Ask Slashdot: Will Technology Disrupt the Song?

An anonymous reader writes: The music industry has gone through dramatic changes over the past thirty years. Virtually everything is different except the structure of the songs we listen to. Distribution methods have long influenced songwriting habits, from records to CDs to radio airplay. So will streaming services, through their business models, incentivize a change to song form itself? Many pop music sensations are already manufactured carefully by the studios, and the shift to digital is providing them with ever more data about what people like to listen to. And don't forget that technology is a now a central part of how such music is created, from auto-tune and electronic beats to the massive amount of processing that goes into getting the exact sound a studio wants.

Comments

Will Technology Disrupt the Song?

[Anonymous Coward]

No. No it won't.

Re:Will Technology Disrupt the Song?

[TWX]

Are you joking? Technology has always disrupted the nature of music. Early forms of recording were very short in duration and essentially dictated the time lenggh of their contents. Popular music has had to conform to the technology, and arguably is permanently changed. How many charting pop songs over five minutes long that aren't novelty tunes can you think of?

Re:Will Technology Disrupt the Song?

[Anonymous Coward]

There were short musical pieces before the invention of audio recording, you know.

Re:Will Technology Disrupt the Song?

[geekmux]

Are you joking? Technology has always disrupted the nature of music. Early forms of recording were very short in duration and essentially dictated the time lenggh of their contents. Popular music has had to conform to the technology, and arguably is permanently changed. How many charting pop songs over five minutes long that aren't novelty tunes can you think of?

Uh, let's not use time as a measure or indication of quality or intent, shall we?

I'm a bit too afraid that the attention span of today will start handing out Oscars for Vine videos.

Re:Will Technology Disrupt the Song?

[Anonymous Coward]

How many charting pop songs over five minutes long that aren't novelty tunes can you think of?

How many songs that predate recordings and are longer than five minutes can you think of?

I have two giant books of old songs. The first is a collection of 975 Finnish folk songs that was originally published in 1905. I haven't made a statistical analysis, but the vast majority of them have 2-5 verses. With 30 seconds per verse that would be 2.5 minutes. There are a few dozens of songs longer than five minutes in it.

The other is a collection of German 803 student songs. Though, they seem to be on average longer than the Finnish folk songs, the vast majority of them have less than 10 verses.

Re:Will Technology Disrupt the Song?

[Anonymous Coward]

The musicians are paid per song. So they have no motivation to make 10 minute songs like American Pie. They have more motivation to make little 2 minute ditties like As Tears Go By and most songs less than 3 minutes, for this reason it seems.

Re: Will Technology Disrupt the Song?

[Anonymous Coward]

A whole slew of stuff from Beethoven and Mozart comes readily to mind...

Re:Will Technology Disrupt the Song?

[geekmux]

The musicians are paid per song. So they have no motivation to make 10 minute songs like American Pie. They have more motivation to make little 2 minute ditties like As Tears Go By and most songs less than 3 minutes, for this reason it seems.

If money is all they care about, then become a banker, for I struggle to call you an artist.

I get what you're saying, but this IS the problem with defining an artist these days. Money is THE priority. When that happens, the ability to express yourself beyond a mathematically calculated attention span becomes impossible.

Re: Will Technology Disrupt the Song?

[dwywit]

Zis vas ze trondheim hammer dance, vich is heard every tventy-five minutes in ze town of Trondheim in Norway, in vich ze old ladies are struck about ze head vith round sticks, or klugels (click)

Re:Will Technology Disrupt the Song?

[Thorfinn.au]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... is a C13 folk song of about 3 minutes and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... is a C16 verse also about 3 minutes and the electric folk group Steeleye Span had a hit in 1973 (No. 14, UK singles chart) with an a cappella recording of the song.
The song has a natural form of about 3 minutes

Re: Will Technology Disrupt the Song?

[RDW]

A whole slew of stuff from Beethoven and Mozart comes readily to mind...

Mostly not 'songs' though. A Mozart opera might be a couple of hours long, but the majority of the individual arias are probably under 5 minutes, e.g.:

https://www.youtube.com/playli...

Re:Will Technology Disrupt the Song?

[sound vision]

Time is 100% relevant to this discussion. Music history is littered with examples of songs that have had their structure and duration altered as a result of outside forces. Donovan had to make a decision when recording "Hurdy Gurdy Man" whether to include all 3 verses he wrote, or 2 verses and a guitar solo, as there wasn't time to have 3 verses plus a solo within 3 minutes. The Byrds had loads of songs where even more verses were cut out to keep them down to a radio-friendly length. While radio stations aren't as anal about running times these days, you still won't hear a 10-minute song on the radio. And there's no disputing that that particular limitation had a deep effect on much of the music of the previous century.

As for how streaming services will affect music - I think a lot of the pressures they put on writers are similar to radio. They work better with shorter pieces of music that are free-standing in the sense that they will work when played between any two other songs. So, less emphasis on things like thematic consistency (both in lyrics and music). Really the only thing I see different in streaming (vs. radio) is that in streaming it's easier to skip a particular song, so the listener is able to shut himself out more from experimentation. He can decide within 15 seconds if a song presents a sound he deems to be acceptable, and whether he wants to skip it. Whereas on the radio, he would be "forced" to listen to the whole track. I don't think this will be much of an issue though, since radio stations as well as streaming services both usually cater to a specific genre anyway - they're certainly not hotbeds of experimentation.

Re:Will Technology Disrupt the Song?

[jellomizer]

Disrupt no, change yes and it always will. Globalization will also change it.
When they started to make drums they found a way to make music louder so it can be heard hundreds of meters away. So music changed.
Additional instruments created new sound so the singer wasn't always needed. Then we have forms where the singer emulates the sound of the instrument.
We get to the point were instruments can be fine tuned then music can be played as written allowing wider distribution of music.

Streaming will change music, being that the artist are not bound by media lengths. They can have a short 30 second song or a 3 hour long song.

Also the fact that music is now listen more privately over headphones, increases the music diversity, you don't need to feel guilty that after some heavy metal music you can switch to music theater without people looking at you funny.

Re: Will Technology Disrupt the Song?

[turbidostato]

"Mostly not 'songs' though. A Mozart opera might be a couple of hours long, but the majority of the individual arias are probably under 5 minutes"

Yes, an arbitrary under-5-minutes cut of a longer composition, be it an opera, a sonate or a symphonic concert lasts, well uh, under 5 minutes.

The point is that when you think "opera", you are thinking "two hours"; when you think "concert", you are thinking "forty minutes"; when you think "sonate", you are thinking "twenty minutes"... heck, even if you think "lied" you go for good ten minutes.

And then, when you think "pop music", you think 2'40'' and it is because of technology.

Re:Will Technology Disrupt the Song?

[ILongForDarkness]

Also probably due to the genre but one of my favorite bands, Opeth, has an average song length of probably 9min. They have a whole bunch of songs 12+ min long. I've never heard them on radio but did hear an a snippet from one of their softer songs in a CSI episode I think it was. I don't listen to the radio because generally it doesn't play the type of music I like. Sure with online I could search around for a station somewhere that plays it but being online I can just listen to the things I like in the first place.

I think radio is an outdated medium at least for music. For discussions and such it can be okay, but then again that can also be replaced by podcasts.

Re: Will Technology Disrupt the Song?

[ILongForDarkness]

Well I'd say now a days it is probably more due to advertisement. Keeping the song around 3min gives you enough time to play 3 "songs" do a weather update and the plug boner pills again.

Re: Will Technology Disrupt the Song?

[RDW]

I don't think it's an arbitrary cut (at least not until you get to, say, Wagner, where selections really do tend to look like 'bleeding chunks'). In earlier operas, there's usually a pretty clear distinction between recitative and aria, not that much different to the songs in a musical today (or even the singles from a 'concept album'). Of course you can argue that composers with a bit of business sense had an eye on the technology of the time - popular arias were sold individually as sheet music, and later as records - I've seen the 78 described (in the LP era) as 'still the ideal medium for a Puccini-length aria'. Puccini died in 1924, and many of his arias were the early hits of the gramophone. Short-form music has always been popular, though. How many popular folk songs go on for more than 5 minutes? In church music, the choir may tackle longer form works, but the hymns the congregation sings generally aren't much longer than a pop single.

Re:Will Technology Disrupt the Song?

[Anonymous Coward]

Change != Disrupt.

Saying "disrupt" in this context would similar to saying things like desegregation disrupted the human rights movement.

Re:Will Technology Disrupt the Song?

[Anonymous Coward]

I don't know what you're listening to, but the musicians I listen to are primarily paid per gig and to a lesser extent, per sale. There is no set price they get per song they write. And their song lengths range from a little over 2 minutes to sometimes half an hour. Basically, the songs are as long as they need to be to do what they want artistically.

Re: Will Technology Disrupt the Song?

[Anonymous Coward]

Well I'd say now a days it is probably more due to advertisement. Keeping the song around 3min gives you enough time to play 3 "songs" do a weather update and the plug boner pills again.

If the modern popular song length is explained by advertisements, what is the explanation for the bulk of the popular songs from the 19th century that have about the same length? Did they have advertisement breaks too?

Re:Will Technology Disrupt the Song?

[MagickalMyst]

As a hobbyist musician, I agree that technology certainly has an effect on music production and creation.

However, to answer your question - " How many charting pop songs over five minutes long that aren't novelty tunes can you think of?"

A few:

Voodoo Chile - Jimi Hendrix
I heard it through the grapevine - CCR
I can do anything for love (but won't do that) - Meatloaf
Stairway to Heaven - Led Zeppelin
Inna Gadda Da Vida - Max Webster
Like a Rolling Stone - Bob Dylan
Hotel California - The Eagles
American Pie - Don Maclean
Paradise City - Guns n' Roses

Interestingly, these are all older songs.

It would seem that longer (hit) songs are more a thing of the past - at least as far as commercial music goes.

I think shorter songs are more popular these days because of radio airplay than anything else. Many bands still write long songs, you just aren't as likely to hear them on the radio or see them in a top 40 list.

Re: Will Technology Disrupt the Song?

[Anonymous Coward]

Auto tune for those who can't sing but look good lip syncing.

Re:Will Technology Disrupt the Song?

[RabidReindeer]

A lot of the longer songs also had "chopped" versions that were used for radio play. Especially if they had long drum solos or the like.

Although Attention Deficit Disorder is pretty much the order of the day these days, even back in simpler times, pop radio favored short songs over longer ones. If a particular number didn't amuse the listener, then keeping them short ensured that the listener would be less likely to switch to a different station, since the chances of something more agreeable coming along shortly were relatively high. Conversely, if your station is broadcasting the "Ring of the Nibelungs", then you'd darn well better be interested in the Nibelungslied, since you're in it for the long haul.

One thing that has disappeared over the last few decades is album-oriented play and its close relative, the late-night "album hour". That's where longer words such as the Dark Side of the Moon, Bob Dylan's extended ballads and Inna Gada Da Vida were most likely to be heard.

Re:Will Technology Disrupt the Song?

[bkr1_2k]

Early songs were the length they were. People regularly played "little ditties" that were a couple of minutes because people like to change up what they're doing (and who they're doing it with) while dancing. Recording technology has nothing to do with the length of songs. Dancing, and human emotions have everything to do with it. That's why operas take longer than the latest Britney Spears song. A Sinatra song lasted about the same as a Britney Spears song does, though. Rock music typically lasts a little longer per song than "pop" music does, I don't know why. I think that genre averages about 4-5 minutes per song, rather than 3-4.

The only thing technology changes is the final sound of the song. Records buzzed, tapes hissed, CDs occasionally click and streaming sounds "tinny" or muffled when done badly. Technology provides an outlet for all those who have mediocre musical talent (such as myself) to produce something a little more polished. It may change (slightly) the way bubble-gum pop is created but not much else.

Re:Will Technology Disrupt the Song?

[AthanasiusKircher]

Time is 100% relevant to this discussion. Music history is littered with examples of songs that have had their structure and duration altered as a result of outside forces. [snip] While radio stations aren't as anal about running times these days, you still won't hear a 10-minute song on the radio. And there's no disputing that that particular limitation had a deep effect on much of the music of the previous century.

Yes, and no. You're right that media constraints often try to keep songs shorter. But that doesn't imply that longer songs would be that common, even without those constraints.

Examine most of music history. Whether you're talking about 14th-century French chansons, 16th-century Italian madrigals, 18th-century independent arias, 19th-century German lieder, or 20th-century pop (or Broadway or jazz or...) -- ALL of those repertoires tend to have songs that average about 3-5 minutes in length, with some that might go 6-7 minutes, rare ones that are 7-10 minutes, and almost none more than 10 minutes. Individual movements of larger classical works often follow a similar pattern.

(The main exception are certain kinds of folk ballades or epic ballades which have many, many verses because they tell a long story. But in that case, the actual form of the music takes a "back seat" to the story -- essentially after the 5th or 6th verse, it's kind of a recitation formula which loses its musical impact. A related form is repetitive chanting, where the music becomes less important than the ritualistic experience of repeating the music again and again.)

It's surprising that TFA seems to be written by a songwriting professor, because he seems to understand little about these long-term trends and what they say about basic cognitive patterns that relate to musical structure.

Effective musical composition is really about balancing two things: repetition and novelty. That's it. Seriously. If you write a song that NEVER repeats a refrain or a musical phrase or a short "motive" of a few notes or even a basic rhythmic pattern, you end up with something that just sounds like "random notes." In fact, you have to work quite hard to write something that has no repetitive patterns at all. And it gives a listener a little pleasure in hearing something familiar again -- you "know how that part goes," and that recognition about how it sounds and how the phrase is going to play out is comforting and satisfying.

On the other hand, outside of dance music (again, a pattern going back roughly a thousand years for dance music), too much repetition makes a piece boring. If you keep playing the same few notes over and over again, it gets tedious.

Composers over the centuries have settled on a number of standard forms for putting together songs, because they effectively balance repetition and novelty -- often through varied repetition (or elements where one thing is repeated, like the harmony, but the melody over top of it is varied somewhat).

Lots of songs, for example, use a "song form" of AABA for verses. Why? Because the first time we hear A, it's unfamiliar and new. When we hear A again, it's a welcome repetition -- we get to feel like we "know how this goes." So why not do A a third time? Because it starts to get boring -- so we do a B section that contrasts and often introduces some drama/tension (or changes the feel or dynamics at least in some way). And then, to finish it off, we do a return to A (often with a little variation or a little shorter than the first time) -- which again satisfies because it's familiar... it kind of releases the tension introduced by the contrasting B.

That may be a structure for a verse, but entire songs often have a similar structure: verse-refrain-verse-refrain-BRIDGE-refrain, where each "verse-refrain" unit is kind of like a big "A," the bridge introduces contrast, and then the final return to the refrain (often transformed or at a higher energy level) provides a satisfying conclusion

Re:Will Technology Disrupt the Song?

[Hognoxious]

With the attention spans the current litter of hiptarded fucksters have, a typical pop ditty seems to them like 2112 or Shine On You Crazy Diamond to a normal person.

Re:Will Technology Disrupt the Song?

[JMJimmy]

No. No it won't.

It already has. Just not for the better. What I know for sure is that I haven't bought, torrented, or otherwise listened to new music in years. I listen to old AC/DC, Queen, Stones, Nirvana, Smashing Pumpkins, etc. but can't change the radio fast enough when new crap comes on.

Re:Will Technology Disrupt the Song?

[Phreakiture]

That would explain songs like All by The Descendents and Art by Nuclear Assault. You could play both songs, back to back twice in fifteen seconds. No, I'm not exaggerating. Okay, maybe sixteen seconds. Art is at least funny.

Re:Will Technology Disrupt the Song?

[umghhh]

I do not see a massive contradiction. Artists were always in search for a sponsor. I work for the money too. I like when it makes fun to but if it does not I still do it to pay for the bills and few times in my life I was proud of what I (together with some other slaves like me) achieved. Great artist can make huge amounts of money and produce artwork that are of great value to many people - what is wrong with that? OTOH the majority, the mass will produce mediocre stuff that if they are lucky make them famous for 5seconds. even this will surely be of some nostalgic value for guys few decades away sifting trough mountains of crap that our era produced and for reasons unknown to anybody saved.

Re:Will Technology Disrupt the Song?

[Sir_Eptishous]

Bingo.

Most on /. don't know that in the 80's there was a movement of making short songs, especially in the punk and hardcore bands.
Short songs are nothing new.
Look at most of the early Beatles catalog. Those were short(and sweet) songs.

The length of a song doesn't dictate it's quality.

Re:Will Technology Disrupt the Song?

[Sir_Eptishous]

Donovan had to make a decision when recording "Hurdy Gurdy Man" whether to include all 3 verses he wrote, or 2 verses and a guitar solo, as there wasn't time to have 3 verses plus a solo within 3 minutes. The Byrds had loads of songs where even more verses were cut out to keep them down to a radio-friendly length.

Yes, the radio version and the LP version, may they never meet!

Re:Will Technology Disrupt the Song?

[Sir_Eptishous]

Opeth is pure genius.
They are prog without sounding like they are trying to be prog, which most bands in that genre can't do well.

Re:Will Technology Disrupt the Song?

[Sir_Eptishous]

A big part of the reason why you don't hear many 10-minute songs on the radio or elsewhere is because it's SIGNIFICANTLY harder to write a piece like that which is satisfying, doesn't get boring, and is also simple enough in structure to remain interesting upon first listening. Similarly you don't hear many songs less the 1-2 minutes long because you don't have enough time to develop anything interesting enough to have a satisfying "narrative journey" for a listener.

There aren't temporary trends -- they're pretty basic to human experience in general which has been consistent for centuries. Has the author of TFA never listened to Broadway songs, let alone historical music? Has he not noticed that the same song lengths and structural patterns tend to occur there, where the constraints of media and radio play are less relevant?

I couldn't agree more about "there aren't temporary trends". Human enjoyment of music is pretty much as you explain it.

However I have to point out that this renewed focus on short songs is strange, being that going back to the beginning of 20th century pop music, songs were regularly 2-3 minutes in length. Take "Michelle" by The Beatles for example. It clocks in at 2:40. Sheer brilliance in less than three minutes. Short songs are nothing new.

On the flip side we have a band like Rush that has consistently created longer songs that "remain interesting" and usually don't adhere to the AABA song structure. For bands like Tool that make this attempt, it usually falls flat.

Re:Will Technology Disrupt the Song?

[TWX]

How many of these pop songs caused the initial promotion of the band, in the long form, versus a truncated radio-play form? Most of these songs were distributed after their respective bands/artists were already popular, and once one is popular, one has more leeway to experiment.

Re:Will Technology Disrupt the Song?

[Slider451]

Great post.

Re:Will Technology Disrupt the Song?

[Anonymous Coward]

I will go as far as saying that Opeth is too good to ever get radio air time. Sad, but ever since the late 1990s when radio stations got consolidated under a few companies, the only time one might hear something on a "rock" channel other than a cut from 50-100 songs, last of which dates in 1997, would be a single hour on a Friday or Saturday night... assuming they don't do a rerun of a King Biscuit Flower Hour instead.

Another thing that hurt artists was the 99 cent per track. Yes, it is good for consumers, but it destroyed the ability of bands to make money via recorded media, and it forces bands to gig... and some of the best musicians are not the best stage performers. Forcing musicians to gig to keep an income is almost like forcing a car mechanic to be able to dance while dropping a bell housing. Some can do it, but a lot of talented people just are not as good on stage as in the studio.

Of course, what was the final blow is the fact that record labels do not sign bands anymore. They build them. They grab some good looking people, stich up a band, provide the pre-digested words and lyrics sung, and sell that. You will never see a band like the Beatles, Pink Floyd, or singers like Trent Reznor in this day and age signed by a record label... -ever-

I do mourn radio. It used to be the "salt lick" where stations were something people had in common. Yes, people had different tastes, but a new song popping up wound up being discussed and reviewed.

Re:Will Technology Disrupt the Song?

[cayenne8]

I get what you're saying, but this IS the problem with defining an artist these days. Money is THE priority. When that happens, the ability to express yourself beyond a mathematically calculated attention span becomes impossible.

I agree. A true artist makes their art for themselves FIRST and enjoys the fact that others like it too second.

Of course with rock music, it also plays to helping ugly guys get laid too, but that's another thread.

But in most cases, trying to pander to the money or follow it over art is in the not very long term a failure.

Take Led Zeppelin. Sure they made a LOT of money, but that didn't seem the reason for their musical choices. It was what THEY wanted to explore and convey. It happened to be of such quality that they sold a lot of it, and continue to do so after all these years.

They also went out and gave the people what they wanted in the form of live performances. In those days, your ticket got you usually nearly a 3 hour concert, and it wasn't lip synched....no auto tune, and often it was improvised on the spot. Sure you would get some flub notes....especially with Jimmy trying to squeeze 50M notes into two bars at times, but hey...they gave you all they could. You don't see that much anymore.

But if you are good, you will get the money....but your art should be for YOU first, and if it is worthy the crowd will follow and pay you for it.

Re:Will Technology Disrupt the Song?

[KGIII]

The Doors were the ones to pretty much break the two minute barrier. Songs two minutes long were pretty much all that got radio play. They broke that because they had music people wanted to hear even though it was longer than two minutes. Short songs is not new. Densmore discusses it in his book and it is discussed in the book The Doors though I have forgotten the author's name - the one with the yellow and red cover with a bad depiction of Jim on it.

Re:Will Technology Disrupt the Song?

[KGIII]

I gave them two tries, Further Fest and a concert at Great Woods... Anyhow, as much as I love their music, the Black Crows are not a band to see live. I had a sibling that I warned who did not believe me and paid way too much for a couple of tickets. He too had the same experience I had. (They headlined at Further and while I was looking forward to them I did not attend to listen to them specifically. I was more interested in the remainder of the Grateful Dead - specifically Mickey Hart and the Planet Drum. I was also greatly interested in the acid.) Surprisingly good? Meatloaf. An old band still rocking it out live on stage (they are all like 70+ now) is Three Dog Night. I found the latter more amazing than the first but the first was pretty surprising. I had only gone to see Meatloaf because I figured I had never seen them live and that I must do so when they were only a two and a half hour drive away and I had nothing better to do.

Re: Will Technology Disrupt the Song?

[ILongForDarkness]

No those might have had actual technical limitations length of a record/phonograph for example.

Another possibility: maybe song length for pop songs is self-limiting. People hate to hear songs they don't like. If they have 10min of a song they like and then 10min of a song they don't they'll change the dial. But if you keep them short they'll rid them out like a lot of people do with commercials.

Re:Will Technology Disrupt the Song?

[KGIII]

That may be a structure for a verse, but entire songs often have a similar structure: verse-refrain-verse-refrain-BRIDGE-refrain, where each "verse-refrain" unit is kind of like a big "A," the bridge introduces contrast, and then the final return to the refrain (often transformed or at a higher energy level) provides a satisfying conclusion.

That is a fantastic post, it deserves a +5. The only thing(s) I would add or change is that the Bridge may lead to a solo (or solos if live, for example). I would also share, as you seem interested and knowledgeable, that if you are a guitarist then instead of AABA change the A to Amin and the B to a B7-Dim9th. I may have screwed up the latter but I am pretty sure it is correct.

Re:Will Technology Disrupt the Song?

[ILongForDarkness]

I agree with a lot of your comments. What I miss about radio is discovering new stuff. That said my tastes lean away from mass market stuff. Not that I hate all of it but the current Lady Gaga song or whatever being played once an hour means 1) I listen to crap I don't like and 2) I don't really discover new music that I want to listen to anyways.

So I rely on friends and concert festivals to find new bands. Because my stuff isn't played on the radio often by the time I discover a band they've put out 6 albums and I have a lot of material to enjoy before moving on to the next new thing I find.

Social aspect: going in all ways. Everyone has headphones on listening to their own playlists while they text with their own friends. casual acquiescences don't really share anything anymore.

Re:Will Technology Disrupt the Song?

[jfengel]

Record albums are kind of the pop equivalent of a symphony. They last roughly the same time, the length of a CD. It's a myth that it was chosen to be the length of Beethoven's 9th, but the intuition seems to be about right: that's about how long people are willing to listen to music before they need a break.

Not all albums are constructed well, but a good album has some kind of structure and forms a complete unit of music, rather than just being a bunch of songs. It's about as unified as the movements of a symphony. Songs don't quite correspond to movements (a movement is likely to be 15 minutes, a song 3), though as you say there is yet more structure within a movement.

These attention spans are probably not absolutely fundamental to human nature, but they're at least deeply culturally embedded.

It is too bad that things seem to have settled in a place that have eliminated long-form songs like Bohemian Rhapsody and Stairway to Heaven (about the length of a symphonic movement, and each definitely composed of sections that are very different musically). I would be very happy to see those return, though songs like those are rare epics, requiring tremendous skill and insight to construct. I don't know if Pandora will want to play them to you, since it means they get paid just once for feeding out bits that they could have been paid 3 or 4 times for, but I suspect that if somebody writes a great song like Stairway there will be demand for it. The streaming services will want to serve that demand, and since they have control over how often it comes up, it may cut only a tiny bit into their profits.

Re:Will Technology Disrupt the Song?

[Anonymous Coward]

Digital technology could make it possible to tag optional segments within an audio program, and automated playback software could effectively carve different versions out as a result. It could even be an automatic feature of players. Perhaps longer versions would play during quiet hours, when the listener is not on the go. Slower or quieter segments might be left out when it is time for the morning wake-up, or one is listening in a noisy environment. Players might also pick the mix of tracks based on time of day and other factors, maybe even whether or not children are present.

TV programming has often been set up with optional segments. It isn't a new concept. I recall once watching ADAM 12 on a station over 1000 miles away via sporadic E-layer skip during a previous active solar period. I watched the same episode on a local station a few hours later and noticed that one incident in the show had been replaced with an ad cluster. That was about four solar cycles ago.

While we think of audio as stereo, there could be streams with more channels. One might set up a station to broadcast with voice tracs for multiple languages at once. With the number of Spanish-speakers in the South-western U.S. it would be interesting to see well done multilingual programming. There could be text tracks too. Used with PVR style pause and rewind features, such a combination could be very helpful to someone learning a language. I think all audio stream players should have pause, rewind, and record options, and a scheduler for record too.

I think the article is a bit off about the "studio" concept though. Most artists have their own producers, many filling the role themselves. It is unfortunate that not only track length, but the degree of audio compression/limiting have been compromised for the sake of radio. Radio and vinyl recordings has strict overload limits and audible noise. For radio, especially A.M. radio where the hits historically were, raising the average loudness through added audio processing masks noise much like more power would. In practice it doesn't really extend range, but helps to hide just how marginal a signal is. It is a shame when recordings have been optimized for radio and consumers have bought over-processed material. The industry tried to push DVD-audio as better. Except for the DRM it is better, but most of the flaws heard on CD were due to the production choices, not a lesser technical limit.

Re:Will Technology Disrupt the Song?

[AthanasiusKircher]

However I have to point out that this renewed focus on short songs is strange, being that going back to the beginning of 20th century pop music, songs were regularly 2-3 minutes in length.

Definitely true. I was mostly responding to GP, who was arguing about how songs are artificially shortened.

But you're absolutely right that short songs have a long history too, though again there are limits. There are plenty of songs in the 2-3 minute range, but very few less than 2 minutes. And, aside from "novelty songs" (or very fast tempo songs) and advertising jingles and such, songs less than 60-90 seconds are exceptionally rare.

Thus, I find TFA's discussion of the possibility of artists replacing a 3-minute song with six 30-second songs to be rather silly -- unless all pop music is going to become advertising jingles. Sure, it's fun to watch a particularly good 30-second commercial a few times, but you're not going to listen to it hundreds of times, as many do with pop songs they love.

On the flip side we have a band like Rush that has consistently created longer songs that "remain interesting" and usually don't adhere to the AABA song structure.

Long songs certainly CAN be done. But except for my folk ballad examples of songs with 50 verses, the only other way to do it in a simple way is to cobble together contrasting sections, with each section being a few minutes long. Effectively, you create a piece like a classical work with "movements," a la Queen's "Bohemian Rhapsody" or many of Rush's longer pieces.

If you want to sustain a longer piece without just chaining a bunch of contrasting blocks ("movements") together, it gets harder. There are certainly solutions, both in the pop world and historically in classical music (e.g., 15-minute-long "sonata form" movements of classical symphonies by Beethoven or Brahms are often just vastly expanded and complex variations on AABA forms).

And certainly AABA is not the ONLY form in the world. I was just using it as an example because it's so common and displays some of the characteristics among various song organization types (i.e., repetition/return/variation and contrast).

But all good points.

Re:Will Technology Disrupt the Song?

[TsuruchiBrian]

In the past, songs were short to prevent listeners from switching channels if they heard a song they didn't like (because it would be over soon). Now not only can everyone be listening to a different song (i.e. they are no longer necessarily broadcast), people can simply skip songs they don't like. With streaming there is no longer this intense pressure to make short songs, so I predict they will be longer.

Re:Will Technology Disrupt the Song?

[TsuruchiBrian]

There are many songs that simply have multiple parts (i.e. if you heard the parts separately you may not guess they were the same song). You also have "songs" like symphonies in which the sub-songs are meant to be played in order. This is similar to albums that are meant to be played as a whole. Then you also have music like Indian Classical Music which is typically 30 - 60 minutes long for a raga.

So yes, no one wants to be bored to death listening to the same thing for 10 minutes, but that doesn't mean that you can't have a level of continuity lasting hours that isn't enjoyable. And it doesn't have to be dance music.

Where we decide to demarcate song boundaries is often arbitrary.

Re:Will Technology Disrupt the Song?

[Toshito]

There's plenty of trash on Slashdot these days, but it's refreshing to read a solid, well written and informative comment like yours.

Thanks.

Re:Will Technology Disrupt the Song?

[OutOnARock]

No One Here Gets Out Alive - Danny Sugarman and Jerry Hopkins

Re:Will Technology Disrupt the Song?

[Anonymous Coward]

So they have no motivation to make 10 minute songs like American Pie.

Which explains why Guns & Roses' "November Rain" was 20 seconds longer than American Pie!

And this also explains why the average length of the pop song has risen from about 3 minutes in the 50's and 60's to 4 minutes today - musicians just care about cranking out the shortest song possible for the most money possible!

Your idiotic argument is retarded. We are all poorer for having read it.

Re:Will Technology Disrupt the Song?

[Anonymous Coward]

Meh. He forgot to explain how this was the work of feminazis trying to emasculate men, or SJW's clearly out to destroy video games, the last bastion of masculine culture.

Needs work.

Re:Will Technology Disrupt the Song?

[Anonymous Coward]

yes it will--today's modern songs are already not songs, but ads.

I mean every song is some dance beat talking about drinking Hennessy, riding in your Z4, wearing your Abercrombie shorts, and carrying your dolce bag. Of course, talking to Katy, sitting next to Justin, and reminiscing about The Stones.And getting a text from your BBF who's over in the NYC as get ready for a evening living large (in Vegas). Not including the fact it's some resampled tune from the 50s--so off you going finding that song to buy.

There: ads for food, drinks, clothes, content, electronics, tourism, ....and Vegas of course. There's a song in there, somewhere.

Even country music, which had it's traditions in stories are pretty much ads too.

Re:Will Technology Disrupt the Song?

[mister_playboy]

After the last two albums, I find myself wishing for more metal to go with the prog.

Glad to see Opeth mentioned. Given all the intelligence, machismo, and aggression on this site I'm always disappointed to see that progressive metal rarely comes up in music discussions.

Re:Will Technology Disrupt the Song?

[KGIII]

Excellent, thank you. It is in my book collection, somewhere... I am sure it is on a shelf too. *sighs* I need to hire an intern or something.

Re:Will Technology Disrupt the Song?

[Phreakiture]

The Doors were the ones to pretty much break the two minute barrier.

Ray Charles kind of did, too, with What'd I Say, but he kind of stood alone with that one. The Doors made it stick.

Re:Will Technology Disrupt the Song?

[KGIII]

I remember that song. Bands with long songs got little radio so were not as popular, it was a self-feeding cycle. The Doors were so popular that people wanted to hear their music on the radio. They lead the way for bands like the Grateful Dead, Pink Floyd, and Led Zeppelin. I admire the Doors for many things, this is one of them though the information could be incorrect I suppose. I grew up with the Doors so, well, they have stuck as have all the bands listed above.

Shut your whore mouth!

[Anonymous Coward]

Many pop music sensations are already manufactured carefully by the studios,

WHAT?! What a corruption of the traditions of our country's musical heritage. Give me the organic groups-- the Monkees, Menudo, One Direction, O-Town, the Backstreet Boys, NKOB, the Spice Girls.. you know, talented musicians who found each other and came together through the music.

Re:Shut your whore mouth!

[Anonymous Coward]

Many pop music sensations are already manufactured carefully by the studios,

WHAT?! What a corruption of the traditions of our country's musical heritage. Give me the organic groups-- the Monkees, Menudo, One Direction, O-Town, the Backstreet Boys, NKOB, the Spice Girls.. you know, talented musicians who found each other and came together through the music.

You might notice that most of the artists you named here were from long ago.

You know, back before Autotune and YouTube could make an "artist" out of anyone.

Re:Shut your whore mouth!

[narcc]

You might notice that most of the artists you named here were terrible.

FTFY

Re:Shut your whore mouth!

[Anonymous Coward]

The US, UK, and Puerto Rico are separate countries, y'know.

Re:Shut your whore mouth!

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm curious, do you think Gorillaz and The Raconteurs count as "found each other and came together through the music", or do you think they were manufactured by the record label like your examples?

[It's a trap, since they're a little of both.]

Re:Shut your whore mouth!

[sexconker]

Whoooooooooooosh

Re:Shut your whore mouth!

[Anonymous Coward]

Are you fucking kidding me? You can not have failed to realize that those are all cast groups whose members were chosen to cover a diverse set of personality stereotypes and thus appeal to the widest audience possible, and perform the most formulaic, marketing-driven music for the exact same purpose. Those groups are the synthetic drugs of the pop music world.

Re:Shut your whore mouth!

[Anonymous Coward]

I concur.

CAPTCHA: idiotic

Re:Shut your whore mouth!

[clickety6]

Whooooosh!

Re:Shut your whore mouth!

[GrumpySteen]

WHAT?! What a corruption of the traditions of our country's musical heritage. Give me the organic groups-- the Monkees, Menudo, One Direction, O-Town, the Backstreet Boys, NKOB, the Spice Girls.. you know, talented musicians who found each other and came together through the music.

You might notice that most of the artists you named here were from long ago.

You might notice that all of the artists named were bands put together by music companies.

You might also notice a whooshing sound.

Re:Shut your whore mouth!

[Mariner28]

And here I thought Puerto Rico was a territory of the US since the Spanish American War of 1898. Or was that where Los Tres Mosqueteros surrendered to Menudo the in the PR Battle of the Bands in 1997?

Re:Shut your whore mouth!

[sycodon]

"That's not music, Martelli....That's masturbation."

-Fame, 1980

Meh

[penguinoid]

Corporations will continue to make boatloads of money, artists will continue to sell their work for a song.

Re:Meh

[TWX]

Pun intended?

Re:Meh

[Solandri]

Corporations will continue to make boatloads of money, artists will continue to sell their work for a song.

That's what I don't get. We already have the infrastructure in place for artists to "make it" on their own - no record label company needed. A friend of mine put a few of her self-produced educational videos on YouTube hoping for some publicity - maybe someone at a TV station would see them and pick up the series or offer her a job. Instead, the videos grew insanely popular among parents. The YouTube revenue was more than enough to fund production of the video series she'd been hoping a TV studio would bankroll. And now she's one of YouTube's biggest producers. Her YouTube revenue exceeds her (lawyer) husband's income, and he's taking more and more time off his law practice to help with her video and website production.

But so many aspiring musicians seem to think the only way to succeed is the "traditional" way - sell their soul to a record label who will take 90% of what they earn, and charge them another 8% as production expenses. Organic publicity on YouTube and social media is free (assuming people actually like what you produce). Amazon, iTunes, and Google Play take a 30% cut, which while I still think is excessive is a helluva lot better than the 95+% a record label will take. The only hold the record labels still have is on radio, which is declining in popularity. The record labels are this generation's buggy whip manufacturers - don't chain yourself to them. The Internet removed one of the biggest impediments to publicizing virtual media like music - production and distribution. Take advantage of it if you're an aspiring musician (or video producer).

autotune

[Anonymous Coward]

All hail to autotune!

Is there anymore "famous" performers, that do not use autotune and are heavily promoted by the music industry?

More Proof the Music Industry is Fake
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qLRoqDqoXek

Re:autotune

[TWX]

Probably none who achieved their initial popularity in the last twenty years. There are probably performers who rose to prominence before it was commonplace that still don't use it, but there probably even large numbers from that generation that have started using it as their voices have aged and their vocal control isn't what it once was.

That said, what I have heard of Lorde, which is probably only two or three songs, doesn't sound especially overproduced, but I don't know if they've tweaked anything to take it from great to outstanding or not.

Re:autotune

[Anonymous Coward]

Someone isn't a fan of South Park.

Betteridge

[Anonymous Coward]

Especially on this medium article, see Betteridge's Law.

Re:Betteridge

[Anonymous Coward]

You totally forgot your mandatory XKCD seasoned with an anecdote about how you have experienced about the issue.

Music has been about tech for decades

[thogard]

Most popular music was a result in changes in technology that allowed for new sounds. Elvis and The Beetles couldn't have made their sound a decade before due to differences in the technology of microphones, recording and playback equipment. The same is true for many of the groups that produced top hits and most major groups in the last 9 decades had a tehcnological edge over the music they replaced.

Re:Music has been about tech for decades

[geekmux]

Most popular music was a result in changes in technology that allowed for new sounds. Elvis and The Beetles couldn't have made their sound a decade before due to differences in the technology of microphones, recording and playback equipment. The same is true for many of the groups that produced top hits and most major groups in the last 9 decades had a tehcnological edge over the music they replaced.

So, this generation of "music" makers, armed with the best Autotune sound mixers and Photoshop artists, along with the algorithms that prove what RPM will drive the most money out of a background bass track, is proving exactly what today? That technology can replace the artist?

Seriously, where do we go from here? How long before the musical overlords simply ask the computer to calculate the next beat and vocal pitch based on revenue?

Enjoy technology. Don't worry though, hologram Elvis will be touring soon, and he'll sound better than he ever could while sporting six-pack abs.

Re:Music has been about tech for decades

[sound vision]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...

This type of thing has been investigated going back to at least the 1970s, although at that time they were doing things like shuffling cards with phrases written on them instead of using a software random number generator to pick which elements end up in the composition. It seems to be easier to apply these techniques to ambient music, like was done with the music in Spore, than to pop music, at least currently. Though there do appear to be more examples than I'm familiar with, based on this article.

Re:Music has been about tech for decades

[Anonymous Coward]

I for one am rather interested about this new Elvis you are talking about.

Re:Music has been about tech for decades

[Hognoxious]

The Beetles

Did you mean The Roches?

Re:Music has been about tech for decades

[king neckbeard]

Typically, music is measured in BPM, not RPM.

Re:Music has been about tech for decades

[gstoddart]

That technology can replace the artist?

Technology won't replace the actual artists, just the hacks and copycats. The artists are the ones doing new and interesting things with the technology, instead of just cranking out clones of successful things.

Seriously, where do we go from here? How long before the musical overlords simply ask the computer to calculate the next beat and vocal pitch based on revenue?

I doubt it.

It seems like when people try to understand the "key factors which make a successful song/movie/book", and then try to apply it, you end up with some soulless terrible thing which everybody hates.

Stuff designed by committee to resemble something which was successful is usually dreck, and people can tell.

There will always be artists who have their own style and do their own new and cool things. The ones focusing on making "Fast Pop Song #5", or "Heartfelt Boyband Song #2" ... well, that's their problem.

And, honestly, if they produce based on ad revenue, they deserve what they get. As an active buyer of CDs, I don't find music through ads, I don't consume it in a medium which allows them a glimpse of how and when I play it.

I can say with 100% certainty not a single person has ever received a penny from ad revenue from me listening to music. And they never will.

All I know somewhere there is a computer system which records CD sales which sees the stuff I buy at the same time and says "don't know how to quantify that bizarre cross section", and then the music industry doesn't get a damned thing ever again. Not ad revenue, not analytics, not anything.

Re:Music has been about tech for decades

[geekmux]

Typically, music is measured in BPM, not RPM.

True, unless you were more referring to the 45RPM and 78RPM records that were spun at such a rate as to limit the amount of recording time on them..

Already has

[GrahamCox]

The "sound" of a badly encoded MP3 is already influencing the way people sing - it's almost as if they think those artefacts and unwanted harmonics are something that makes a voice a good singing voice, because that's what they hear when someone holds a long or high note. Bloody hateful.

Re:Already has

[geekmux]

The "sound" of a badly encoded MP3 is already influencing the way people sing - it's almost as if they think those artefacts and unwanted harmonics are something that makes a voice a good singing voice, because that's what they hear when someone holds a long or high note. Bloody hateful.

Yeah.

It would be a shame to allow shitty encoding to ruin the beautiful sounds of an Autotuned voice.

Re:Already has

[AmiMoJo]

That's more a result of auto-tune and the loudness war. Actually this whole thing started in the late 80s, with 1990 being about the tipping point.

Before 1990 people tended to write lyrics and then set them to music. The music was built around what the vocalist could sing, because clearly the lead can only make one sound at a time and has to breathe from time to time. Then sampling became popular and people started to sample and layer up vocals, stitching them together in a way that no vocalist could repeat in real life, and applying effects to them.

People who sing will be familiar with this, especially if they do a lot of covers of popular songs (e.g. karaoke). A lot of post 1990 stuff is very hard to do live, if not impossible.

Later we got auto-tune. That lets people do ridiculous things with their voices, because they can hit notes effortlessly and it becomes more like playing an instrument than actually singing. Add the loudness war in and you get lots of distortion and ringing added into the vocal mix. Real time effects are standard too.

Re:Already has

[Anonymous Coward]

William Gibson talks about this kind of thing in No Maps.
"We no longer find it extraordinary that we can hear the voices of the dead whenever we wish to."

Re:Already has

[MrKaos]

A lot of post 1990 stuff is very hard to do live, if not impossible.

Later we got auto-tune. That lets people do ridiculous things with their voices, because they can hit notes effortlessly and it becomes more like playing an instrument than actually singing. Add the loudness war in and you get lots of distortion and ringing added into the vocal mix. Real time effects are standard too.

Some great points - which '90's music do you mean?

I'm the lead vocalist in a band and we just recorded an album. I can't stand auto tunas personally and forbid them in the studio - even for back-up singers. Everyone has to be physically fit and my mates tell me I can sing high enough to sound like a chick - if I want to. We have used technology to drive the recording process pretty hard to achieve dynamic range in the recordings for precisely the reasons you cite. I'm so happy people are starting to realize it!!!

Technology has changed the way we record songs because all of the restrictions you had are gone. Our song structure is completely free and we do anything from jazz an pop to blistering heavy metal simply because we can. Having said that we push musically to the creative limits because the technology is stable enough to perform reliably enough for us to take those risks and reproduce it live on instruments.

I don't know if that means if the song structure has changed because of technology or if it means we can finally do what we want musically because the technology can keep up with the structures we want to make. I think it's natural for music to change and now that there is enough CPU time to support it our plans become more ambitious.

Re:Already has

[sound vision]

I wouldn't say technology has made music un-singable. Yeah, there are some tracks out there with vocals layered using a sampler. But you've had layered vocals since the dawn of time in the form of duets and harmony singing in larger groups. Effects like chorus and reverb can be pretty much ignored when singing - lots of them are just used to replicate the sound of a particular physical environment. Even autotune is mostly used to correct singers who can't hold a specific pitch, not to extend their vocal range or otherwise make it something that can't be sung. Complaining that you can't make the sound coming out of your mouth sound identical to what you hear on a record is a bit of a ridiculous comparison... it's a bit like saying you can't sing Yesterday unless your voicebox is an exact 1:1 mold of Paul McCartney's.

Re:Already has

[drinkypoo]

Even autotune is mostly used to correct singers who can't hold a specific pitch, not to extend their vocal range or otherwise make it something that can't be sung.

Correcting a singer who can't hold a specific pitch is expanding their vocal range! Maybe from zero to something, but still.

Re:Already has

[AmiMoJo]

What I mean is that, for example, often one line ends and the next begins too fast for any normal person to breathe. Rap has some extreme examples of this. I recall a live performance by Eminem a few years ago where he sang most of each line but then had someone else cover the last couple of words so that he could get enough oxygen for the next line.

There is a lot of other marginal stuff that can be sung but you need to re-arrange the music a fair bit for it to sound good. That's one of the reasons why karaoke versions are often re-arranged rather than the original version. When the original is available it is usually an older pre-1990 song.

Re:Already has

[MrKaos]

Even autotune is mostly used to correct singers who can't hold a specific pitch, not to extend their vocal range or otherwise make it something that can't be sung.

Correcting a singer who can't hold a specific pitch is expanding their vocal range! Maybe from zero to something, but still.

What about in a live setting if the singer is tired or sick and needs help delivering a 'usual' performance as opposed to trying to record a performance that just isn't there? Isn't that what they were made for initially?

Re:Already has

[MrKaos]

What I mean is that, for example, often one line ends and the next begins too fast for any normal person to breathe. Rap has some extreme examples of this. I recall a live performance by Eminem a few years ago where he sang most of each line but then had someone else cover the last couple of words so that he could get enough oxygen for the next line.

Maybe the guy was too out of shape to produce a performance? I remember seeing System of a Down not so long ago, when I thought it was dubious they could deliver however they delivered a massive unstoppable two hour set. There is no way a person can deliver those performances if they aren't at the top of their game physically and mentally.

Re:Already has

[Hognoxious]

Autotune can only do so much.

UK readers may have seen an episode of The One Show about it, they just couldn't get Adrian Chiles to sound right.

Re:Already has

[drinkypoo]

What about in a live setting if the singer is tired or sick and needs help delivering a 'usual' performance as opposed to trying to record a performance that just isn't there? Isn't that what they were made for initially?

Yes. That's the idea. Still true, though. Vocal range can change from day to day.

Re:Already has

[fermion]

Rock and roll came out the ability to overdrive amplifiers, electrical then electronic.

The crooning typical of music prior to that came about through the ability of microphones to pick up nuances in tone. Prior to this it was just a bunch of guys playing and singing as loudly as they could to try to get the sound recorded on wax.

The last major fight over the structure of music was 30 years ago when everyone was fighting over the right to sample. This, by and large, was due to the fact that for the first time we had a large archive of high quality recording, and the the technology to mix old and new to create a significantly different product.

I suspect that this revolution will be similar. The structure of music has changed. It has gone from an album format, in which most consumers buy and listen to a compilations of songs, to an a la carte format where listeners buy, or more often just stream, a selected song. This has minimized the importance of creating a cohesive album. While every album had one or two radio songs released as singles, most artists tried to make it part of a whole.

In the future I think software will make it possible to string parts of songs together to make something like a dance mix. Some radio DJS used to do this before it was all computer controlled. So like the album losing it status as the definitive unit, the song will also be a legacy concept, artist getting paid royalties only if a part of the song can be structured to fit in a longer musical composition.

Re:Already has

[Critical Facilities]

Autotune can only do so much.

Actually, you'd be amazed at what some of the modern vocal effects can do, especially with a well trained engineer/producer. Antares , for example, can do everything from change the pitch/time, to alter the vocal characteristics of the track using things like "throat modeling". They can generate harmonies complete with tiny imperfections to make it sound more "human", They can make a voice have more "rasp" or "smokiness", so when you hear guys screaming (think Chris Cornell) and you think "how can they do that without their voice getting sore?", the answer is, they're not. Those are the effects at work.

Now don't get me wrong, I am not against the use of vocal effects. I look at them the same way I look at guitar effects. If you layer a guitar with enough delay, chorus, compression, tube distortion, tape saturation, EQ, and maybe some octave effects, even a rudimentary player is going to sound pretty killer. They're not going to stand up to a virtuoso like Al DiMeola or Steve Vai. Same goes for vocalists. Sure, you can find someone of marginal talent and make them sound good with effects, but they're never going to touch really capable, trained singers.

Re:Already has

[tlhIngan]

The "sound" of a badly encoded MP3 is already influencing the way people sing - it's almost as if they think those artefacts and unwanted harmonics are something that makes a voice a good singing voice, because that's what they hear when someone holds a long or high note. Bloody hateful.

The other scary thing is, if you played back the MP3 and the original lossless source material, you'll find the new crowd prefers the lossy encoded one.

I'm not saying using LAME on 256+VBR, but crappy encoded 128kbps stuff where there are audible differences.

Listening to poorly encoded music in poor listening environments has changed the preferences of the music. Even the recording engineers now have to optimize their music for the lossy encodes with reduced dynamic range and pre-echo distortion.

There's still a few who go by the "if it's clean going in, it'll be the cleanest it can be coming out", while others are realizing that they need to adjust their mixers to sound better.

Re:Already has

[AK Marc]

I love the loudness war. Especially the result on VHS. DVD/Blu-Ray sucks because the dynamic range is so high.

When I watch a movie at home, to turn it up to be able to hear the dialogue whispers, the "loud" parts disturb the neighbors. When "loudness wars" come in, the volume difference between a whisper and an explosion are smaller. Less "realistic", but far more practical.

Re:Already has

[Hognoxious]

If you layer a guitar with enough delay, chorus, compression, tube distortion, tape saturation, EQ, and maybe some octave effects, even a rudimentary player is going to sound pretty killer.

Rubbish. I can strum about three chords from memory and six if I study them before playing.

The only way you could make me sound like Clapton, Page or Blackmore would be to erase all my shit and record them over the top.

Re:Already has

[MrKaos]

How ironic that my other career is flamebait as far as slashdot is concerned. Looks like there are a lot of trolls out there in slashdot land.

Technology isn't killing music

[CeasedCaring]

That's Simon Cowell's job.

Re:Technology isn't killing music

[Hognoxious]

Needs a bit more Cowell!

Hang on...

Re:Technology isn't killing music

[Anonymous Coward]

I've got a fever.

The only cure is more Cowell.

don't forget

[Anonymous Coward]

And don't forget that technology is a now a central part of how such music is created

Thank you for the reminder! I did nearly forget!

Re:don't forget

[Chrisq]

And don't forget that technology is a now a central part of how such music is created

Thank you for the reminder! I did nearly forget!

Its been that way since our distant ancestors found that banging a stick on a log was a great enhancement to just wailing

Why would anyone bother listening to radio music

[future assassin]

these days when there is more free and independent music on the internet. When I found http://www.ektoplazm.com/ I was lost in there for week discovering tons of free EM. Yes not everyone cup of tea but its like shopping for cd to discover new artists except you get to hear the music first and not waste your money.

Re:Why would anyone bother listening to radio musi

[Anonymous Coward]

it's the coded subliminals which 'hook' the listener of popular music to continue to 'receive instructions' and listen to the same songs, mostly so you become used to them and eventually enjoy them if you hadn't at first.

one master release with alien/human hybrid and/or alien subliminals and many stations and many ears and many minds = they gotcha!

if you watch the idiot box you'll see the same shitty bands repeated and repeated until you give in and listen. it's like politics, two sides, one team, no choice.

Albums

[redback]

We might see the concept of an album die out. in the digital world its just as easy to release a song a month as it is an album a year.

Re:Albums

[sound vision]

Albums might become less important commercially, as far as many people will be buying individual tracks, not a whole CD. But when you look at what was released all throughout the CD era (and before), most albums were already just collections of standalone songs. The Pink-Floydian concept album was always the exception, not the norm. The norm was taking a half dozen songs that had in fact already been released as 45 rpm singles, padding them with some filler, and releasing it as an album.

So looking at release schedules, you're probably right, artists might be more inclined to release smaller batches of tracks vs. waiting until they have enough material for an album. But as far as the music they're writing, I don't see that changing. People who cared about putting together an hour-long block of thematically consistent music before, will still care about that now. People who were going to write standalone "singles" will continue to do that, too.

Re:Albums

[mjwx]

Albums might become less important commercially, as far as many people will be buying individual tracks, not a whole CD. But when you look at what was released all throughout the CD era (and before), most albums were already just collections of standalone songs. The Pink-Floydian concept album was always the exception, not the norm. The norm was taking a half dozen songs that had in fact already been released as 45 rpm singles, padding them with some filler, and releasing it as an album.

Whilst this is true for a lot manufactured pop, with forms of music that had the artist sing and play as well as write different albums have different sounds. The Colour and the Shape from the Foo Fighters sounds very different from Nothing Left to Lose and the albums were only separated by 2 years and this is very different from Sonic Highways (their latest album).

So yeah, someone who has their music written for them and autotuned will benefit from releasing songs on a staggered timetable, but bands who tour will still need to make whole albums and not just because they only get a few months of studio time between tours.

I'm confused.

[d'baba]

When did it not?

Re:I'm confused.

[Assistansersttning]

I wonder the same?

Re:I'm confused.

[Anonymous Coward]

Me too?

Re:I'm confused.

[Anonymous Coward]

I find that I prefer to listen to longer versions of songs when they are available. Now that 3 minutes doesn't have to be the limit.

Wow.

[Anonymous Coward]

Sorry, couldn't hear you over the whoooooosh.

(Apparently needed explanation: those are ALL groups from the 60s, 70s, 80s, 90s, 00s and today that were initially manufactured/assembled by industry music producers)

Learn Something Very Old

[Anonymous Coward]

I dislike these medium.com articles as much as anybody, but there is a whopper of an Easter Egg in it.
It's that picture at the top- bits of a Score written in some kind of Latin. (There are many kinds...)

This comes from the commissioned, by Cardinal Ascanio Sforza, work of one Florentius de Faxolis, a 15th century Priest and Musical Scholar.
He had written a work on Music Theory for the Cardinal, on what makes _Good_ _Music_.
I once read some of the Book, at Berkeley. It emphasized short pieces, repetition, and simple melodies. (I had to have my God-Daughter translate some of the more obscure parts. The Latin in the commentary was difficult.)

It was written in Manuscript form; the only widely distributed printed edition is only five years old.
http://www.hup.harvard.edu/catalog.php?isbn=9780674049437

How relevant is this

[Chrisq]

I here that for most artists the revenue is in live playing now and the media sales is mainly to attract interest. Obviously it is different for the few top-end artists but most will carry on writing music for live gigs.

One Word

[Anonymous Coward]

MilliVanilli

Also known as Boney-M

there is no incentivize

[Anonymous Coward]

It's a made-up word. The real word is motivate, as in, "You can motivate people by giving them an incentive."

Re:there is no incentivize

[gnupun]

http://www.merriam-webster.com...

First Known Use of INCENTIVIZE
1970

Originality

[Livius]

Disruption would require innovation; I don't expect we'll see any of that from the music industry in the foreseeable future.

fuck you aliens and alien/human hybrids! FUCK YOU!

[Anonymous Coward]

stay away from me, you stink!

Instant feedback....

[thegarbz]

Studios will continue to manufacture music but the instant feedback will drive the future trends. Studios will replicate songs that sell the best and slowly build up enough data to know what we like. I predict that this will result in convergence around a single specific melody. Then they can just insert any generic hot girl (or guy, it won't matter at that point) onto the stage and just autotune them to ensure they sing the same song.

Oh and everything is awesome.

Re:Instant feedback....

[gtall]

Oh, you mean like hip-hop.

Don't completely agree with premise.

[Anonymous Coward]

"Virtually everything is different except the structure of the songs we listen to"

If only this was true. The most simple of structures are still used, the three chord trick, or use of the relative minor/major for example. But for the most part modern music is becoming more modal. The kind of complex, key based, music that the Beatles did so well is disappearing and becoming a lost art because it isn't easy, it requires real musical knowledge, and the computer won't do it for you.

And what about the meaning of lyrics? How many people actually know what American Pie is about? Can anyone point to a modern song that has such culture bearing significance? They must exist somewhere but I'm not hearing them, and the rise of independent artists on the internet is not helping as the content is as vapid there as in the mainstream.

Gotta go, damn kids on my lawn again.

Japanese Technology Will Disrupt the Song?

[Anonymous Coward]

> Will Technology Disrupt the Song?

It already does. Google for Vocaloid. It is a singing synthesizer software marketed by Yamaha Music Corp., but made to look like manga girls, mostly. Enter arbitrary lyrics and a fitting melody sheet and she will sing it, quite terribly. Spend a few dozen hours refining her performance by re-entering the lyrics in X-SAMPA notation and do endless tweaking with FFT, etc. Then cover up her unfixable fault spots (bad triphones, etc.) by using vocoder-autotune effect or superhuman speed singing. Add a background video to match the song (bonus points if it looks like anime).

Upload the result to Nico-Nico-Douga (~ youtube.co.jp) and you may have a few hundred thousand followers. If the song is very good the teenager hologram starlet Hatsune Miku will sing it on live stage, with live band and you'll earn nice money and fans will call you Producer-sensei.

Now there is also a capable, english-singing 4th generation Vocaloid called "Yamaha Cyber Diva". She has native california girl accent and looks like a younger age Gaga. It (she?) costs about 150 USD boxed.

Re:Japanese Technology Will Disrupt the Song?

[xSander]

My first thought was this too. At least the character doesn't necessarily have to age and when she doesn't turn up or late at a concert, you can always blame Windows.

Re:Japanese Technology Will Disrupt the Song?

[jsepeta]

My teenaged daughter mostly plays vocaloid songs on our long, long car rides. Yamaha owns the vocaloid technology
http://www.yamaha.com/about_ya...

They even made a keyboard synthesizer only available in Japan that's specific to producing vocaloid music.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?...

Re:Japanese Technology Will Disrupt the Song?

[Anonymous Coward]

> My teenaged daughter mostly plays vocaloid songs on our long, long car rides.

Buy her a penny-farthing, so she doesn't need to conscript you for rides. (She can decipher this.)

> Yamaha owns the vocaloid technology

They do, but the story is a bit more complicated.

The theory behind V. technology was invented in 1989 by a spanish guy while working on PhD in a US univ. lab. At that time civilian HW was not strong enough to allow implementing it for non-regular orthographic property languages (english and most others), so he returned to Catalonia, Spain. There he met a visiting prof. from Japan, who was also into computerized music. The prof had personal connections with Yamaha Corp. and was able to secure a big grant in exchange for IP rights, which allowed a lab to be set up at Pompeu Fabra Univ., Barcelona. (Co-incidentally both spanish and japanese are ~ perfect orthographic type languages, i.e. written and spoken words are 1-on-1 related, even if the grammar rules are complex.)

By the late 1990s, Vocaloid engine gen1 was ready, but using it was a very complex task and few skilled singers would volunteer as donors for the atomic sound sample set. Of that generation, only the Kaito Shion voicebank (avatar) remains significant today, voiced by a pro jazz-singer.

Vocaloid engine gen2 was redesigned to produce more emotional and cute voices more easily, but sacrificing quality and pro features. Also, V2 voice providers came from the japanese anime voice actor ecosystem, they weren't trained and talented singers. Yamaha Corp. was ashamed of the end result and didn't want to touch it with a pole, so marketing and further development was carted off to some smallish electronic music merchants, most notably Crypton Future Media in snowy Sapporo, Hokkaido (a place at the end of the world, as far as Japan is concerned).

CFM then marketed CV01 Hatsune Miku (voice of Ms. Saki Fujita) and the japanese Vocaloid market instantly skyrocketed. Nowadays Sapporo overflows with her teal / turqoise color scheme for much of the winter and the traditional snow festival became more like Snow Miku Festival. She's an electric angel already worth over a billion dollar per year in merchandise, adv. etc.

Mellow greetings, citizen

[drinkypoo]

What seems to be your boggle?

Because radio isn't just about music

[Viol8]

Its about the DJ banter, weather & traffic news etc. If I wanted to listen to wall to wall music I'd put my collection on, but sometimes its nice to hear a live human voice between the tracks and to be surprised by a track I'd probably never have streamed or downloaded myself.

Re:Because radio isn't just about music

[Anonymous Coward]

I don't know about where you live, but around where I live clear channel controls all. You will never discover new music on the radio, since they will only play that which is charting.

Re:Because radio isn't just about music

[Anonymous Coward]

Both AM and FM radio are dead to me. With two parts of one giant shadow corporation owning 99.99% of all radio stations, TV stations, and newspapers, there is nothing original any more. AM radio is wall-to-wall Rush Limbaugh clones spewing their garbage over the airwaves. The same garbage on every station at the same time. FM radio is no better. The same songs, news, and commercials on every station all synchronized to within 10 seconds of each other.

The few stations not owned by this giant shadow corporations are not profitable enough to be bought. And they are the only ones still worth listening to. A very sad state of affairs indeed.

Re:Because radio isn't just about music

[gstoddart]

Its about the DJ banter, weather & traffic news etc.

Really? Because I think DJ banter is one of the most annoying things you could possibly hear on the radio.

Other than hearing the same song 5 times in a day every time I find myself in a car (this actually happened on my last vacation).

It was like "why the hell is it that every time I start this car that song is playing on the radio?" I had to find a new radio station.

and to be surprised by a track I'd probably never have streamed or downloaded myself

LOL, I used to know someone who kept his radio on at his desk while he worked ... and then he started being able to tell what part of the hour they were in based on which songs were in rotation. Because it seemed like the same song would play at the same time every day, until it was replaced with a new song, to play at the same time every day.

Many many radio stations really only seem to play the same 10-15 songs, and randomly throw in something novel for "variety".

Maybe I'm unusual in that sense(*), but I despise radio DJs.

(*) The other ways I'm unusual are mostly irrelevant to radio DJs.

The only change I see is the legal tactics

[Anonymous Coward]

used to try to control the $ associated with music, which naturally means controlling and extending copyright as much as possible.

Music is music and not something else because of the way human brains are wired. Until that changes, noise will remain noise.

Create your own song adventure

[paiute]

For some reason this makes me think of the trend in the early 90s of people creating hyperfiction, where the reader could pick the direction of the plot at certain points. That never appealed to me. Fiction should be about surprising the reader, not letting them control the narrative.

In the same way, I always like hearing a song which takes an unanticipated turn.

Pfff already been done

[Anonymous Coward]

You guys seriously don't remember MS Songsmith?

yes

[Anonymous Coward]

I think technology will continue to become more immersive, and more able to make contextual decisions for us, to the point where we are able to create fully expressive music modulated by our controlled emotional impulses as part of everyday normal communication. What we think of today as musical artists will seem as anachronistic as the first astronauts.

It depends

[sys64764]

Depends if your player skips due to lack of bandwidth?

already has

[Anonymous Coward]

Frampton was doing fine until that voice thing came up and ruined everything for the whole 12 minutes.

now get off my lawn!

Optimized to sound good at low kbps

[Anonymous Coward]

Quite sure I read it here a few years ago; some songs are carefully engineered to still sound reasonably good at low bitrates.

Thanks to advances in technology, I no longer listen to radio. Now I subscribe to podcasts to learn of new releases in my genres of choice, none of which you'd ever hear on the radio anyway.

Also, rather enjoying the fact there's no talking other than announcing the tracks, and no advertising :D

Ex-Yahoo Jay Frank saw this coming in 2009

[ZipK]

Jay Frank's Futurehit.DNA made many of these same observations six years ago.

Interview with John Hiatt in 2000

[Anonymous Coward]

From an interview with John Hiatt in 2000 about Music on the internet and then Napster

"Is it going to be good for the artist?

Absolutely. How could it not be? How could another avenue of being able to get yourself heard not be a good thing? The traditional avenues have gotten so corporatized — it’s going to be one big major label when they’re all done eating each other. And then there’s one or two conglomerates that own all the radio stations, so you have to sound a certain way to make that work. When things get so constricted like that, other arteries have to open up. And that’s what’s happening, I think. The industry’s needing a triple bypass. [Laughs] And the Web’s giving it to ‘em."

http://www.salon.com/2000/09/25/hiatt_4/

Now the internet has become corporatized.

Music Industry Exists because of Technology

[MatthiasF]

The current model for the music industry based on recorded media exists literally because of technology. Before recorded music, music artists did not make much money at all without a wealthy patron and today they make massive amounts of money (literally becoming wealthy patrons).

The industry itself needs to realize that the era of printed media recordings (LPs, tape, CDs) is over and those record profits will never happen again. The era of digital purchases was also brief and now we're moving into the era of streaming music.

Each time, consumers have followed the trend into the method that gives them the most for their money and there is absolutely nothing wrong with that. The industry as a whole needs to adapt, again, and stop bitching about the fact consumers don't want to pay tons of money for music.

Re:Music Industry Exists because of Technology

[Anonymous Coward]

This argument should (and does) apply to the Big Oil industry as well. Reluctant to use their billions of dollars to embrace changing markets and instead using those billions of dollars to pay lobbyists to keep the status quo. Ignoring the problem makes it go away, right?

Auto generate

[AndyKron]

I think for most people, computer generated background music will be enough. The people who walk around all day with ears buds are so clueless to begin with they'll never know the difference.

Yes, yes it will.

[Anonymous Coward]

But it will only matter to people who listen to pop. And since pop hasn't been actual music for the last several decades, I'd be surprised if anyone noticed.

solution: product placement

[jsepeta]

Hey Coke & Walmart? I'll name drop your company into my next hip-hop song, guaranteeing tens of listeners.

Blasting my ears

[endus]

What amazes me is that the more technology and information we get, the more the music seems to become harsh and random to listen to. All the pop music that has flowed down from dubstep is so jarring...just random ear-raping sounds firing at the listener. This is to say nothing of lyrics which seem to be getting more and more repetitive and less and less creative/sonically flowing.

I'm not saying this to necessarily criticize pop as being simple and vapid, which has been the case since pop has existed and is totally understandable/fine, but just from a sonic perspective popular music just seems...I guess, "not what I would expect people to find appealing to listen to" is what I mean.

Popular rap would be a good example - it used to be about finding creative ways of saying something...that was the whole joy of it. You could talk about having money or cars or partying, but you would flip it in a unique way and with a unique flow. Now popular rap is becoming so unbelievably basic. It's not the subject that's changed, but the way of communicating it has just gotten so incredibly stripped down.

Re:Blasting my ears

[mjwx]

What amazes me is that the more technology and information we get, the more the music seems to become harsh and random to listen to. All the pop music that has flowed down from dubstep is so jarring...just random ear-raping sounds firing at the listener. This is to say nothing of lyrics which seem to be getting more and more repetitive and less and less creative/sonically flowing.

The industry loves things like Dubstep because it can be produced on a computer and the "artist" (using this term very loosely) is just an actor and can be replaced if need be. Not that the art of replacing band members in pop groups is a new concept either. Their ultimate goal is to replace the human component forever, that way they dont have to pay them their 10%, beyond this people tend to have opinions that aren't popular, develop drug habits, get old/ugly. Virtual pop stars are the wet dream of the music industry.

Back to sound quality, I've noticed this too, even with voices they seem to be altered to just beyond the range of what the human voice is capable of. My theory always has been that this is done to make the track sound louder and more noticeable (modern music seems more about annoying you into listening/remembering than enticing you) but someone else in this thread pointed out that people have grown used to listening to poorly encoded MP3's and this also makes a lot of sense, people are starting to think that the artefacts you get in bad MP3 files are normal. Add to that the fact that people have also grown used to using poor quality playback devices to listen to their poorly encoded music.

Re:Blasting my ears

[endus]

That's a great point about sound quality, actually, I think you're on to something there. Some of the harsher music gets tamed by poor quality playback equipment and encoding. The listener loses a lot of the dynamic aspects of the music, so add tons of compression and nuclear-computer-tones to overcome those limitations. People who listen with better setups have their ears melted off, but it doesn't sound too terrible on what 99% of people are listening to it on.

On the one hand...

[whitroth]

it won't, because the studios have always wanted assembly-line music, with musicians being interchangeable and replaceable, like parts in your car., and they've worked long and hard for that. (Such as the singers for Tin Pan Alley, and many of the groups that got played on American Bandstand)(They screwed up, early on, with the Monkees, who were actually real musicians....)

On the other hand, if someone goes viral, they will attempt to buy them, or create a cheaper clone, and will water down what they sing and how they sing it.

Still, there's more music out there, including more than they know about.

                    mark

new technology

[jjbenz]

Auto Tune needs to die violently.

DJs valued long-playing poop tunes

[Anonymous Coward]

>Time is 100% relevant to this discussion.

The looooooong versions of Love to Love You Baby (a whole album side?) and Stairway to Heaven were blessings to DJs needing to step out in the era before computer assisted operation.

Some albums have tracks that flow together like one long adventure, but they didn't get played that way on the radio. I vaguely recall some licensing restriction that normally prevents (or prevented? this was some time ago) playing whole album/disc sides, or too much of an album within some time window. It was to discourage people from making off-air album copies to cassette. Of course the heavy processing generally seen in broadcasting kills the dynamics. Besides it being easy to set levels when the meters constantly peak at one spot, the only good thing that could be said about that dense/loud audio is that it masks tape hiss well. If there had been a tracking expander to undo the processing it all would have made a very effective noise reduction system.