Slashdot Mirror
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.
No. No it won't.
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.
Corporations will continue to make boatloads of money, artists will continue to sell their work for a song.
Don't waste your vote! Vote for whoever you want, unless you live in a swing state it won't matter anyways
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.
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.
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.
Do not look into laser with remaining eye.
That's Simon Cowell's job.
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
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.
by TheSpoom (715771) Uncaring Linux user here. I have nothing to add to this but please continue. *munches popcorn*
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.
When did it not?
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
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.
Disruption would require innovation; I don't expect we'll see any of that from the music industry in the foreseeable future.
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.
What seems to be your boggle?
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
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.
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.
If Slashdot were chemistry it would look like this:Cadaverine
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.
http://www.merriam-webster.com...
First Known Use of INCENTIVIZE
1970
Depends if your player skips due to lack of bandwidth?
Jay Frank's Futurehit.DNA made many of these same observations six years ago.
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.
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.
Hey Coke & Walmart? I'll name drop your company into my next hip-hop song, guaranteeing tens of listeners.
Remember kids, if you're not paying for the service, YOU ARE THE PRODUCT THAT IS BEING SOLD.
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?...
Remember kids, if you're not paying for the service, YOU ARE THE PRODUCT THAT IS BEING SOLD.
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.
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
Auto Tune needs to die violently.