Isn't the problem the lack of gatekeepers? There are tons of new stars the problem is they're becoming social media stars first and pop music stars second. The people who would have used music as their ticket to fame and fortune are using Tik Tok/Youtube instead. You don't have to sing which is hard, you can just wear a bikini and do some viral dances. Then when you're a star, you put out some half baked terrible pop music to cash in. You share a much smaller percentage of your money with the labels this way.
I would say the lack of gatekeepers is a major benefit.
For the music listener, there now exists music as nieche as possible and platforms like Spotify provide access to it. My music tastes have only gotten more obscure since using streaming.
For wannabe celebrities, they get to have their quanta of fame and everyone uninterested can just ignore that.
For musicians, they are no longer forced into contracts that force them to give up control entirely. They get to keep a far larger share of the revenue from what they create.
No matter how much RIAA and MPAA are struggling to keep middlemen relevant, the world is slowly marching towards getting rid of middlemen in publishing music, video and literature.
Isn't TikTok a middleman? The main whinge of the article was that whatever you do it's got to go viral on TikTok or it sinks without trace.
Personally I think the music industry is missing the point. Music has become universal - we carry it everywhere and the scarcity that used to drive music sales from the physical production of product is gone and the old mechanisms of driving "hits" went with it. They can't just churn out 100 clones of whatever is hot anymore and hope that the video, featuring some greased up pop starlet in a bikini, is going to save them.
I think that is wonderful myself. There has never been a better time to enjoy music and killing the old publishing system is helping that, not hurting it.
I watched the Creedence Clearwater Revival (most successful band in the world in 1969) documentary on Netflix, and it's striking how "uncool" they seem, especially John Fogerty. It's not surprising that savant-like weirdos would create better music that social media influencers.
They gotta make some movie where JAY-Z or another rapper beams back in time to stop autotune.
The music industry traces the beginning of its problems to Napster but that was also the time that autotune started to become ubiquitous. The industry doesn't want to hear it, because autotune speeds up production, but autotuned music washes over people without making any impression. You can put it on the radio or on a playlist but from the viewpoint of people engaging it you might as well mute the volume completely.
This is a real weird take. Auto tuned songs have been wildly successful in the past, and continues to be. When it's used subtly, it's nearly undetectable and the average listener would never notice. When it's used aggressively it's a stylistic device, that makes a voice into something totally different. So it's not really even a corrective tool.
People listen to and love autotuned music every day.
Furthermore- auto tuned is not even really ubiquitous. Plenty of artists either keep their vocals unturned or only use manual pitch correction.
I don't mind autotune as an artistic effect. I'm not against Daft Punk. But, I can't stand to listen to very much rap after M.F. DOOM because it has all been infected by T-Pain. Personally I can hear the effect that "subtle" autotuning has and I don't like it.
The fact is that "wildly successful" today is against a background of reduced expectations. Thriller sold 70 million copies, Bat out of Hell (somehow) sold 43 million copies. That's on a different order of magnitude than what seems possible today.
I think part of what makes music interesting to listen to is the subtle imperfections and nonidealities. It hurts to listen to a pure sine wave but FM synthesis adds some richness, as does the three strings on a piano that are just slightly out of tune. Numerous artists that were productive and commercially successful in the 1970s failed to make a transition to the "music word processor" in the 1980s. They kept releasing albums but fans ignored them and will boo if they try to play anything but the old favorites. I think MIDI and the click track are part of the same problem as autotune... "Snap to grid" and a lot of what makes music interesting is just gone.
> I'm not against Daft Punk. But, I can't stand to listen to very much rap after M.F. DOOM because it has all been infected by T-Pain.
Why is overt use of autotune a less valid artistic choice when T-Pain uses it than when Daft Punk uses it?
> Thriller sold 70 million copies, Bat out of Hell (somehow) sold 43 million copies. That's on a different order of magnitude than what seems possible today.
This is mostly due to the monumental changes in the sales model for music since those days. Sales suffered massively at the hands of iTunes and Spotify - there's little correlation with trends in the actual music.
> I think part of what makes music interesting to listen to is the subtle imperfections and nonidealities. I think MIDI and the click track are part of the same problem as autotune... "Snap to grid" and a lot of what makes music interesting is just gone.
There's nothing wrong with feeling that way, but I would be cautious of projecting your preferences onto the rest of the world. I think it's clear that many, many people enjoy music produced in this style.
After all, someone living a century before us could make the exact same arguments decrying recorded music in favor of live performances. Who wants to listen to the same thing over and over again? The subtle variations and imperfections between live performances are what gives music color - do away with them and all we have is a cold, mechanical, unfeeling facsimile of proper music.
This article sounds a lot like major label dinosaurs and middle managers complaining that the business model that worked in the past doesn't work anymore. Can't say I have any tears to cry for them given that model really benefited labels and middle management instead of the musicians.
However, I don't really think that the music industry's woes are because of social media, viral breaks, or whatever they are attributing it to. If they didn't have their heads so far up their own asses it should be obvious to them why they are not breaking new artists. Every song in the top 100 approaches this new monogenre of R&B/trap/electronica that was clearly produced with GarageBand starter packs and autotune.
People who are passionate about music, buy records and merch, and go to concerts are probably more of the type of person who has niche interests and very deep and genuine love for a few artists / genres. They are not the kind of person who listens to the vapid musical fast food that major labels are shitting out.
One of the DJs on satellite (I think it was Mark Goodman) had a great point that even the "old" hit artists are still producing new music.
When was the last time you heard one of those songs?
Rick Beato commented recently that the death of the "record" also caused the death of the single. Many of the top 100 songs weren't released as singles. Yet, they became popular because of proximity.
When was the last time you heard a song, bought the album, and discovered something else good on it?
And, at the bottom, neither TikTok nor the record companies want to create megastars--megastars wind up with leverage. And that's actually anathema to making more money.
As MTV said some 20 years ago: once is not enough, recycle. A lot of the "new" hits are recycled songs. This will get worse with record labels (sic) buying song rights from artists. The quality of music has declined considerably.
Perhaps media feeds and culture in general are less homogenous now, therefore gross popularization of individual pop-cultural artifacts could be seen as objectively less likely.
