thread to track Poptimism 2.0

gauging how my coworkers (mostly extremely normal cubicle-dwelling suburban types) listen to music is illuminating and has really changed over time

the one that makes no sense to me is my coworker who is in his mid 30s and mostly has youtube sitting open with either 90s rock or a handful of newer things streaming on his work computer. somehow, since youtube has some instructional stuff on it, it's not blocked by the work web filter. but it's restricted mode so it's incredibly variable what you can get to. he also likes imagine dragons, I think

https://pudding.cool/2018/05/similarity/

some definite weird categorization is going on in the charts with the prominence of synths in #1 hits -- mainly, uh, a bunch that say "no synth" clearly have synths (mickey, power of love)

but other than that, some good (albeit traditional) observations with data to back it up:

1. pop music is becoming more homogenous

2. the working environment of music production is something that has never been seen before

(2) is one that is really interesting to me. 4+ and sometimes 10+ people working on a song, where one is assigned a snare person, and s/he is in charge of finding the right snare sound; ditto for kick drum person, etc.

laying the framework of a tune, then pumping out songs this way, with your man zedd being the most prominent example

seems a little contradictory at first, but this:

From 2010-2014, the top ten producers (by number of hits) wrote about 40% of songs that achieved #1 - #5 ranking on the Billboard Hot 100. In the late-80s, the top ten producers were credited with half as many hits, about 19%.

just seems like a sad state for music to be in. so each producer is basically a manager that hires different people for different parts of the song -- something like this:

https://www.nytimes.com/2018/04/22/arts/music/diary-of-a-song-the-middle-zedd-maren-morris-grey.html

In other words, more songs have been produced by fewer and fewer topline songwriters, who oversee the combinations of all the separately created sounds. Take a less personal production process and execute that process by a shrinking number of people and everything starts to sound more or less the same.

and, again, rockist although it may be, but hip hop (and i would add edm) is the main genre pushing this:

Hip hop is now the dominant genre, a track-and-hook archetype. Beats are programmed, copy and pasted or downloaded to mimic top producers. Recreating whatever’s fashionable has never been easier.

i think all this would be fine, except musical diversity in top 40 hits is close to nil

That new John Seabrook books gets into the hit factor division of labor a bit. One guy does the drums, one guy is good with hooks, one person does lyrics, one does vocal melodies, one does bass, etc. But all more or less independently.

as opposed to the old days where charlie would do the drums, and keef would be good with hooks, and mick would do lyrics and vocal melodies (two things!), and bill would do bass, etc.?

josh, i get what you're saying

sadly, people on ilx criticize the lowest of the hanging fruits, and if someone (fact checking cuz) doesn't read the article, they'll just hang on to that

so the argument is that there are now teams of 5+ people producing a track that are assigned specific things like a kick drum or a snare sound and it is all done in a lab, as opposed to in a collaborative band/rehearsal space/jam style

keyword in josh's argument is independently, which again, if you didn't read the article, is easy to gloss over

with DAWs, you can pretty much collaborate with anyone, anywhere, which is what happened to the zedd song in the nytimes article i posted

except it's not just collaborating over the internet, it's people assigning a particular part of a song as a producer, not a musician, based on what is hot and popular, so the sounds themselves become closer sonically to each other. there is no longer a unique dynamic or timbre in a maybe slightly differently tuned tom or size of a kick drum, to name a couple examples

the example on the pudding site is that there was still some musical variety in 80s top hits, where now they are closer to each other sonically, and a lot of it is attributed to trying to match the same sonic palette of whatever is a hit, and probably doing so with greater accuracy due to everything being digital

i get all that and i read the article and saw the word "independently."

obviously production methods continue to change and obviously that's going to affect the results.

but it's a continuum, not a seismic shift. technology being introduced, adopted and tweaked over time. as the article notes, pop (and rock and hip-hop and country etc for that matter) artists and producers have always tried to sound like what's hot at any given moment. now they just have more shortcuts to make that happen.

this is misleading...

From 2010-2014, the top ten producers (by number of hits) wrote about 40% of songs that achieved #1 - #5 ranking on the Billboard Hot 100. In the late-80s, the top ten producers were credited with half as many hits, about 19%.

...because according to their own numbers, that dropped down to 32 percent from 2015-2017, which is pretty much the same as it was in 1995-1999. which suggests that at least some of the changes they're attributing to current technology and culture may have happened more than two decades ago, for better or worse.

john seabrook has written some insightful pieces on how pop is made, but his quote "the process doesn’t lend itself very well to art" is a little too get-of-my-lawny for my taste.

"collaborative band/rehearsal space/jam style" is one way to make musical art. it has never ever been the only way.

"collaborative band/rehearsal space/jam style" is one way to make musical art. it has never ever been the only way.

― fact checking cuz, Sunday, June 3, 2018 9:47 PM (fourteen minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

even with early electronic bands like kraftwerk, music was still done in-person in a collaborative way. unless you're talking about the, what, less than 5% of musique concrete or whatever that had tapes and sent it over to other people. it sounds disingenuous to say "it has never been the only way," since it actually was the only way for most up until, say, the 1970s

...because according to their own numbers, that dropped down to 32 percent from 2015-2017, which is pretty much the same as it was in 1995-1999. which suggests that at least some of the changes they're attributing to current technology and culture may have happened more than two decades ago, for better or worse.

― fact checking cuz, Sunday, June 3, 2018 9:47 PM (fourteen minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

i mean, you're misrepresenting the argument. in the mid-90s, producers weren't assigning a person to find the perfect kick drum online and swapping files over the web en masse and collaborating in real-time. it certainly did happen, but again, you are focusing on like the less than 5% that did to argue that the phenomenon occurring now is no big deal and has happened before. from 2005-2014 there was an increase, then from 2015-2017 it dropped 11 points. personally, i don't consider that an indication that things will go back to how they were in the 80s and before

the data from 2018 onwards will be interesting. zedd's the middle was released this year and he has tapped into a formula that works

i dont understand the concern here at all

zedd will be out of fashion in a year if he isn't already

so far this thread seems more like rockism 2.0!!

any argument that goes "10+ people worked on this song!" is complete garbage because the most common reason there are that many writers listed is sample credits

for instance, the song this thing chooses to whine about modern music is "Uptown Funk," over half of whose credits are because of "All Gold Everything" (interpolated) and "Oops Up Side Your Head" (sued, were added to the credits)

(also, "Uptown Funk" and "Havana" are very weird songs to choose if you are complaining about all songs sounding the same, because they are both fairly distinctive as far as top 40 pop goes)

xxp

not really

havana literally had 10 songwriters that put the song together and this is without crediting sampled artists

unless you mean the person who actually recorded the kick drum and sold it to the company that produced havana, but i'm sure no one is giving these people credit right now

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Havana_(Camila_Cabello_song)

sure, which is why I said "the most common reason," not "every single instance"

and if you really want to dig into it, then one of those writers is Young Thug, who obviously is there because of his verse and nothing else; another is Kaan Gunesberk, who's a session musician (this is a pretty good article about what he does: https://www.spin.com/featured/how-hitmaking-producer-frank-dukes-is-reinventing-the-pop-music-machine/); another is Camila Cabello, who it is probably safe to say didn't do a huge amount. Starrah and Pharrell did backing vocals. I could go on but I've already done way more research about this song than the purported researchers. but who needs to do research when you can drop a "one can imagine" in front of your hypothesis?

you're misrepresenting the argument

i'm staring at their own chart and quoting their own numbers but ok

in the mid-90s, producers weren't assigning a person to find the perfect kick drum online and swapping files over the web en masse and collaborating in real-time

sure, but they were absolutely recording drums digitally and using them to trigger perfect kick and snare samples. maybe this was more late '90s than mid '90s, i'm not a historian, but, seriously, this is not a new thing. it's gotten easier, that's all.

(xp) if today's songwriting credit conventions (and business protocols) were retroactively applied to the beatles, "one can imagine" a lot of songs suddenly having lennon/mccartney/harrison/starr/martin/emerick (and probably random other people here and there) credits.

I mean, this is a "study" whose conclusion is "more songs have been produced by fewer and fewer topline songwriters, who oversee the combinations of all the separately created sounds," which is like saying a costume designer oversees the direction of a movie

every academic “study” on pop music should be accompanied by a release of the researchers’ favorite artists, similar to how you find out that research on seltzer being bad was sponsored by soda companies

lol

i'm so done with seabrook being considered an expert on this stuff. "what i see when i look at this data is [the same dusty pet theory that i was hammering in my error-riddled book that is already becoming irrelevant as the industry continues to change in ways that i am ill-equipped to understand]!"

i'm so done with seabrook being considered an expert on this stuff.

otm

I didn't like the book, got the impression he knew next to nothing about music.

(i actually liked his book, numerous flaws aside, btw. but still.)

every academic “study” on pop music should be accompanied by a release of the researchers’ favorite artists, similar to how you find out that research on seltzer being bad was sponsored by soda companies

it should also require the researchers spend a certain amount of time listening to the music they're writing about.

pudding's analysis (to their credit, it's one of their better music-related ones!) systematically ignores that many compositions credited to one writer in the past would have, by today's standard practices, been credited to many more. like, read about how some of these songs and albums were actually put together! read about thriller and bad, to start. there is no easy way to normalize the raw numbers based on social and cultural changes in the industry, but that doesn't mean that settling for the raw numbers is adequate.

these data-driven analyses can have great value imo! but the people who generate them need to be, like, hyper-vigilant about the implicit assumptions that are made when they collapse the complicated reality down to a few easily understood numbers. sometimes the understanding you think you are gaining is fatally compromised by the nuance you've lost. pudding has disappointed on this front multiple times. (their 'best' music projects are the ones that attempt to say the least: here's yesteryear's charts presented in a neat visualization, without any blathering or analysis! the analysis of spotify streaming numbers was not very insightful and contained some truly awful writing. the analyses of hip-hop lyrics have been abominable and deeply misguided.)

if this is one of pudding's better music-related analyses I'd hate to read the worse ones

I accidentally posted this in the kanye thread but it mentions Max Martin being a #1 hitmaker since 1985, which is hilarious, because you just know they got that year off Wikipedia -- in 1985, Max Martin was in a newly formed Swedish hair metal band that wouldn't release its first (mediocre-selling) album for six years. shit, that's on Wikipedia too, it would just take ONE CLICK

every academic “study” on pop music should be accompanied by a release of the researchers’ favorite artists, similar to how you find out that research on seltzer being bad was sponsored by soda companies

This will happen the day after what I want to happen, which is for every year-end critics' poll to start listing publicists alongside artist, album title, and label.

i think they meant max martin is the #1 hitmaker (songwriter/producer) by their metric from the period 1985-present. like, not implying that he started as a hitmaker in 1985.

(incidentally, some of the errors in seabrook's book very obviously did come from misreadings of wikipedia articles!)

if they meant that, it's sloppy-ass writing, especially considering it also mentions "the adrenaline-charged bubblegum sound of the past 10 years," which started apparently with a 1995 Backstreet Boys song. like, pick one start date and stick to it

While there are plenty of burgeoning Max Martins (e.g., Metro Boomin, DJ Khaled)

pudding's most useless analysis of pop music is 'the most timeless songs of all time'. i quoted this excerpt in another thread over a year ago but it still astonishes me every time i see it:

For example, in 1961, Bobby Lewis’s Tossin’ and Turnin’ spent 7 weeks at #1. For all intents and purposes, Bobby Lewis was the Beyonce of 1961. Yet, have you heard of it? Do you know who Bobby Lewis is?
Meanwhile, Etta James’ debut album dropped the same year, with At Last peaking on Billboard at #68.

Music historians will regard Bobby Lewis as a pioneer in rock and roll and R&B, yet whatever led to Tossin’ and Turnin’s popularity in 1961 has faded over time. His music, for countless reasons, didn’t persevere in the same way as Etta James’.

One hypothesis: Tossin’ and Turnin’s success had more to do than just the song...perhaps Bobby Lewis was a huge personality. Great looks. Amazing dancer. When we examine pop hits, popularity is so much more than song quality.

But future generations don’t remember Bobby Lewis’s dancing and good looks. Spotify only catalogues his music. And unfortunately, that quality didn’t endure in the same way as At Last. (And of course, we have not even considered the role of covers, samples, and movie soundtracks, etc. – a future project to undertake).

And for this reason, it will be weird to hear future generations reverently listen to groups such as Nickelback – the kids only know their music, not what they culturally stood for in 2015.

like, try cracking open a fucking book! this represents the absolute worst of (what aspires to be) 'data journalism'. (same feature surmises that onerepublic's "counting stars" was initially popular in 'indie music circles' lol.)

the adrenaline-charged bubblegum pop of Seabrook's prose.

whatever led to Tossin’ and Turnin’s popularity in 1961 has faded over time... One hypothesis: Tossin’ and Turnin’s success had more to do than just the song...perhaps Bobby Lewis was a huge personality. Great looks. Amazing dancer.

it's so sad that the civilizations from the mid 20th century didn't leave behind any records of what life was like back then, how people lived, what they looked like, how they even consumed audio-based art in those primitive times.

I had never heard of Zedd until I clicked on this thread.

so ya, i think katherine's point about sampling credits is valid, for sure

and while i actually enjoy the nitpicking of his argument, the point he is trying to make is that hits have become more homogenous in their sound, which i think is accurate, at least to my ear

and at the bottom he links this:

https://www.reuters.com/article/us-science-music/pop-music-too-loud-and-all-sounds-the-same-official-idUSBRE86P0R820120726

Researchers in Spain used a huge archive known as the Million Song Dataset, which breaks down audio and lyrical content into data that can be crunched, to study pop songs from 1955 to 2010.

...

They also found the so-called timbre palette has become poorer. The same note played at the same volume on, say, a piano and a guitar is said to have a different timbre, so the researchers found modern pop has a more limited variety of sounds.

i think the whole loudness wars has been dying out in recent years, actually, but there is something to be said for the resemblance of timbre palettes in top hits

it could be that producers are seeking the same type of heavy kick drum and using mostly synths in middle frequencies to create lush sounds, but the details are super scarce

it's more of a curiosity for me rather than some hidden agenda btw

he also links a study that says the opposite, so

i think he does that in an effort to provide transparency, which is actually pretty laudable

from the 'most timeless songs' article:

For the entire 1980s, Don’t Stop Believin’ is the most-played song on Spotify. This song barely charted on Billboard. From the 70’s: Bohemian Rhapsody. If we were to time travel to either decade, no one would reasonably believe that these two songs would be cultural touchstones for their respective decades in 2015.

apparently hitting #9 on the Top 100 counts as 'barely charting' and while a large part of Don't Stop Believin's current popularity stems from usage in TV etc., this seems like an absurd assertion to make about Bohemian Rhapsody considering its huge success in the UK at the time? not even good at the 'data' part of 'data journalism'

re: the 1985 Max Martin thing, I think they're trying to say that Max Martin has written & produced more hits than any other producer/songwriter since 1985 (when their dataset for producer credits starts)

taking credits as gospel is a bad idea imo

credits are political, they're a summary of leverage and not of cotributions

any argument constructed on the foundation that credits can be taken at face value is inherently flawed and will have to be thrown out entirely the next time another cultural or legal paradigm shift changes the way people within the industry think about the process

^ otm

james otm

also yes stop citing seabrook. having a good job doesn’t make him not a dumbass

i have never read john seabrook

but anyway, the dudes the wrote the pudding article made another page of the top #1s in 3,000 places

https://pudding.cool/2018/06/music-map/

1/ finally updated the music map for May 2018. This is a breakdown of the most popular song in 3,000 cities around the world from last month. https://t.co/iHni87eJbu

— Matt Daniels (@matthew_daniels) June 4, 2018

4/ worth nothing that most of Mexico is listening to a song by NJ-based Nicky Jam and Colombian J. Balvin.

it sure is

worth noting even more is that said track was produced by two Dutch guys

i am not convinced by this analysis that music today is more homogeneous than it was in the 1980s (!)

may i ask why the article was shared in this thread? like, "here's evidence of why we need to be taking this evil new strain of poptimism seriously!" or something? personally i was considering reviving this thread with a link to the thread where some of ilm's influential early adopters are heaping praise onto the new charlie puth record, thus setting us up to thoughtfully enjoy whatever ed sheeran, maroon 5, meghan trainor and james arthur put out next. phew, the poptimist threat has been vanquished and all is well again!

No particular reason

Feel free to post whatever u like man

I am still so annoyed by that "timeless" article. Early takedowns, including me going on about their amateur-level misreading of Pearl Jam data, can be found here: songs that weren't a bands biggest hit, but have gone on to be their legacy song and biggest iTunes seller