As an audiophile it was a headline that certainly captured my attention: “Is Old Music Killing New Music?”. The article in The Atlantic by Ted Gioia popped up on my Facebook feed over the weekend, and I just had to click through.
Remember in the early 2000’s when streaming services and digital download sites started to pop up on the internet? We were told at the time that those websites were going to revolutionize the music industry by “destroying the monopolies of record labels and radio stations that control what we listen to!” Any artist with a computer was going to be able to put out their music for the masses—and people hungry for new and diverse music were going to come rushing toward them.
The only problem is, that didn’t happen. The gist of The Atlantic article is that as more people have started using streaming and download sites, the more they are enjoying the same old music that was popular in the past. It cites reports from music trackers that show 70-percent of all streamed and downloaded music is at least two years old. And that percentage has been growing as subscribers have increased. Rolling Stone magazine had an article a couple of years ago that found 10% of artists account for 90% of the royalties paid by sites like Apple Music, Pandora, and Spotify. (Do those 10 and 90 percentages sound familiar? For some reason I can’t help but hear them in a Bernie Sanders voice.)
Rolling Stone went full socialist to solve what it saw as the inequities of streaming payments: Pay all artists on the site a minimum amount (even if they generate no listens) and give those that actually do have people listening to them just a little bit more. Gioia unironically chooses to turn it back on the people streaming was supposed to destroy, calling for record labels and radio stations to give more promotion and air play to new artists—apparently so that people search them out on streaming services.
The major flaw in these “solutions” is that is comes from a place of recency bias. The underlying assumption that you have to make is that the music being made today is of equal or greater quality than what was made in the past—and therefore demands your attention (and cash). And if you are a fan of musicianship—that is certainly not the case.
Music producer Rick Beato has a series of very popular YouTube videos that break down the process of modern musicmaking. After you watch a couple you realize that the most important “instrument” in music today is the computer mouse. Because it is with the mouse that producers control the programs that are relied upon to create modern songs: Auto Tune and Beat Detective.
Auto Tune is the program that takes a vocal recording and eliminates all of the small (and sometimes large) imperfections. Come in a half-note flat on a couple of words in the chorus? Auto Tune pitches those up perfectly. Your guitarist comes in a half-beat late with the start of the melody line? Beat Detective adjusts that so it comes in right on the beat.
And speaking of beat, don’t bother bringing the drummer to the studio, the computer is loaded up with any time and tempo you need syncopated to the millisecond so the beat is consistent all the way through the track. Probably don’t need a bass player either—those lines are already stored in the computer too—and they can be made as loud and as deep as you want.
So when all of the computer magic is done, the final product sounds exactly like it came out of a computer. As Rick points out, there is no “feel” to modern music, no differences in guitar, drum or vocal parts from verse to verse or chorus to chorus. It’s the same, over and over and over again.
When the Peter Jackson documentary on the Beatles “Get Back” was released late last year it came as a real shock to modern music producers. The idea that a band would come to the studio without finished songs, and would record multiple versions of songs over and over again until they got the sound they liked was a foreign concept. Most pointed out that no one would ever record like that now, because it would cost too much to be in the studio that long. But that is what it took to produce organic music of that quality.
If the Beatles came along today—with the same batch of songs—they would likely end up just like the modern sensation B-T-S, a Korean pop boy band that plays no instruments, spend most of their live shows doing choreographed dance numbers, and whose songs all sound the same. And they would be dispatched to the same heap of tunes that no one who loves “music” would put in their playlist. And the world would be a much poorer place for it.
