May 31, 2024 09:16 PM
(This post was last modified: Jun 1, 2024 04:06 PM by C C.)
RELATED (scivillage): The music industry is dead: Here's how musicians survive today (Where music creativity and experimentation could still be taking place outside the sterile pop music complex.)
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The real reason pop music 'sucks' today, which no one tells you
https://youtu.be/ekNGVggJ4vQ
INTRO:The New York Times recently compared the Beatles and Taylor Swift, looking at number of Billboard hits, impact etc. But I think they missed the key difference. And that has something to do with a little movie called Moneyball. And it may just explain why modern popular music sucks, as Rick Beato keeps lamenting.
VIDEO EXCERPTS: So say 40 or 50 years ago you could only measure the sales of a particular record. You could ask the band to creatively experiment, you could have the same person who is writing songs to sing the songs, and it was not hyper-specialized.
But today everything has been measured. This is what you need to do, this is the person who has a track record of creating hit singles, this is the best person for the instruments that you need, etc.
Today you have the ability to hyper-specialize, hyper-optimize for everything towards the end goal of maximizing revenue. Earlier (40 or 50 years ago) you were also trying to maximize revenue, but you weren't as good at it. The precise numbers weren't there, the big data for every detail of the production process wasn't there, the formulas weren't there.
Now that the company is so good at maximizing revenue, there is certainly not that much space for the music or the creative venture -- the luxury to experiment.
Think about what happened in the movie industry over the last 20 years. It was the superhero franchise. It was goodness knows 25,000 variations of it. Remake, remake. This was all algorithm, revenue maximizing, data crunching in action.
So if you think that the music industry today or popular music today is rather uniform -- that it is rather bland and formulaic -- that is true, it is.
It's what the data and all the number crunching is telling the music executives to do. You are trying to maximize revenue and profit. Find a way to optimize the product by paying less money for the product, spending less money on developing the product. Say, for example, using AI instead of real musicians for most of the recording session...
The real reason pop music 'sucks' today, which no one tells you
https://www.youtube-nocookie.com/embed/ekNGVggJ4vQ
- - - - - - - - - - - -
The real reason pop music 'sucks' today, which no one tells you
https://youtu.be/ekNGVggJ4vQ
INTRO:The New York Times recently compared the Beatles and Taylor Swift, looking at number of Billboard hits, impact etc. But I think they missed the key difference. And that has something to do with a little movie called Moneyball. And it may just explain why modern popular music sucks, as Rick Beato keeps lamenting.
VIDEO EXCERPTS: So say 40 or 50 years ago you could only measure the sales of a particular record. You could ask the band to creatively experiment, you could have the same person who is writing songs to sing the songs, and it was not hyper-specialized.
But today everything has been measured. This is what you need to do, this is the person who has a track record of creating hit singles, this is the best person for the instruments that you need, etc.
Today you have the ability to hyper-specialize, hyper-optimize for everything towards the end goal of maximizing revenue. Earlier (40 or 50 years ago) you were also trying to maximize revenue, but you weren't as good at it. The precise numbers weren't there, the big data for every detail of the production process wasn't there, the formulas weren't there.
Now that the company is so good at maximizing revenue, there is certainly not that much space for the music or the creative venture -- the luxury to experiment.
Think about what happened in the movie industry over the last 20 years. It was the superhero franchise. It was goodness knows 25,000 variations of it. Remake, remake. This was all algorithm, revenue maximizing, data crunching in action.
So if you think that the music industry today or popular music today is rather uniform -- that it is rather bland and formulaic -- that is true, it is.
It's what the data and all the number crunching is telling the music executives to do. You are trying to maximize revenue and profit. Find a way to optimize the product by paying less money for the product, spending less money on developing the product. Say, for example, using AI instead of real musicians for most of the recording session...
The real reason pop music 'sucks' today, which no one tells you
