I get the worst resistance when I say it but I think music died when autotune became ubiquitous. Curiously this happened at the same time that Napster hit so piracy got a lot of the blame.
Personally I think autotune sucks all the emotional connection out of music. It is one thing that Miku Hatsune sings like that, it's another thing that Miley Cyrus does. (Not to pick her out as a particularly great musician but she is a competent singer with a beautiful voice that stands on its own without processing.)
Autotune music just washes over people without having any effect.
When there is autotune music on at the gas station people can't tell you who the artists is sometimes they aren't even sure if it is rap or country music. Ask people on the street to actually name a Kanye West song and most of them struggle. I'm almost tempted to say that "Kanye West doesnt't exist or that he's just famous because his wife is famous."
I only know the one where he talked over the top of a Daft Punk track. I already had the CD with the Daft Punk track which was really the same song so I just kept that one.
I doubt the person who could not identify Kanye West could also identify nearly any other musician. Do you think they'd be able to identify John Lennon?
Regarding Kanye West, I think that might just be your social bubble. I know multiple people who seem to randomly start talking about Kanye West songs totally unprompted.
And similarly, your dislike of auto tune likely reflects your cultural upbringing more than anything else.
Kayne's in the top 20 of most albums ever sold.. OP saying he basically doesn't exist because some hypothetical people hypothetically wouldn't be able to name a song is hilarious. And chalking that up to autotune?
Yea same, I know people like that though I personally never engaged with his music. I wonder what the decision boundary for being in each group is? I grew up listening to rap from the 80s, 90s and early 00s so it prob isn’t that.
Autotune is just one of many tools that were used to (IMO) overproduce music in the early '00s. I think DAWs in general give producers enough rope to strangle the life out of any recording.
There's a reason why DAWs usually have a "humanizer" knob. Turns out humans relate better to imperfect things that feel like were created by other humans than they do to overly perfect things obviously created by machines.
No, it's about tiny and usually unnoticeable delays in hitting a note or a beat. There's nothing incorrect about them. They are not variations either, just tiny mistakes that happen to _all_ humans when they play an instrument.
You're talking about mainstream music, which is essentially mcdonald's and starbuck's. There are millions of other coffee shops and burger stands out there that are only serving thousands of people instead of billions.
Kanye West is one of the most listened to artists in the last two decades, and is widely considered one of the most influential artists of the last two decades.
If you haven't at least tried to listen to My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy with an open mind, you can't really trash on his music. If you have, and still don't like it, that's fair.
I think that is part of it, also the way that mass-market music is mixed today. It's very loud all the time and has no dynamic range. This has been a problem for a while TBH but it certainly isn't better in 2022. It all combines to make a very artificial sound.
Is autotune ubiquitous? Other than the trend of artists like T-Pain who used it for stylistic effect (who actually has a great natural singing voice- https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CIjXUg1s5gc), I don't think it was ever overwhelmingly used except in certain genres such as EDM.
Any ignorance of Kanye West song names may simply be a reflection of his more avant-garde new albums not having the same memorable hooks as old ones, but I can at least think of one recent song by him ("Donda").
Autotune the special effect a la T-Pain is not ubiquitous, but Autotune, the process, definitely is. The software itself (or its cousin, Melodyne), or the rack unit are still used in most pop music. Even bedroom studios will have it. Not using it today is pretty much a stylistic statement.
It can be set to be very subtle to the point of imperceptible, keeping the vibrato and the portamento, to the point it is impossible to pinpoint its usage. But it kinda has a sound: vocals that go trough it sound absolutely flawless.
Whether regular people can perceive it, I have no idea.
> Whether regular people can perceive it, I have no idea.
If the singer is somewhat good (so that the correction is small) and it's applied well, you have no chance. Even musicians will have a hard time.
But you can definitely notice it in sum - everything sounds pitch-perfect and all the little misses, which might be stylistic in and by itself [0], just go missing.
[0] A good sound engineer will of course know when not to use it, but the unintentional characteristics go missing.
Yeah, you’re right. it’s when you put all the things together that it makes a lot of difference.
It’s not just autotune, but also the fact people today can make almost infinite punch-ins, a lot of music is time adjusted, samplers and modern synthesizers are in perfect tuning (compared to orchestra/guitar/synths of the past).
IMO “perfect music” has its own sound, which is a good sound, but there isn’t much to go after it. Maybe the next wave will be a little looser when it comes to this.
Yes. What you're thinking of is "autotune" as in totally overdone, which is the signature sound people know. What the parent is referring to is autotune as in tone correction (which is, funnily enough, what the autotune software did, unless you turned it to 11). And that's everywhere; it's basically a standard part of a post-production pipeline right now. The thing is that you really can't notice it; it's just that singers hit the tone just a bit better.
And even live concerts are not safe, you can easily (and cheaply!) do that in real-time by now.
You should walk the music documentary This is Pop [0] on Netflix. It goes into a lot more details about the inventor and the history of Autotune.
In summary, it was used a lot longer (like old Mac 68k days) by a lot more artists than you realize. T-Pain turned an aid for lackluster artists into a form of art all its own. And the industry was pissed.
What you think of as Autotune from your examples was popularized by Cher (turning it up all the way to produce that effect).
Used sparingly it can turn people with terrible pitch into reasonably good singers. Turned up a bit more gets you a pristine sound, which sometimes pops pleasantly but often enough ends up bland and less memorable. You may have to have an ear for music a bit to notice it.
Fair point, but it still depends. Even inhumanly perfect sterile vocals can be offset by interesting instrumentals and innovative production. Really depends on what genre, or even what specific song, we're talking about. There is a lot of overproduced vapid pop (to pick a genre that might use this to a higher extent), but there is also a lot of interesting pop.
I can't disagree here about some really good music using Autotune. Even if it is not your cup of tea, Cher's "Believe" is undeniably iconic.
I am not a record producer, but I feel like Autotune is a big part of the reason that we don't have many modern classics. I would love some producers' hot takes on this article.
Some degree of vocal tuning is probably ubiquitous, but the extreme T-Pain/Cher effect is definitely not ubiquitous or even that common anymore.
Who are the biggest artists today? Off the top of my head: Taylor Swift, Ed Sheeran, Adele, Billie Eilish, all of them use pretty much natural-sounding vocals.
And the big artists that use Autotune and vocal effects like The Weeknd, Kid Laroi, and Post Malone don't do it to the same degree. Their voices certainly retain some unique character
And to add to your last point, I’d say those three vocalists you mention are using those effects for stylistic purposes and not (just) to cover up human-sounding flaws for the sake of overproduction.
> Ask people on the street to actually name a Kanye West song and most of them struggle
I think Kanye may be a terrible example for your point since people tend to listen to his music for the lyrics, which are often well crafted. Your point makes more sense for mass produced pop music where the lyrics for almost every major song are written by ~6 different groups. In that case most of the lyrics tend to have similar tone and themes and so it matters much less who is singing them.
This feels like the same argument you'd here when electric guitars became ubiquitis. Or synthasizers.
Can you not create emotionally resonant music without vocals? You'd be hard pressed to find someone who doesn't think you can. What about with no vocals and only electronic instruments like synths. You can. So why does adding a level of "electronic" feeling production to vocals do anything different? Sure, there's _bad_ autotune. There's also bad singing without it. But there's nothing inherently wrong with autotune.
I agree that there isn’t anything inherently wrong with autotune, but electric guitars and synthesizers were very expressive instruments that generated new possibilities for musicians to express themselves: guitars with more sustain allowing for legato playing, for a different kind of vibrato, synthesizers allowing change of different parameters that traditional instruments can’t, etc. “Autotune the T-Pain effect”, is also a new sound…
But Autotune/Melodyne being used to make vocals flawless is sort of “removing” flaws from vocal tracks. This would be similar to replacing an orchestra with Gemeral MIDI instruments. It is technically perfect, but there’s less expression.
Whether this is good or bad I don’t know, but part of the charm of old recordings is the infinite variations of tuning and timing.
Are you talking about Antares Auto-Tune? Or are you talking about pitch correction with Melodyne or in-DAW pitch tools? Or do you mean finer-grained pitching with vocal track slicing and pitching? Or do you mean splicing together tons of different takes to create the perfect vocal track?
As a producer, my sense is that people who refer to "autotune" generally don't know what they mean when they say it, but they really want to identify some point in the history of music where things became "artificial". That's not how it works. Plus, people don't just throw a vocal track through some magical automatic tuner and get a perfect result. There is an unbelievable amount of manual work involved to produce a high quality vocal track.
This stuff has been going on since the beginning of pop music. Most pop hits since the 70s have had spliced vocals where ideal takes are combined. Since advanced sampling began in the 80s, we've had manual pitching and adjustment of tiny vocal clips. That became easier in the 90s with computers. In the 2000s, when full-featured DAWs and plugins became practical, we've had more automatic pitch correction, like the auto-tune vocal effect you heard from T-Pain and others. But there's always something manual involved, and there's a lot of work from the vocalist to make this happen.
Max Martin, the producer of countless pop hits starting in the 90s, has detailed many times that he combines dozens of vocal takes and corrects pitch throughout the entire vocal tracks. This is normal. People actually want this.
Speaking of Max Martin, I had wanted to reference the Weeknd's new album Dawn FM into the discussion somewhere, which was coproduced by Martin. That is a heavily produced album, a lot of influence from '80s New Wave and Michael Jackson pop all the way to obscure internet retro syntwhave, yet the vocals were very human and soulful and not at all unemotional. YMMV, as always.
They clearly mean the shitty vocal artefacts from pitch correction software pushed to the extreme. That's really not in the same paradigm as multi-take / double-tracked vocals.
While pitch correction software is used subtly in a lot of recordings, OP is obviously meaning the sound that started with Cher snd Daft Punk in the early 2000s, and is now ubiquitous on modern radio.
Pitch correction (in the non-Auto-Tune and non-vocoder sense) is used in literally all commercial vocal recordings. There's nothing really subtle about it.
EDIT: This guy is right about both of those tracks using Auto-Tune.
I'll say this. If you're in the middle of this culture you might not see it clearly.
I knew someone who spent a lot of time in a small town in Alaska and told me how the people there were obsessed with guns. If there was a story in the newspaper about vandals shooting up an outhouse the story would be full of juicy details about what exact kind of ammunition was used because the people in that small town wanted to know.
Really I am not offended by artists who use vocoder effects that are in character like Kraftwerk. I do think though that there have been a few phenomena in music production that I see from a distance.
One of them is that the vocals are really different than they were before 1990. I don't mind that Cher song because it was fresh at the time. I never liked T-Pain and I can't stand modern rap. I got into an argument on the phone with the DJ of an urban music program at a local college radio station and told him I wanted to hear some rap that wasn't auto-tuned. (I am a big fan of rap up until M.F. Doom or so.)
He put on a track from Three feet high and rising and I was struck with how completely out of place it was compared to newer rap.
Another thing I noticed was how many artists who were highly productive in the 1970s became irrelevant in the 1980s. I love synth music like Depeche Mode and Information Society but it seemed like the pervasive use of synths and a "music word processor" had something to do with why Billy Joel and so many others got "too old to rock and roll."
Here is a circa 1980 track which I think is one of the best engineered tracks of all time
what I like about it is how the vocals are kept distinct from the instrumentals such that the vocals have a strong effect almost like a-capella that you just don't see in the Punk genre that this track appears to be part of. I think there was a labor intensive process involved in "cutting holes" in the instrumentals in time-frequency space so that they didn't stomp on the vocals. Today I see technology used not to improve music but as a labor saving device and I think the quality suffers.
Exactly this. Complaining about auto-tune is a self report to not understanding what the loaded umbrella term means. Every artist adds some amount of pitch correction to their voice just like they add some level of compression to their voice.
When a layman is complaining about Auto-Tune, they're almost always referring to the super-corrected version where a voice will snap to the tonal "gridlines" perfectly.
Whatever you can glean from that complaint (that they don't know about the intricacies of music production) isn't really a counter to that. I still think that overly-quantized tones from the vocals sounds like shit.
Kind of like a digitally altered image "being photoshopped" is a valid phrase, even when GIMP or some other software was actually used.
The point is that most people cannot tell when the vocal is adjusted to the grid, because if they could, they would be complaining about it on every single vocal track since the 80s.
"Auto-Tune" is meaningless if you use it to refer to anything other than the specific effect popularized by Antares Auto-Tune.
Pointing out that there is greater complexity than merely Antares Autotune doesn't change the point at all. If music is snapped to 12-tone equal temperament it loses something for some listeners. You don't need to know the technical details (and I do know at least some of them, having developed vocal pitch detection algorithms) to have an aesthetic response to that.
That judgement is an aesthetic one though, and entirely subjective. Many people like the pitch "corrected" sound and there's nothing wrong with that. Personally I'd take Adele or Voces8 (the latter really know a thing or two about vocal pitch) over it any day of the week.
I'm assuming GP does not mean not any kind of attempt to produce nice sounding vocals. The are referring vocal tracks that don't really sound like human voices anymore, but like robot/android voices.
I just listened to the current top 5 pop songs, and 3 of them would definitely fall in that category:
- Heat Waves, Glass Animals
- Need to Know, Doja Cat
- Stay, The Kid Laroi and Justin Beiber
Happily the #1, Adele's Easy on Me, has a very beautiful, human-sounding vocal track.
That's because trap music (the hip-hop genre) and EDM (which has a trap subgenre) were highly influential genres in the 2010s and their influence continues to be felt, even though the latter's heyday with its huge electronic music festivals has passed. Those genres quite often intentionally used robotic vocals as an artistic choice. Simultaneously, there's been a revival of synthwave and other '80s electronic music in terms of influence and style. "Stay" somewhat typifies the latter.
When OP says “robot/android” voice I don’t think he means literal robot sounds like Kraftwerk, but instead that artificially flawless, ultra-precise, sterile “ISO-standard male(or female) vocalist” sound that seems to show up on many modern pop songs. You can’t tell the difference between modern singers today since they’ve all been produced into this single bland homogenized voice-like sound.
It's interesting to me that you called out Glass Animals. To me, they are exactly the type of music that's innovative, using interesting beats, vocals, and melodies.
Even ABBA had multiple vocal tracks mixed together, with subtle phase/pitch effects done with tape, to achieve richer/fuller/sparkling sound.
Meanwhile, breakdowns of Billie Eilish mixes show that Finneas, the producer, is using mostly techniques in principle reproducible on tape. Today's equipment and DAWs save time and space, but they are not what is creating the magic. It's easy to see.
My sense is that most people mean pitch correction and samples that are perfectly snapped to even intervals.
To me, modern 'robotically accurate' music feels like creating food using salt, sugar, lemon, MSG and coffee powder. It technically covers all 5 flavors and should be able to create any culinary experience out of them. However, it shows the hubris of food science to think that the food experience can be summed up as some simple y = f(x) style mathematical equation of narrowly defined base variables.
It is great in the moment, but one-dimensional and shows the human hubris of thinking that the entire musical experience can be captured within these mathematically accurate beats and notes, ignoring all the nuance that a trained musician either accidentally or intentionally inserts into a playthrough.
> People actually want this.
I'll extend the food analogy a little bit. People want more MSG on their chips because that sells, and people want more sugar in their coke because that sells. But, it is never a person's answer for the best meal of their life. It is usually one that keeps rewarding you for revisiting it every time and one that evokes a deep sense of nostalgia, memories and emotions.
Tool's Wings for Marie hits as hard as it does, because you can hear the imperfections and crackle in Maynard's voice when as he mourns his mother through the song. It's emotion conveyed through musical nuance.
You remove nuance, and you're stuck with songs that are the equivalent of 'eating chips'. Freddie Mercury's big performances and Van Halen's Eruption still cause goosebumps, decades after their heyday, and part of it is because they are nowhere close to 'perfect'. But, the heart of their music is found within those exact imperfections.
All pop music now feels sanitized. I recognize that it takes a LOT of effort and talent to continuously create sanitized works that everyone will like. I also recognize that this isn't exclusive to music. Marvel Movies and COD games are a reflection of that exact phenomenon in other media. But, that media is not made to last. I love the experience, but I want to move on to the shiny new thing within a week.
___________
I suspect that this was always true with commercial pop, but every half-decade there would be a new genre that would be created, whose pioneers would rule the pop world and stand above the commercially sanitized works for the duration of their reign. Backstreet boys, Spice Girls and Bon Jovi were just as sanitized as any artist today.
I went back to look the top selling albums of each year, and the sales numbers completely betray the narrative of our musical history. The albums that go on to become the highest sold over time [1] are rarely the ones that topped the billboards for their year [2]. A fraction of the top selling albums of all time are their highest selling album of the year.
But one thing you can see in the highest selling albums of all time that don't make it onto the yearly charts, is that they were usually popularizing a new musical movement. Nirvana, Metallica, Led Zep and Linkin Park were scratching new itches that their pop counterpoints did not touch. (I stick to rock, cuz I know more about rock).
Now, getting to anywhere near the top 10 needs a level of virality that can only be facilitated by huge marketing budgets or a short hooks that organically spread on the internet (tiktok recognized this and made an entire platform based on it). This means that a full albums from artists without a marketing army is shit out of luck if they want to en...
What is "pop music" even? Maybe the Top 40 crowd is just always going to be a certain style for mass market audiences, and will always sound sanitized and overproduced because of production styles. But that's not all pop music.
> Nirvana, Metallica, Led Zep and Linkin Park were scratching new itches that their pop counterpoints did not touch. (I stick to rock, cuz I know more about rock).
Hybrid Theory was the first album I ever bought, and even as much as I appreciated it then and I do now, I do not think they were the opposite of commercially sanitized. The production sounds as fancy and artificial as any pop band created in this era. Their sound was far more family-friendly than contemporaries such as Korn. Heck, even the original band's name was Hybrid Theory until Warner suggested they change it to be adjacent to Limp Bizkit in alphabetical order.
I think rock is being over-lionized in this discussion in general. Everyone remembers grunge fondly, less so hair metal.
> As a producer, my sense is that people who refer to "autotune" generally don't know what they mean when they say it, but they really want to identify some point in the history of music where things became "artificial".
Sure, most people outside of music production (unless they've, say, seen the documentary on it) probably don't know that the sound they are referring to is the characteristic sound of a particular extreme setting in Antares Auto-Tune (which may or may not now actually be produced by other software), but I think they know exactly what sound they are talking about when they say it, rather than referring to some kind of fuzzy transition in the overall feel of music.
And it's kind of weird that as a producer you wouldn't be aware of that (upset, perhaps, by the publix characterizing the tool by that particular use, I could see, but not even recognizing the public association is odd.)
It's interesting that you mentioned Max Martin. I immediately thought of the new Adele single Easy on Me as a counterexample to people wanting 150-200 production tracks on a single song like you'll find on Max Martin songs. What's interesting is that Max Martin worked on the album 30 but is not listed as a producer on that song, and I think it shows. It's stripped down and you can hear the rawness, squeaks, and rasp of Adele's voice. Contrast that with something like a Max Martin produced Ariana Grande song (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cBDJDZAo41c) or Katy Perry, both who can sing extremely well on their own, and there's a stark difference in production taste. Something like Rihanna's (ft. Kanye West and Paul McCartney) FourFiveSeconds would be impossible for Max Martin to produce (yes it has vocal and instrumental processing and tuning on it but it is very stripped down).
Max Martin certainly has a nose for hits, but it's almost self-fulfilling. When he's producing everything, he sort of dictates what people "like" and other producers follow. I quote like because what's played on the radio is not necessarily what people actually like, it's what they're made to like through various marketing schemes. So I sort of balk at the notion that people want Max Martin style music. It's just what they're given.
It's also a bit misleading that people have been recording this way since the beginning of pop music. Yes, lots of takes and doubles, but these Max Martin and similar production style DAW sessions have literally hundreds of tracks that actually get mixed down into the final song.
If you think music died or is dying, you're probably just not exposing yourself to enough new music. Or you're just living in the past. Or a combination of both.
Not sure what autotune has to do with anything. It's over-use in the top hits can be annoying, but who gives a fuck. You don't have to listen to that music. The vast majority of music I listen to, across a wide spectrum of genres, doesn't use it.
There's a huge amount of survivor bias when thinking about old music. All the crap that never made it far is mostly lost by now; what's remembered and what's on the 80s playlist is basically the top pick from a whole decade, readily discovered for you and sprinkled with nostalgia from your childhood.
Also, in different decades, different styles were mainstream. Today you can find music for any genre that was popular in any decade and the best of it will also sound great; it's just not present everywhere or readily picked out for you. It's quite likely that you don't like the decade, you simply like the music style and didn't find the niche that is still producing it.
> Ask people on the street to actually name a Kanye West song and most of them struggle. I'm almost tempted to say that "Kanye West doesnt't exist or that he's just famous because his wife is famous."
Not a great example - whilst Kanye is undeniably a vacuous prat these days, he was one of the most influential music producers in his generation and has two, arguably three, albums that are widely regarded as having raised the bar for hip-hop. He's won 22 Grammys.
Have you heard "Jesus walks"? The man was brilliant.
He has certainly contributed more creative talent to the world than Kim Kardashian. They were both extraordinarily famous before they married.
You don't think people on the street could name "Golddigger"? It was in the first episode of "Glee" for Pete's sake. I think you'd have more luck getting people to name a Kanye West song than whole lot of other artists.
It'd depend on the generation of course. Maybe GenX/Boomers would struggle with Kanye ( and I say this as a GenXer ) but I'd guess a lot of millenials/genZ's would struggle a bit with the Rolling Stones. I'm not sure what either proves.
This only applies if you somehow are only exposed to music that is played on the radio. The same type of people who don't connect with current popular music probably didn't connect with previous popular music. Many people largely disengage with seeking out music once they enter adulthood, if they even did to any meaningful degree at all. They might still listen to music they liked when they were younger regularly, but they aren't going out of their way to discover it.
My parents are in their 70s and were never that into music. My dad kind of liked the Beach Boys, but if I asked either of them to name a Beatles song they would struggle as they were pretty much out of school by the time they reached superstardom. I, on the other hand, listen to tons of new music, but if you asked me to name a random song on the radio, I probably wouldn't be able to name the artist primarily because I don't give a shit about the kind of music they play on the radio. I don't think new radio music is any better or worse than old radio music. It's always been corporate-driven pablum, autotune or not. As for autotune itself, it can be effective when used appropriately as a texture, and not necessarily as something to pitch-correct a bad singer.
I'm with you on autotune. It's an effect that was briefly musically interesting and then almost immediately massively overused. I can't stand the sound of it now.
I entirely disagree on music dying, though. The bland stuff that washes over people is made to be bland and wash over people. You don't have to listen to it.
We're living in a golden age of music production if anything, with every conceivable taste catered to. The challenges are on the consumption side: finding the music you like and forming a meaningful relationship with it can be challenging in a time of such excess.
Gold digger was an amazing song when it came out. After that I would struggle to name one. I know that the Ye is talented and influential, I just don't think as much as some people make out.
That’s an interesting idea, but I believe your right that much modern music have the problem that it all sounds similar. Once in a while some artist stands out, but so much modern R&B, pop and rock is so simular that you can switch songs between artists and no one would know.
It might be survivour bias and was always the case that most music sounded similar within a given time period, but it could also be a result of high prompted and manufactured artists. The article does sort of touches on this subject when talking about which artists get promoted. That’s really what we’re seeing in movies, TV, design and much more. The risk is eliminated and only the safest option is push forward.
Your perception of Kanye only being famous "because his wife is famous" is something that is influenced by your own media consumption. I'm not sure if you actually asked people that they would struggle - Kanye has been big for a long time. I think if people struggled to know the names of the songs it would probably just be because Kanye isn't radio friendly.
The reason music "died" around the time of Napster, is that editorial distribution died. Before Napster, if you wanted to listen to music you either had the radio - which played the same thing for everyone, or you really had to dig record crates. Now it's completely possible to exclusively listen to hyperpop-house-vaporwave artists and not know who is charting. In short if you were expecting someone to curate your music, that mechanism no longer exists; likewise if the algorithm of your streaming service of choice is never playing Kanye for you, you might be confused to why everyone thinks he's so famous.
A coworker 10 years my senior when I was 20: When did MTV start sucking and VH1 get good? MTV used to be good and VH1 used to be for the boring older crowd. It's way better than MTV, now.
Me: Hate to say it, but I don't think it's VH1 that's changed.
Do you think that Beethoven would feel the same way about rock and roll, or 1900s folk feel the same way about vinyl killing sheet music and so on through the history of music.
I once heard a saying, "the future of music is not music." All through history, most recently with Autotune and previously with rap music (and further back in other ways), we hear people saying, "that's not music!" Invariably, these styles establish themselves and time moves on. I mean, if you want to talk about antipathy and outright-racist music criticism and hatred being thoroughly demolished, let us look at how rap has taken over Country music, because it has. 30 years ago half of everybody didn't consider rap to be music. Do you remember people saying "(c)rap" or "hippity-hop?" It wasn't that long ago!
You say music died not when Buddy Holly and the Big Bopper went down, but with the advent of one musical effect among many in the recording signal path (and I bet a lot more of your favorite artists use Autotune than you realize). Emotional connection is just what you like about the music. Many people think Death Metal has no feeling, or that Yacht Rock is dead-eyed pablum, or that any toddler could make a dance music track. After all it's just a drum machine, or cocaine, or screaming, and where's the love?
>Ask people on the street to actually name a Kanye West song and most of them struggle.
It's been a long time since my phone set on shuffle allowed me to memorize the title of anything. There just isn't the repetition that fixed-format radio and "I can afford one 12-song album per month," gave people. That's how you memorize song names, or you hum it into Vocaroo and hope an internet stranger helps you out. It's absolutely irrational to blame Autotune for this state of affairs, and if anything it made songs more identifiable! It just so happens that people and song titles aren't as tightly connected anymore. I don't know how you can say that without knowing a song's title the music doesn't even exist.
>it's another thing that Miley Cyrus does. (Not to pick her out as a particularly great musician but she is a competent singer with a beautiful voice that stands on its own without processing.)
That's funny because my way of dismissing her is to call her a Brenda Lee ripoff. Thus, emotion gets sucked out in many different ways. There's no accounting for taste.
My free advice is to check out the stuff people don't think is music, because not-music is the future of music, and I feel there's probably always something valuable in evolution. If you don't like it, that doesn't mean you're closed-minded, but if you reject everything about it out of hand, you might be. Not that there's anything wrong with that.
I kind of hope it is. New music, with a few notable exceptions is ultra-produced cheap beats with overly simplified harmonies and horrible lyrics.
The music industry has been feeding us this crap more and more since the last 2 or 3 decades. Shoving it down everybody's throats is easy when they have no choice, but I guess people are getting tired of the sameness and looking for things with more nuance. Streaming gives us control over what goes into our ears and it seems that we like good things even if they are not as well produced.
Also, there's JoJo's Bizarre Adventure teaching kids about great music!
This just isn't true? There is tons of new amazing music out there in every genre. You can find amazing new jazz, metal, electronic, bluegrass, etc. You name it, there is somebody out there making good music in that genre today. You just have to look beyond what is talked about on TV.
Yeah, but I don't think good new music has ever been easy to find? I think things like spotify's "discover weekly" has made it a lot easier than it used to be though.
It certainly doesn't for me. Once you listen to things (presumably things you like), it updates your suggestions and offers a lot of more fine-tuned stations and mixes.
Really? How do you see it? For example, I need some stream of new jazz/electro-swing music - what should I do? Just entering it into the search engine and manually checking every given result (which will not be songs, but some articles and playlists) will not work.
I use Last.fm which tags artists to similar ones, which is admittedly an older platform, but I also use Bandcamp, Spotify, and YouTube. It's trivial, I just search for bands that sound like whatever I like and sample their tracks. You don't even need music platforms to do this, Wikipedia has copious lists of musical groups for any given genre, or just the influences or affiliated acts of artists I already like. Beyond that, there's always been an ecosystem of music blogs and music journalism web sites since the early '00s, some still continuing today, and whenever they talk about bands they tend to refer to other ones.
You really just need a music platform to sample referenced acts, which YouTube is the universal one. It's really not that difficult.
Thanks, I’m doing this, of course, but this method doesn't discover new music - it's just a way to find something similar, and mostly it's not “fresh” (by release date).
Then what's stopping you from simply listening to random tracks from new releases sections?
I've done this before- with Spotify, I've even picked albums based on their cover art, the name of the record, the name of the artist. Occasionally the aesthetic vibes align and I find a new artist that is actually enjoyable. Usually not. But if you're just trying to find new music, there's ample methods to do so.
Since this seems like a genuine question, nts.live is an online radio platform running out of London that has tons of good contemporary jazz. Try typing an old jazz song that you like into the search bar and find radio shows with that song featured. There will likely be new songs mixed in with the old.
In general, I find search engines to be a really poor discoverability resource for anything, not just music.
>> The music industry has been feeding us this crap more and more since the last 2 or 3 decades. Shoving it down everybody's throats is easy when they have no choice, but I guess people are getting tired of the sameness and looking for things with more nuance. Streaming gives us control over what goes into our ears and it seems that we like good things even if they are not as well produced.
> You name it, there is somebody out there making good music in that genre today. You just have to look beyond what is talked about on TV.
Sure, but that assertion doesn't actually help with finding those musicians. It could both be true that 1) great music is being produced AND 2) the horizons of the commercial/mainstream music industry have contracted, making those musicians harder for most people to discover. Sort of like how the movie industry is focusing more and more on easily exported comic book blockbusters, at the expense of middle-budget dramas and comedies.
Then there's also the fact that the streaming revolution has made crap easier to find, and there's a lot more crap than good stuff, which hurts discoverability. As an example: I've been looking for kids music on Spotify recently, and it's a sea of low-effort auto-tuned garbage from people following the economics of spam. It's pretty much impossible to find a good version of a classic song unless you already know the artist.
Spotify's discover weekly has worked remarkably well for me! I've been able to find tons of new music (and old to be fair) that fits within my musical tastes. Combining that with a bit of effort on my part to google for new music and I've been able to find tons of good stuff.
Half of this thread is literally: old man yells at cloud.
How do people continuously fall into this trap? "New X sucks" No, it doesn't. You just don't make an effort to seek out new things and wish everything stayed the same as when you were young.
That's kind of missing the point though. In the context of the article, streaming, "an effort to seek out new things" is mostly out of the table. This is about things that are shoved in front of us. Before streaming, we would simply get fed stuff on the TV or the radio, and that's how we discovered music. This has been widely abused to feed us ever worse quality stuff. With streaming it's easy to skip the crap and look for stuff that we like better (within limits), and if the article is right, people are not just sucking up anymore.
If one's musical tastes are easily satisfied, there wouldn't be discovery be happening regardless of what age one lived in. With streaming, you can easily seek out new things, more easily than ever.
Of course. We're talking about volumes of streaming. Surely most of it is mass-consumption stuff, isn't it? Niches barely register when it comes down to the big players making a profit.
That's fair, I don't think I was entirely charitable with how I read your initial comment :)
On the thread of mass-consumption stuff, I think we all underestimate the effect of "mass" becoming a significant portion of the available market - when you measure your success against the top 100 earners in a space like that, it almost boils down to skinner's box style output.
Yeah, it's an old trope that one generation hates the next's music. I was sure I would be more open minded. But I hear things like most of the past few years popular music, and I'm certain kids are just liking it because it annoys adults. It sounds like...purposefully dissonant noise. Maybe we're just getting old...
This does seem like every one falling into the trope.
I didn’t listen to music as a sheltered kid. Once I began listening to music in my late teens, I started with Velvet Underground and Joy Division. From there it was all modern music. Like say “indie music” of the times of the 00s was abundant for me. I’m almost 20 years into listening to music now and nothing has changed for me. I still don’t like most of the the top charting songs, but I didn’t like them 15 years ago either. I might actually like popular music more now as I used to not like most of it. While now I enjoy artists like Lil Uzi Vert and especially Playboi Carti.
Similarly, Star Wars films appear to be completely mediocre films. I didn’t watch them [properly] until I was older.
Some semblance of me not being pushed into the normal popular stuff as an easily influenced young person makes it very easy for me not to yearn for older stuff being better.
I just checked the billboard top 100. It appears to mostly be your basic standard pop culture popular music. It seems like what would be at the top decades ago too if zooming out and seeing things as a whole.
90% of everything is rubbish. Most old music was rubbish too - it’s just been rightfully forgotten and we’ve only kept the good stuff.
Half an hour digging on a site like Bandcamp will prove there’s a vast amount of good new music, too much to comprehend. It only feels like there’s less good music because there’s vastly more music of all quality levels available now.
You’ve just got to steer away from the mainstream and look for it.
There's an overwhelming amount of good music coming out right now, you just need to put in the effort to explore it.
I got deep into niche online electronic artists over the pandemic and there's just so much creativity from young kids publishing stuff on soundcloud with only a few thousand listens.
Yep, there's a lot of great new stuff out there! Perhaps with "new music" (as referred in the article) dying and opening up a vacuum, these great new niche artists will find public. One can hope!
When I was younger, my parents got me a dual cassette/radio thing. Every Saturday, there was a show on a Romanian Radio 3, called Top 100. They would play 100 songs, in reverse order, from about 10pm all the way to early hours. I spent many Saturday evenings changing tapes to record as much as possible so I can listen to later. And get really happy when Prodigy was on.
Later, i got a PC and a friend of mine was letting me his CDs with mp3s so I can pick songs. I did not have lots of space and he was gone for 6 months at a time to uni, getting new stuff was quite an event and all of it was prefiltered by his taste.
Fwd to today, i can listen to my metal or to Two Steps From Hell and get recommended Mecina by an algorithm. I can listen to some old Romanian songs, or some crap i would never understand. I can listen to those nice lads that drink in the same pub as I do or to these other guys from Mongolia. And the best part is that all of this takes 1 click and if I don't like what is currently playing, i can skip because there are so many other options. The music lover in me is very very happy.
Spotify has exposed me to some really good bands or musicals that I love now - it even put on an anime OST that got me hooked on the show. It's almost creepy how well it's figured me out, but it certainly lets me enjoy new music without having it be a part-time job to discover it.
I'm not sure how big a factor it is, but I have for a long time wondered if music produced in the 70s (perhaps late 60s) and later would have more staying power than earlier music. That was about the time that really high quality masters could be made which sound good even today. Used to be that old music sounded as old as it was, but now you can listen to music from the 70s with the same quality as if it were recorded today.
Anecdotally, recently my dad got me a Tidal subscription (which has masters at supposedly higher quality than CDs) and an entry-level DAC. The two put together have blown me away and I've been having a blast the last couple of weeks re-listening to all my favourite records from as far back as the 70s.
I think the 70s are also around the same time that a lot of familiar genres started to emerge, while music from before then is often dismissed as "oldies" or saved for special occasions - e.g. old crunchy recordings of Christmas songs.
It might very well be the DAC doing the work then, or maybe the placebo effect is just making me pay more attention to music I first heard years ago and I'm picking up more :)
Thanks for the information though, I'll do some A/B testing to see if it makes any difference to me.
Just the Hifi level is probably enough for almost any system. I also noticed a huge difference coming from YouTube and Spotify on the Hifi setting in Tidal. I didn’t bother with Master as my ears aren’t that magical
Nah that's just Tidals marketing talking. "Anyone" can submit music to Tidal through services like DistroKid etc. However, to get the Tidal "MASTER" badge on your song, you basically just have to pay them extra. I don't need to submit another file to them, so it's the same master. It might be that they do some post-processing on it, but it's not the revolutionary thing they make it out to be.
it's not only technical. the 60s-80s were also hugely innovative and maybe people are just rediscovering just how good older music is now that's trivial to stream it. Personally I think the 2000s onward, with exceptions of course have just not been great for music.
I like old music because old music really is better. Most of the (non-"alt") music that I listen to was written and recorded before I was born.
It's not that old music is "killing" new music. It's that new music has been slowly killing itself since the 2000s. Even the Backstreet Boys and Three 6 Mafia seem fresh and interesting compared to the stuff I've been hearing on the radio over the last decade.
Even probably the best (IMO) pop artist of the current era, Stromae, writes songs that are mostly the same hooks and background elements repeated over and over for 4 minutes, with no change in dynamics or structure.
I'm honestly pretty sick of all the 60s-80s stuff I've been listening to, but what else is there?
Don't get me wrong: there was plenty of stupid garbage in those decades too. But the great stuff truly is great beyond most of what we get today, at least when it comes to stuff that's considered "mainstream".
But if the record industry wants to destroy itself, who am I to stop them? Keep listening to (and paying for!!) alt stuff, that's where the personality and creativity is.
> I'm honestly pretty sick of all the 60s-80s stuff I've been listening to, but what else is there?
Listen to a whole album. This is THE fundamental problem with streaming.
Any band that produced one good song probably produced quite a few other good ones. Bands that got pigeonholed into a "sound" probably produced other songs on their albums that weren't in that sound.
Even for mega-popular bands like "Journey", for example, 3/4 of the songs on their albums never get played anywhere. You'll probably find something you really like in that set.
Sadly, this seems to break down starting in the late 1990s.
> Bands that got pigeonholed into a "sound" probably produced other songs on their albums that weren't in that sound.
The best place too look for these (since the pigeonholing is often at the very start of their commercial recording, with the label pushing them into a particular niche) is stuff later than their most popular works (which are often what fuels their ability to ditch the narrow commercial optimization strategy that the label would impose for riskier, more diverse approaches.)
> I'm honestly pretty sick of all the 60s-80s stuff I've been listening to, but what else is there?
Well, as you mentioned yourself, there are lots of great musicians doing their thing, but mostly flying under the radar - you just have to find them, which has become easier thanks to Spotify et al. But then it's sad to see that they only have 30.000 or even 3.000 "monthly listeners", while Ava Max has 30.000.000. And, I did notice that even for new music I tend to be attracted to stuff that sounds more or less "retro", but I guess most music that's not > 90% electronically processed sounds retro nowadays.
You should check out Iggy Pop's BBC show. He's a 70s icon but he's still excited about new music and is always looking to share his latest finds. I also really enjoy BAGeL Radio.
Ultimately, curation matters. If iheartmedia doesn't care about your personal interests then none of the toplists are going to be useful to you. Find individual curators who are principled and like what you like instead.
Alternative explanation: 60s-80s is when the boomers were making music. Population boom led to production boom which led to a greater number of iconic works. Larger consumer population led to continued playing of said iconic works leading to more people growing up listening to them and perpetuating the cycle.
> high quality masters could be made which sound good even today
Those mixes and masters were optimized in a world where everyone listened to vinyl, radio, home hifi, and crappy car stereos. This biases the whole production in certain ways, which together with fashions of those time colour the sound and dates it. Remasters (I think) remove some these biases. The new targets are headphones and streaming.
New recordings can and should sound very differently unless they are pastiches.
Some people like the old sound because it's already etched in their brains, and they want to hear it again. They've associated it with "genuine" and "honest" and whatever.
I think there is a similar thing in modern music - lots of people listen on tiny little phone or laptop speakers, and the sound often has a lot more 'information' in the treble range. The sound is designed such that it's listenable with the bass portions basically inaudible.
There is also huge selection bias, when people are listening to 60’s, 70’s 80’s w/e music they are listening to 1% or even less of the music that was recorded.
Exactly. And that also explains the difference in quantity: the author is comparing the best 1% of songs from a catalog spanning several decades, to the best 1% of songs from the last year or so.
No, music back then wasn’t better in general, we’re just not listening to the shit songs from that time. In 20 years time we’ll still be listening to all the good music from today, have forgotten about all the crap, and then decide that music from the 20’s really was better that whatever we’re producing in the 40’s.
this is so important to bear in mind. How many artists, songs do we remember and frequently play from a given decade? Be generous and say it's 500, and that's still a drop from the bucket of music that was released and popular in its time. Compare to today, when it's easier than ever to record and release new music, and it's a drop in the ocean.
Agreed. The latest remaster of Let It Be ALMOST sounds like it could have been recorded today. Conversely, I think a lot Adele's ALMOST sounds like it could be from the 70's
Listen to "One After 909" from Anthology (or the 1963 'bootleg' release).
Then listen to the version from Let It Be.
"Production" such as it is is, I'd think, 'minimal' in most senses - there's some mics in front of singers and amps. One was outside, one inside. But the sound is different. The performance is definitely different in 1969 - so much looser, relaxed, and more accomplished. In some ways it's hard to think it's the exact same band a mere 6 years apart (yes, excepting Billy Preston added keys in 1969).
I'd always wished they'd have re-visited a few more of those early ones (originals or covers), just to get that sense of development, progress and transformation in such a short time. It's interesting that we ended up getting at least one song captured so 'far apart' from itself.
Back then they were looking for any new technology that would help make clean recordings.
Nowadays audio professionals are looking for any new technology that will help imprint the analog artifacts of these years on the clean digital recordings.
Correct.
There are millions and millions of old music made throughout many many decades. Thousands and tens of thousands stood the test of time and people like to listen to those regardless what the calendar shows. Others got mostly forgotten. New songs are from a much shorter period and so those are in the thousands and tens of thousands only. And perhaps hundreds or more will stand the test of times and will be listened to many many years from now too.
This is how it is when people can pick their music more freely instead of fed by the industry and from a seemingly endless list not just from those stamped as 'new'.
No killing is going on here. Music that people like will be listened to still, regardless of their age. It is just much much more out there from earlier than now, due to longer period and more people throughout the history.
There’s also tons of covers which can suit you better than the original (or even suit you at all where the original definitely did not).
For me “stories” (acoustic covers by the Scary Pockets crew and the same model of rotating guest singers & musicians — without the fixed members though Lerman is generally on guitar) is a daily with a 95% hit rate, but about half the originals I wouldn't listen to at all.
"Respect" comes to mind. Otis Redding recorded it in 1965, and in his version, it's pretty clear that respect means sex. Aretha Franklin re-arranged it and released her version two years later. She flipped the song to be from a woman's point of view, and it became one of the anthems of the women's rights movement of the late 60's and beyond.
Even though his version reached a decent #35 on Billboard, Aretha's version completely eclipsed it. Reportedly, Redding conceded that "it's her song now" (paraphrasing).
I've just listened to the original version for the first time. What leads you to the conclusion that it's "pretty clear that respect means sex"?
To me, he could mean she gets used to living without him when he's on the road and treats it like her home when he gets there, instead of theirs. If he's going to give her most of his money, at least she could make nice.
Also Johnny Cash's cover of Hurt , Nirvana's Man who Sold the World, and the Animals' House of the Rising Sun.
I've also seen it claimed that Leonard Cohen thought Pentatonix' cover of Hallelujah was the best he'd ever heard but I can't find any confirmation for that.
I choose to read this as a ever more pressing need to explore music beyond 12-tet. and not just in a niche microtonal fashion.
computers can take us there but not so long as MIDI is the standard. the 'problem' (which is really more of an opportunity to improve and go beyond) is not MIDI but the conceptual theoretical framework of the 12-notes keyboard underlying all 'western' traditions.
but don't get me wrong, it's no coincidence that this 12 notes system is so widespread, it really is very well made. anything that attempts to take music beyond it needs to be even better, which ain't easy as it's quite something already.
in summary, computer technology has so far just made cheaper and easier to do the same things that were already possible. no new things have been tried yet regarding the choice of notes to use.
I'm actually a big fan of this idea, and am slowly doing work to get my DAW (Ardour) more capable of supporting non-12TET and non-western tunings.
However, putting on my devil's advocate hat for a moment, this leans heavily on the idea that humanity didn't already explore non-12T music already, which is a difficult argument to make.
It is false that the 12T model originated on keyboards.
Finally, it also fails to note the reason why we have 12TET. Western music is relatively unique among world music cultures in the dominant role that harmony plays (contrast with the highly evolved classical musical forms from India, which are incredibly rhythmically and melodically sophisticated but lack almost any notion of harmony (let alone harmonic movement) at all).
If you want to make music that is rich harmonically, it is likely that at some point you will want to be able to modulate between similar relationships (call them "scales" if you like) but starting from different initial tones. Doing this without it all going horribly wrong requires ET.
ET arose from the need to play music in all 12 keys on a moment's notice without any one of those keys sounding like the obvious dump stat. It's a compromise to play a song that is strictly diatonic in a single key in ET.
Two artists who have been doing fascinating work around microtonal music are King Gizzard & The Lizard Wizard (check out the album Flying Microtonal Banana) and Jacob Collier (insane musician, perfect pitch, extremely worth checking out).
I think this is due to the relationship with music changing. I'm in my early 40s now, but when I was in my teen/early 20s, I would buy a 1 or 2 CDs a month and I would listen to those CDs over and over again. I would study the linear notes and the cover.
Music is too disposable now. With my spotify subscription, I can still listen to those albums from the 90s/early 2000s over and over again, but there's just so much new music. Even new albums that I really enjoy, I'll listen to them a handful of times and forget about them.
I find new music I love on bandcamp, perhaps that's outside the data used for this analysis?
Anyway, I spend thousands of dollars on amazing music on bandcamp, and the artists get a higher percentage from bandcamp than a studio, so I'm making the best choice for me and the future of my music.
I'm late to this thread. I'm shocked that I had to scroll past an entire page of "music is dead" to find something about Bandcamp.
Producing music is easier than ever so there's more music out than ever.
Listening to music is easier than ever.
If you're relying on mass media (tv/radio) and big labels to find music you'll enjoy, you're doing it wrong.
The curators nowadays are Youtube channels and Spotify playlists and indie labels on Bandcamp, I'm following music subreddits, finding stuff on Soundcloud.
> The radio stations will only play songs that fit the dominant formulas, which haven’t changed much in decades. That’s even more true for the algorithms curating so much of our new music—the algorithms are designed to be feedback loops, ensuring that the promoted new songs are virtually identical to your favorite old songs.
With discovery being AI driven and no credibility connoted by knowing bands - the music industry is in trouble as it has become commoditize to a certain degree. Listeners no longer have as much value or identity to who they listen to as there isn't any real effort to find music (by the majority of people).
That and artists needing to make big singles too monetize their work - so the approach to making music is different. Getting a movie/show themesong or leveraging another artists popularity to drive song plays
Musical instruments becoming quite inexpensive increasing the competition while the market place is increasingly fragmented. Former gate keepers don't have that much cloud [record labels].
As a former music head it really sucks to look at music from a business market perspective - but it really does frame what's going on.
There's a confluence of forces making new music difficult that and you would also think a lot of the items i posted above would make there being more higher quality music.
I agree with the thesis here 100% but isn't this argument prey to temporal bias? Its easy to compare the current moment with a much longer period of time (all other past moments), and have the current moment fall short.
What new music? Everything is hip-hop, rap, or r&b nowadays.
I just can't turn on the “new songs” radio station in Apple Music because 90% will be hip-hop & rap.
I imagine how modern music producers are fed up by an endless stream of demo records from ‘new hip-hop stars’ - my condolences.
If streaming services will add the button “Do not propose music of this genre”, then new music will be more discoverable. But right now the only two things I saw in Spotify and Apple Music are “I like this genre” and “I love/hate this song”.
I hope it will become a killer feature of some new startup.
I was hesitant to chime in here, because I'm in my mid-60s, which puts me solidly in the boomer generation that grew up with classic rock. But I have to agree with this. I have some faves in the realm of "old" music, but also like a lot of current/newer musicians, a few of whom are R&B but none of whom are rap/hip-hop. It's just not something I enjoy, and I agree that too many new songs radio stations are full of it.
Looking for new music doesn't occupy much of my time, so my tolerance for the choice presented to me is fairly low.
This is just a symptom of the cultural zeitgeist moving out of the mainstream distribution channels. People are still listening to new music, it’s just not happening the way it used to (e.g. labels, records, radio, or even streaming services). A lot of new music is discovered/distributed through social media which makes it much harder to quantify what even counts as a “listen”.
I don't mean to be nonconstructive but... my gut response is "naaah".
A generation of wealthy nostalgics overspends on the same old music.
A generation of hard-up youth (and there's nothing wrong with that in strictly origin-of-media-cultures terms!) won't pay anything the "music market" can easily measure, for what they actually value.
Musicians aiming for commercial appeal really seem to be scraping the barrel now. There are people with new ideas but the profusion of barrel-scrapers makes "try to sell big" a poor use of an inventive musician's time.
Where do we go from here? No idea, but it probably needs to involve inventing (or reinventing) some different kind of engagement.
I don't think my preferences for what kind stand much of a chance, but no matter.
They define new music as from the last 18 months, so every recording is solidly inside the pandemic. I wonder if people just aren't going out as much.
I dunno -- would anyone care if superstars vanished? A much better result would be for lots of artists to make, like, middle class wages on Bandcamp or whatever (not saying this actually happens, just thinking about possible better end results).
> The reasons are complex—more than just the appeal of old tunes
Are they so complex? Personally I can listen to popular music from up until 2015 and "get it", but after that, what's supposed to be popular music starts to sound more extreme than what I listen to alone. And it's not just a "me" thing, we have a wide variety of tastes in the family, and we agree that most of that plays on the radio these days is not what any of us would listen to. I don't know what niche this music is optimizing for, but I think that most people are out of it.
In parallel, lots of less-known artists continue putting out great stuff.
all those years spending $17.99 just to have ten songs I can play, the chickens have come home to roost.
if there's not as much money to be made selling new music I think it's mostly because there is so much new music. anyone can record an album now, or whatever, release it, do the whole nine yards, without having to go through that ridiculous hurdle so many years ago of "getting a deal with a label". if you're into a whole genre of music, that's great, but there's like 18 thousand other genres that are all just as valid now, unlike in the 1980s when there were something like five. All the bands that you think are great and have changed your life listening to are not anyone else's in your town. it's as though the music industry has spread across the whole galaxy to millions of planets and it would be impossible for there to ever be some artists that are as important as names like the Police or Madonna were in the 80s.
It was widely understood that even then, while "getting a record deal" was the only way you'd have a career, the publishing companies were generally in it to rip the musicians through a shredder and extract as much cash as they can before discarding the talent, except in the very unlikely case that said talent did well enough to still be viable for more albums.
I'm sort of amazed that industry hasn't just thrown in the towel at this point, they were basically gatekeepers on recording and distribution technology.
Sure, we still have good tracks here and there. Good artists are still there but it’s pretty hard to compose something « new » without being « strange ».
It’s mostly impossible to do better than the masters of your musical genre because most genres exists for more than 60, sometimes 100 years so, statically speaking, they may have been mastered by one or multiple artists since then.
Even if an artist managed to be greater (for what it could mean) than his masters, well, he could never have the advantage of novelty.
I don’t think it’s an issue (except maybe for the industry), after all, there is already enough music to enjoy an entire life, and still pretty good new artists.
I agree with this sentiment and it feels right to me personally but I think to know how much consumption is changing we'd benefit from seeing this broken out by age demographics. If the teens are listening to older music at the same rate as the late 30s/40s then that is certainly a problem for the music industry. Otherwise this might just be driven by the streaming adoption. We couldn't quantify this stuff before when everyone was listening to music on CDs, mp3s etc.
Have you listened to the radio? To background music at the mall (ha ha). Hard Rock, Classic Rock, Soft Rock, almost nothing from the last 30 years. It is weird to be 50+ years out of college, and have a choice between talk radio, religion, and college music while driving.
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[ 4.8 ms ] story [ 351 ms ] threadPersonally I think autotune sucks all the emotional connection out of music. It is one thing that Miku Hatsune sings like that, it's another thing that Miley Cyrus does. (Not to pick her out as a particularly great musician but she is a competent singer with a beautiful voice that stands on its own without processing.)
Autotune music just washes over people without having any effect.
When there is autotune music on at the gas station people can't tell you who the artists is sometimes they aren't even sure if it is rap or country music. Ask people on the street to actually name a Kanye West song and most of them struggle. I'm almost tempted to say that "Kanye West doesnt't exist or that he's just famous because his wife is famous."
I am highly skeptical of this assertion.
People can burrow into a specific small set of bands and music styles and never ever need to move outside of it now.
It's seems quaint that 20 years ago my primary source of new music was SNL and late shows.
Now, spotify/pandora will give you entry to exactly what you want and keep giving it to you, forver.
And similarly, your dislike of auto tune likely reflects your cultural upbringing more than anything else.
There is even research showing the variations in timing follow large macro cycles.
None of this is random or mistakes when we are talking about high level players.
Some is deliberate. Some is totally unconscious.
But not mistakes.
Whether GP’s thesis has merit, I have no idea.
If you haven't at least tried to listen to My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy with an open mind, you can't really trash on his music. If you have, and still don't like it, that's fair.
Any ignorance of Kanye West song names may simply be a reflection of his more avant-garde new albums not having the same memorable hooks as old ones, but I can at least think of one recent song by him ("Donda").
The go to software is Meloldyne. It's...crazy capable. It can even return single notes in polyphonic music.
Watch this from about the 3:00 mark on: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=smOmTZWddrE&t=185s
(Note this video is very extreme editing, it absolutely possible (in fact easier) to use Melodyne in a way that sounds utterly natural)
It can be set to be very subtle to the point of imperceptible, keeping the vibrato and the portamento, to the point it is impossible to pinpoint its usage. But it kinda has a sound: vocals that go trough it sound absolutely flawless.
Whether regular people can perceive it, I have no idea.
If the singer is somewhat good (so that the correction is small) and it's applied well, you have no chance. Even musicians will have a hard time.
But you can definitely notice it in sum - everything sounds pitch-perfect and all the little misses, which might be stylistic in and by itself [0], just go missing.
[0] A good sound engineer will of course know when not to use it, but the unintentional characteristics go missing.
It’s not just autotune, but also the fact people today can make almost infinite punch-ins, a lot of music is time adjusted, samplers and modern synthesizers are in perfect tuning (compared to orchestra/guitar/synths of the past).
IMO “perfect music” has its own sound, which is a good sound, but there isn’t much to go after it. Maybe the next wave will be a little looser when it comes to this.
Yes. What you're thinking of is "autotune" as in totally overdone, which is the signature sound people know. What the parent is referring to is autotune as in tone correction (which is, funnily enough, what the autotune software did, unless you turned it to 11). And that's everywhere; it's basically a standard part of a post-production pipeline right now. The thing is that you really can't notice it; it's just that singers hit the tone just a bit better.
And even live concerts are not safe, you can easily (and cheaply!) do that in real-time by now.
In summary, it was used a lot longer (like old Mac 68k days) by a lot more artists than you realize. T-Pain turned an aid for lackluster artists into a form of art all its own. And the industry was pissed.
[0] https://www.netflix.com/title/81050786
Used sparingly it can turn people with terrible pitch into reasonably good singers. Turned up a bit more gets you a pristine sound, which sometimes pops pleasantly but often enough ends up bland and less memorable. You may have to have an ear for music a bit to notice it.
Once you notice it, it is everywhere.
I am not a record producer, but I feel like Autotune is a big part of the reason that we don't have many modern classics. I would love some producers' hot takes on this article.
Who are the biggest artists today? Off the top of my head: Taylor Swift, Ed Sheeran, Adele, Billie Eilish, all of them use pretty much natural-sounding vocals.
And the big artists that use Autotune and vocal effects like The Weeknd, Kid Laroi, and Post Malone don't do it to the same degree. Their voices certainly retain some unique character
I think Kanye may be a terrible example for your point since people tend to listen to his music for the lyrics, which are often well crafted. Your point makes more sense for mass produced pop music where the lyrics for almost every major song are written by ~6 different groups. In that case most of the lyrics tend to have similar tone and themes and so it matters much less who is singing them.
Can you not create emotionally resonant music without vocals? You'd be hard pressed to find someone who doesn't think you can. What about with no vocals and only electronic instruments like synths. You can. So why does adding a level of "electronic" feeling production to vocals do anything different? Sure, there's _bad_ autotune. There's also bad singing without it. But there's nothing inherently wrong with autotune.
But Autotune/Melodyne being used to make vocals flawless is sort of “removing” flaws from vocal tracks. This would be similar to replacing an orchestra with Gemeral MIDI instruments. It is technically perfect, but there’s less expression.
Whether this is good or bad I don’t know, but part of the charm of old recordings is the infinite variations of tuning and timing.
As a producer, my sense is that people who refer to "autotune" generally don't know what they mean when they say it, but they really want to identify some point in the history of music where things became "artificial". That's not how it works. Plus, people don't just throw a vocal track through some magical automatic tuner and get a perfect result. There is an unbelievable amount of manual work involved to produce a high quality vocal track.
This stuff has been going on since the beginning of pop music. Most pop hits since the 70s have had spliced vocals where ideal takes are combined. Since advanced sampling began in the 80s, we've had manual pitching and adjustment of tiny vocal clips. That became easier in the 90s with computers. In the 2000s, when full-featured DAWs and plugins became practical, we've had more automatic pitch correction, like the auto-tune vocal effect you heard from T-Pain and others. But there's always something manual involved, and there's a lot of work from the vocalist to make this happen.
Max Martin, the producer of countless pop hits starting in the 90s, has detailed many times that he combines dozens of vocal takes and corrects pitch throughout the entire vocal tracks. This is normal. People actually want this.
While pitch correction software is used subtly in a lot of recordings, OP is obviously meaning the sound that started with Cher snd Daft Punk in the early 2000s, and is now ubiquitous on modern radio.
EDIT: This guy is right about both of those tracks using Auto-Tune.
I'm also aware of what a vocoder is - even own a couple.
It's extremely widespread, even in classical music, but "literally all" is simply not true.
I knew someone who spent a lot of time in a small town in Alaska and told me how the people there were obsessed with guns. If there was a story in the newspaper about vandals shooting up an outhouse the story would be full of juicy details about what exact kind of ammunition was used because the people in that small town wanted to know.
Really I am not offended by artists who use vocoder effects that are in character like Kraftwerk. I do think though that there have been a few phenomena in music production that I see from a distance.
One of them is that the vocals are really different than they were before 1990. I don't mind that Cher song because it was fresh at the time. I never liked T-Pain and I can't stand modern rap. I got into an argument on the phone with the DJ of an urban music program at a local college radio station and told him I wanted to hear some rap that wasn't auto-tuned. (I am a big fan of rap up until M.F. Doom or so.)
He put on a track from Three feet high and rising and I was struck with how completely out of place it was compared to newer rap.
Another thing I noticed was how many artists who were highly productive in the 1970s became irrelevant in the 1980s. I love synth music like Depeche Mode and Information Society but it seemed like the pervasive use of synths and a "music word processor" had something to do with why Billy Joel and so many others got "too old to rock and roll."
Here is a circa 1980 track which I think is one of the best engineered tracks of all time
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kYGQe0kRb4o
what I like about it is how the vocals are kept distinct from the instrumentals such that the vocals have a strong effect almost like a-capella that you just don't see in the Punk genre that this track appears to be part of. I think there was a labor intensive process involved in "cutting holes" in the instrumentals in time-frequency space so that they didn't stomp on the vocals. Today I see technology used not to improve music but as a labor saving device and I think the quality suffers.
Whatever you can glean from that complaint (that they don't know about the intricacies of music production) isn't really a counter to that. I still think that overly-quantized tones from the vocals sounds like shit.
Kind of like a digitally altered image "being photoshopped" is a valid phrase, even when GIMP or some other software was actually used.
"Auto-Tune" is meaningless if you use it to refer to anything other than the specific effect popularized by Antares Auto-Tune.
That judgement is an aesthetic one though, and entirely subjective. Many people like the pitch "corrected" sound and there's nothing wrong with that. Personally I'd take Adele or Voces8 (the latter really know a thing or two about vocal pitch) over it any day of the week.
It's a very distinctive sound, horrendously overused and occupies a completely separate area in most people's minds than pitch tweaking.
[1] https://youtu.be/nZXRV4MezEw
I just listened to the current top 5 pop songs, and 3 of them would definitely fall in that category:
- Heat Waves, Glass Animals
- Need to Know, Doja Cat
- Stay, The Kid Laroi and Justin Beiber
Happily the #1, Adele's Easy on Me, has a very beautiful, human-sounding vocal track.
Meanwhile, breakdowns of Billie Eilish mixes show that Finneas, the producer, is using mostly techniques in principle reproducible on tape. Today's equipment and DAWs save time and space, but they are not what is creating the magic. It's easy to see.
To me, modern 'robotically accurate' music feels like creating food using salt, sugar, lemon, MSG and coffee powder. It technically covers all 5 flavors and should be able to create any culinary experience out of them. However, it shows the hubris of food science to think that the food experience can be summed up as some simple y = f(x) style mathematical equation of narrowly defined base variables.
It is great in the moment, but one-dimensional and shows the human hubris of thinking that the entire musical experience can be captured within these mathematically accurate beats and notes, ignoring all the nuance that a trained musician either accidentally or intentionally inserts into a playthrough.
> People actually want this.
I'll extend the food analogy a little bit. People want more MSG on their chips because that sells, and people want more sugar in their coke because that sells. But, it is never a person's answer for the best meal of their life. It is usually one that keeps rewarding you for revisiting it every time and one that evokes a deep sense of nostalgia, memories and emotions.
Tool's Wings for Marie hits as hard as it does, because you can hear the imperfections and crackle in Maynard's voice when as he mourns his mother through the song. It's emotion conveyed through musical nuance. You remove nuance, and you're stuck with songs that are the equivalent of 'eating chips'. Freddie Mercury's big performances and Van Halen's Eruption still cause goosebumps, decades after their heyday, and part of it is because they are nowhere close to 'perfect'. But, the heart of their music is found within those exact imperfections.
All pop music now feels sanitized. I recognize that it takes a LOT of effort and talent to continuously create sanitized works that everyone will like. I also recognize that this isn't exclusive to music. Marvel Movies and COD games are a reflection of that exact phenomenon in other media. But, that media is not made to last. I love the experience, but I want to move on to the shiny new thing within a week.
___________
I suspect that this was always true with commercial pop, but every half-decade there would be a new genre that would be created, whose pioneers would rule the pop world and stand above the commercially sanitized works for the duration of their reign. Backstreet boys, Spice Girls and Bon Jovi were just as sanitized as any artist today.
I went back to look the top selling albums of each year, and the sales numbers completely betray the narrative of our musical history. The albums that go on to become the highest sold over time [1] are rarely the ones that topped the billboards for their year [2]. A fraction of the top selling albums of all time are their highest selling album of the year.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_best-selling_albums
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_best-selling_albums_by...
But one thing you can see in the highest selling albums of all time that don't make it onto the yearly charts, is that they were usually popularizing a new musical movement. Nirvana, Metallica, Led Zep and Linkin Park were scratching new itches that their pop counterpoints did not touch. (I stick to rock, cuz I know more about rock).
Now, getting to anywhere near the top 10 needs a level of virality that can only be facilitated by huge marketing budgets or a short hooks that organically spread on the internet (tiktok recognized this and made an entire platform based on it). This means that a full albums from artists without a marketing army is shit out of luck if they want to en...
What is "pop music" even? Maybe the Top 40 crowd is just always going to be a certain style for mass market audiences, and will always sound sanitized and overproduced because of production styles. But that's not all pop music.
> Nirvana, Metallica, Led Zep and Linkin Park were scratching new itches that their pop counterpoints did not touch. (I stick to rock, cuz I know more about rock).
Hybrid Theory was the first album I ever bought, and even as much as I appreciated it then and I do now, I do not think they were the opposite of commercially sanitized. The production sounds as fancy and artificial as any pop band created in this era. Their sound was far more family-friendly than contemporaries such as Korn. Heck, even the original band's name was Hybrid Theory until Warner suggested they change it to be adjacent to Limp Bizkit in alphabetical order.
I think rock is being over-lionized in this discussion in general. Everyone remembers grunge fondly, less so hair metal.
Sure, most people outside of music production (unless they've, say, seen the documentary on it) probably don't know that the sound they are referring to is the characteristic sound of a particular extreme setting in Antares Auto-Tune (which may or may not now actually be produced by other software), but I think they know exactly what sound they are talking about when they say it, rather than referring to some kind of fuzzy transition in the overall feel of music.
And it's kind of weird that as a producer you wouldn't be aware of that (upset, perhaps, by the publix characterizing the tool by that particular use, I could see, but not even recognizing the public association is odd.)
Max Martin certainly has a nose for hits, but it's almost self-fulfilling. When he's producing everything, he sort of dictates what people "like" and other producers follow. I quote like because what's played on the radio is not necessarily what people actually like, it's what they're made to like through various marketing schemes. So I sort of balk at the notion that people want Max Martin style music. It's just what they're given.
It's also a bit misleading that people have been recording this way since the beginning of pop music. Yes, lots of takes and doubles, but these Max Martin and similar production style DAW sessions have literally hundreds of tracks that actually get mixed down into the final song.
https://www.soundonsound.com/people/sandy-vee-recording-katy...
Not sure what autotune has to do with anything. It's over-use in the top hits can be annoying, but who gives a fuck. You don't have to listen to that music. The vast majority of music I listen to, across a wide spectrum of genres, doesn't use it.
Also, in different decades, different styles were mainstream. Today you can find music for any genre that was popular in any decade and the best of it will also sound great; it's just not present everywhere or readily picked out for you. It's quite likely that you don't like the decade, you simply like the music style and didn't find the niche that is still producing it.
The Monkees were more popular than the Beatles, but you'll never get the Mojo magazine audience to admit that.
Not a great example - whilst Kanye is undeniably a vacuous prat these days, he was one of the most influential music producers in his generation and has two, arguably three, albums that are widely regarded as having raised the bar for hip-hop. He's won 22 Grammys.
Have you heard "Jesus walks"? The man was brilliant.
He has certainly contributed more creative talent to the world than Kim Kardashian. They were both extraordinarily famous before they married.
It'd depend on the generation of course. Maybe GenX/Boomers would struggle with Kanye ( and I say this as a GenXer ) but I'd guess a lot of millenials/genZ's would struggle a bit with the Rolling Stones. I'm not sure what either proves.
My parents are in their 70s and were never that into music. My dad kind of liked the Beach Boys, but if I asked either of them to name a Beatles song they would struggle as they were pretty much out of school by the time they reached superstardom. I, on the other hand, listen to tons of new music, but if you asked me to name a random song on the radio, I probably wouldn't be able to name the artist primarily because I don't give a shit about the kind of music they play on the radio. I don't think new radio music is any better or worse than old radio music. It's always been corporate-driven pablum, autotune or not. As for autotune itself, it can be effective when used appropriately as a texture, and not necessarily as something to pitch-correct a bad singer.
I entirely disagree on music dying, though. The bland stuff that washes over people is made to be bland and wash over people. You don't have to listen to it.
We're living in a golden age of music production if anything, with every conceivable taste catered to. The challenges are on the consumption side: finding the music you like and forming a meaningful relationship with it can be challenging in a time of such excess.
It might be survivour bias and was always the case that most music sounded similar within a given time period, but it could also be a result of high prompted and manufactured artists. The article does sort of touches on this subject when talking about which artists get promoted. That’s really what we’re seeing in movies, TV, design and much more. The risk is eliminated and only the safest option is push forward.
The reason music "died" around the time of Napster, is that editorial distribution died. Before Napster, if you wanted to listen to music you either had the radio - which played the same thing for everyone, or you really had to dig record crates. Now it's completely possible to exclusively listen to hyperpop-house-vaporwave artists and not know who is charting. In short if you were expecting someone to curate your music, that mechanism no longer exists; likewise if the algorithm of your streaming service of choice is never playing Kanye for you, you might be confused to why everyone thinks he's so famous.
Photos of people now show a perfect, clear, soulless and uncanny skin. It is the same thing when I hear autotuned artists.
As opposed to the 1960s, when nearly every popular album was actually recorded by the Wrecking Crew, not whatever muppets happened to be on the cover.
Me: Hate to say it, but I don't think it's VH1 that's changed.
::pregnant pause::
Him: Ouch... My youth.
You say music died not when Buddy Holly and the Big Bopper went down, but with the advent of one musical effect among many in the recording signal path (and I bet a lot more of your favorite artists use Autotune than you realize). Emotional connection is just what you like about the music. Many people think Death Metal has no feeling, or that Yacht Rock is dead-eyed pablum, or that any toddler could make a dance music track. After all it's just a drum machine, or cocaine, or screaming, and where's the love?
>Ask people on the street to actually name a Kanye West song and most of them struggle.
It's been a long time since my phone set on shuffle allowed me to memorize the title of anything. There just isn't the repetition that fixed-format radio and "I can afford one 12-song album per month," gave people. That's how you memorize song names, or you hum it into Vocaroo and hope an internet stranger helps you out. It's absolutely irrational to blame Autotune for this state of affairs, and if anything it made songs more identifiable! It just so happens that people and song titles aren't as tightly connected anymore. I don't know how you can say that without knowing a song's title the music doesn't even exist.
>it's another thing that Miley Cyrus does. (Not to pick her out as a particularly great musician but she is a competent singer with a beautiful voice that stands on its own without processing.)
That's funny because my way of dismissing her is to call her a Brenda Lee ripoff. Thus, emotion gets sucked out in many different ways. There's no accounting for taste.
My free advice is to check out the stuff people don't think is music, because not-music is the future of music, and I feel there's probably always something valuable in evolution. If you don't like it, that doesn't mean you're closed-minded, but if you reject everything about it out of hand, you might be. Not that there's anything wrong with that.
https://www.reddit.com/r/WeAreTheMusicMakers/comments/s6l9tk...
Not about autotune per se but about what makes a great singer is not the perfection of their voice but the imperfections, that make it recognizable.
Autotune irons out imperfections; so does the grid. A big problem of new music is it's too perfect, which makes it sound dead.
To be fair, "Old Town Road" is sort of both.
The music industry has been feeding us this crap more and more since the last 2 or 3 decades. Shoving it down everybody's throats is easy when they have no choice, but I guess people are getting tired of the sameness and looking for things with more nuance. Streaming gives us control over what goes into our ears and it seems that we like good things even if they are not as well produced.
Also, there's JoJo's Bizarre Adventure teaching kids about great music!
You really just need a music platform to sample referenced acts, which YouTube is the universal one. It's really not that difficult.
I've done this before- with Spotify, I've even picked albums based on their cover art, the name of the record, the name of the artist. Occasionally the aesthetic vibes align and I find a new artist that is actually enjoyable. Usually not. But if you're just trying to find new music, there's ample methods to do so.
In general, I find search engines to be a really poor discoverability resource for anything, not just music.
> You name it, there is somebody out there making good music in that genre today. You just have to look beyond what is talked about on TV.
Sure, but that assertion doesn't actually help with finding those musicians. It could both be true that 1) great music is being produced AND 2) the horizons of the commercial/mainstream music industry have contracted, making those musicians harder for most people to discover. Sort of like how the movie industry is focusing more and more on easily exported comic book blockbusters, at the expense of middle-budget dramas and comedies.
Then there's also the fact that the streaming revolution has made crap easier to find, and there's a lot more crap than good stuff, which hurts discoverability. As an example: I've been looking for kids music on Spotify recently, and it's a sea of low-effort auto-tuned garbage from people following the economics of spam. It's pretty much impossible to find a good version of a classic song unless you already know the artist.
How do people continuously fall into this trap? "New X sucks" No, it doesn't. You just don't make an effort to seek out new things and wish everything stayed the same as when you were young.
On the thread of mass-consumption stuff, I think we all underestimate the effect of "mass" becoming a significant portion of the available market - when you measure your success against the top 100 earners in a space like that, it almost boils down to skinner's box style output.
I didn’t listen to music as a sheltered kid. Once I began listening to music in my late teens, I started with Velvet Underground and Joy Division. From there it was all modern music. Like say “indie music” of the times of the 00s was abundant for me. I’m almost 20 years into listening to music now and nothing has changed for me. I still don’t like most of the the top charting songs, but I didn’t like them 15 years ago either. I might actually like popular music more now as I used to not like most of it. While now I enjoy artists like Lil Uzi Vert and especially Playboi Carti.
Similarly, Star Wars films appear to be completely mediocre films. I didn’t watch them [properly] until I was older.
Some semblance of me not being pushed into the normal popular stuff as an easily influenced young person makes it very easy for me not to yearn for older stuff being better.
I just checked the billboard top 100. It appears to mostly be your basic standard pop culture popular music. It seems like what would be at the top decades ago too if zooming out and seeing things as a whole.
Half an hour digging on a site like Bandcamp will prove there’s a vast amount of good new music, too much to comprehend. It only feels like there’s less good music because there’s vastly more music of all quality levels available now.
You’ve just got to steer away from the mainstream and look for it.
I got deep into niche online electronic artists over the pandemic and there's just so much creativity from young kids publishing stuff on soundcloud with only a few thousand listens.
Later, i got a PC and a friend of mine was letting me his CDs with mp3s so I can pick songs. I did not have lots of space and he was gone for 6 months at a time to uni, getting new stuff was quite an event and all of it was prefiltered by his taste.
Fwd to today, i can listen to my metal or to Two Steps From Hell and get recommended Mecina by an algorithm. I can listen to some old Romanian songs, or some crap i would never understand. I can listen to those nice lads that drink in the same pub as I do or to these other guys from Mongolia. And the best part is that all of this takes 1 click and if I don't like what is currently playing, i can skip because there are so many other options. The music lover in me is very very happy.
This can be said to apply to cheesy rock-pop 60's hits - electronics weren't involved but same difference.
I think the 70s are also around the same time that a lot of familiar genres started to emerge, while music from before then is often dismissed as "oldies" or saved for special occasions - e.g. old crunchy recordings of Christmas songs.
Alas, this is BS.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pRjsu9-Vznc
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NHkqWZ9jzA0
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hf-UGPXpqJ4
Thanks for the information though, I'll do some A/B testing to see if it makes any difference to me.
I like old music because old music really is better. Most of the (non-"alt") music that I listen to was written and recorded before I was born.
It's not that old music is "killing" new music. It's that new music has been slowly killing itself since the 2000s. Even the Backstreet Boys and Three 6 Mafia seem fresh and interesting compared to the stuff I've been hearing on the radio over the last decade.
Even probably the best (IMO) pop artist of the current era, Stromae, writes songs that are mostly the same hooks and background elements repeated over and over for 4 minutes, with no change in dynamics or structure.
I'm honestly pretty sick of all the 60s-80s stuff I've been listening to, but what else is there?
Don't get me wrong: there was plenty of stupid garbage in those decades too. But the great stuff truly is great beyond most of what we get today, at least when it comes to stuff that's considered "mainstream".
But if the record industry wants to destroy itself, who am I to stop them? Keep listening to (and paying for!!) alt stuff, that's where the personality and creativity is.
Listen to a whole album. This is THE fundamental problem with streaming.
Any band that produced one good song probably produced quite a few other good ones. Bands that got pigeonholed into a "sound" probably produced other songs on their albums that weren't in that sound.
Even for mega-popular bands like "Journey", for example, 3/4 of the songs on their albums never get played anywhere. You'll probably find something you really like in that set.
Sadly, this seems to break down starting in the late 1990s.
The best place too look for these (since the pigeonholing is often at the very start of their commercial recording, with the label pushing them into a particular niche) is stuff later than their most popular works (which are often what fuels their ability to ditch the narrow commercial optimization strategy that the label would impose for riskier, more diverse approaches.)
It's probably because this guy wrote it:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Max_Martin
Well, as you mentioned yourself, there are lots of great musicians doing their thing, but mostly flying under the radar - you just have to find them, which has become easier thanks to Spotify et al. But then it's sad to see that they only have 30.000 or even 3.000 "monthly listeners", while Ava Max has 30.000.000. And, I did notice that even for new music I tend to be attracted to stuff that sounds more or less "retro", but I guess most music that's not > 90% electronically processed sounds retro nowadays.
Ultimately, curation matters. If iheartmedia doesn't care about your personal interests then none of the toplists are going to be useful to you. Find individual curators who are principled and like what you like instead.
https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b03yblbx/episodes/player
https://www.bagelradio.com/
Just a thought.
The proportion of people younger than 30 is shrinking everywhere there is 4G and more.
Those mixes and masters were optimized in a world where everyone listened to vinyl, radio, home hifi, and crappy car stereos. This biases the whole production in certain ways, which together with fashions of those time colour the sound and dates it. Remasters (I think) remove some these biases. The new targets are headphones and streaming.
New recordings can and should sound very differently unless they are pastiches.
Some people like the old sound because it's already etched in their brains, and they want to hear it again. They've associated it with "genuine" and "honest" and whatever.
No, music back then wasn’t better in general, we’re just not listening to the shit songs from that time. In 20 years time we’ll still be listening to all the good music from today, have forgotten about all the crap, and then decide that music from the 20’s really was better that whatever we’re producing in the 40’s.
Listen to "One After 909" from Anthology (or the 1963 'bootleg' release).
Then listen to the version from Let It Be.
"Production" such as it is is, I'd think, 'minimal' in most senses - there's some mics in front of singers and amps. One was outside, one inside. But the sound is different. The performance is definitely different in 1969 - so much looser, relaxed, and more accomplished. In some ways it's hard to think it's the exact same band a mere 6 years apart (yes, excepting Billy Preston added keys in 1969).
I'd always wished they'd have re-visited a few more of those early ones (originals or covers), just to get that sense of development, progress and transformation in such a short time. It's interesting that we ended up getting at least one song captured so 'far apart' from itself.
Nowadays audio professionals are looking for any new technology that will help imprint the analog artifacts of these years on the clean digital recordings.
Music is not like a new phone. There are no "upgrades".
Maybe it is futile to conceptualize old / new music? We have music, and then just an expansion of the catalog.
This is how it is when people can pick their music more freely instead of fed by the industry and from a seemingly endless list not just from those stamped as 'new'.
No killing is going on here. Music that people like will be listened to still, regardless of their age. It is just much much more out there from earlier than now, due to longer period and more people throughout the history.
Disagree. Listen to "I'll Be" by Edwin McCain, then "You and Me" by Lifehouse.
Ed Sheeran upgraded "Thinking Out Loud" with "Perfect."
"Girlfriend" by Avril Lavigne is an improved "Hey Mickey."
For me “stories” (acoustic covers by the Scary Pockets crew and the same model of rotating guest singers & musicians — without the fixed members though Lerman is generally on guitar) is a daily with a 95% hit rate, but about half the originals I wouldn't listen to at all.
Even though his version reached a decent #35 on Billboard, Aretha's version completely eclipsed it. Reportedly, Redding conceded that "it's her song now" (paraphrasing).
To me, he could mean she gets used to living without him when he's on the road and treats it like her home when he gets there, instead of theirs. If he's going to give her most of his money, at least she could make nice.
I've also seen it claimed that Leonard Cohen thought Pentatonix' cover of Hallelujah was the best he'd ever heard but I can't find any confirmation for that.
computers can take us there but not so long as MIDI is the standard. the 'problem' (which is really more of an opportunity to improve and go beyond) is not MIDI but the conceptual theoretical framework of the 12-notes keyboard underlying all 'western' traditions.
but don't get me wrong, it's no coincidence that this 12 notes system is so widespread, it really is very well made. anything that attempts to take music beyond it needs to be even better, which ain't easy as it's quite something already.
in summary, computer technology has so far just made cheaper and easier to do the same things that were already possible. no new things have been tried yet regarding the choice of notes to use.
However, putting on my devil's advocate hat for a moment, this leans heavily on the idea that humanity didn't already explore non-12T music already, which is a difficult argument to make.
It is false that the 12T model originated on keyboards.
Finally, it also fails to note the reason why we have 12TET. Western music is relatively unique among world music cultures in the dominant role that harmony plays (contrast with the highly evolved classical musical forms from India, which are incredibly rhythmically and melodically sophisticated but lack almost any notion of harmony (let alone harmonic movement) at all).
If you want to make music that is rich harmonically, it is likely that at some point you will want to be able to modulate between similar relationships (call them "scales" if you like) but starting from different initial tones. Doing this without it all going horribly wrong requires ET.
If you're going to do purely melodic, or purely modal, work, then sure, you don't need it and you could argue that it's even "harmful".
Music is too disposable now. With my spotify subscription, I can still listen to those albums from the 90s/early 2000s over and over again, but there's just so much new music. Even new albums that I really enjoy, I'll listen to them a handful of times and forget about them.
Anyway, I spend thousands of dollars on amazing music on bandcamp, and the artists get a higher percentage from bandcamp than a studio, so I'm making the best choice for me and the future of my music.
Producing music is easier than ever so there's more music out than ever. Listening to music is easier than ever.
If you're relying on mass media (tv/radio) and big labels to find music you'll enjoy, you're doing it wrong.
The curators nowadays are Youtube channels and Spotify playlists and indie labels on Bandcamp, I'm following music subreddits, finding stuff on Soundcloud.
New music isn't dying, it's striving.
For Bandcamp, I follow artists and labels there. Whenever an artist I like has a release on a label I don't know I check it out.
There's also this tool from the Hype Machine that finds Bandcamp links from a Spotify playlist.
https://hypem.com/merch-table
Are there some specific kinds of music you're looking for?
"Programmed by a sucker in a suit — a slick back hair / And he don't even live here" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iiGOXmSmf9E
That and artists needing to make big singles too monetize their work - so the approach to making music is different. Getting a movie/show themesong or leveraging another artists popularity to drive song plays
Musical instruments becoming quite inexpensive increasing the competition while the market place is increasingly fragmented. Former gate keepers don't have that much cloud [record labels].
As a former music head it really sucks to look at music from a business market perspective - but it really does frame what's going on.
There's a confluence of forces making new music difficult that and you would also think a lot of the items i posted above would make there being more higher quality music.
I just can't turn on the “new songs” radio station in Apple Music because 90% will be hip-hop & rap.
I imagine how modern music producers are fed up by an endless stream of demo records from ‘new hip-hop stars’ - my condolences.
If streaming services will add the button “Do not propose music of this genre”, then new music will be more discoverable. But right now the only two things I saw in Spotify and Apple Music are “I like this genre” and “I love/hate this song”.
I hope it will become a killer feature of some new startup.
Looking for new music doesn't occupy much of my time, so my tolerance for the choice presented to me is fairly low.
A generation of wealthy nostalgics overspends on the same old music.
A generation of hard-up youth (and there's nothing wrong with that in strictly origin-of-media-cultures terms!) won't pay anything the "music market" can easily measure, for what they actually value.
Musicians aiming for commercial appeal really seem to be scraping the barrel now. There are people with new ideas but the profusion of barrel-scrapers makes "try to sell big" a poor use of an inventive musician's time.
Where do we go from here? No idea, but it probably needs to involve inventing (or reinventing) some different kind of engagement.
I don't think my preferences for what kind stand much of a chance, but no matter.
I dunno -- would anyone care if superstars vanished? A much better result would be for lots of artists to make, like, middle class wages on Bandcamp or whatever (not saying this actually happens, just thinking about possible better end results).
Are they so complex? Personally I can listen to popular music from up until 2015 and "get it", but after that, what's supposed to be popular music starts to sound more extreme than what I listen to alone. And it's not just a "me" thing, we have a wide variety of tastes in the family, and we agree that most of that plays on the radio these days is not what any of us would listen to. I don't know what niche this music is optimizing for, but I think that most people are out of it.
In parallel, lots of less-known artists continue putting out great stuff.
if there's not as much money to be made selling new music I think it's mostly because there is so much new music. anyone can record an album now, or whatever, release it, do the whole nine yards, without having to go through that ridiculous hurdle so many years ago of "getting a deal with a label". if you're into a whole genre of music, that's great, but there's like 18 thousand other genres that are all just as valid now, unlike in the 1980s when there were something like five. All the bands that you think are great and have changed your life listening to are not anyone else's in your town. it's as though the music industry has spread across the whole galaxy to millions of planets and it would be impossible for there to ever be some artists that are as important as names like the Police or Madonna were in the 80s.
It was widely understood that even then, while "getting a record deal" was the only way you'd have a career, the publishing companies were generally in it to rip the musicians through a shredder and extract as much cash as they can before discarding the talent, except in the very unlikely case that said talent did well enough to still be viable for more albums.
I'm sort of amazed that industry hasn't just thrown in the towel at this point, they were basically gatekeepers on recording and distribution technology.
It was likely unbalanced in the beginning when these platforms first came out
Sure, we still have good tracks here and there. Good artists are still there but it’s pretty hard to compose something « new » without being « strange ».
It’s mostly impossible to do better than the masters of your musical genre because most genres exists for more than 60, sometimes 100 years so, statically speaking, they may have been mastered by one or multiple artists since then.
Even if an artist managed to be greater (for what it could mean) than his masters, well, he could never have the advantage of novelty.
I don’t think it’s an issue (except maybe for the industry), after all, there is already enough music to enjoy an entire life, and still pretty good new artists.