as possible (which is good for vinyl – otherwise you get noise and you have to make the softest parts of your composition overcome the signal/inherent noise ratio inherent to the medium), and IIRC “We couldn’t give you more, and we didn’t want to give you less, so you just bought a double-LP set!”)
It’s no secret, now that I’m thinking a bit more, that Tin Pan Alley/Great American Songbook cats tended to use the same chord progressions as well. It’s also why jazz musicians don’t really use a Real Book unless they’re just starting out – cause you can kind of feel your way through most of those tunes from the 1920s-1960s (I’m including people like Anthony Newley as a Tin-Pan cat) without a hitch.