thread to track Poptimism 2.0

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

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.

It's baffling to me that someone who writes about music would have to turn to extra-musical factors in trying to understand why "Tossin' and Turnin'" was a bigger hit than "At Last"!

Yet, have you heard of it?

haha - lemme rack my brain

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

― aloha darkness my old friend (katherine)

Things That Can Happen in European Politics is one of the all-time great historical analyses, up there with Albert Thayer Mahan

lmao

the pudding people don't appear to have any experience writing about music outside those pieces hence their extremely bad engagement with their data

pudding in, pudding out

Pudding poptimism

Pudtimism

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oVME_l4IwII&t=21s

i don't even know if we've already done this but lol peak fucknut

sick of these yet? https://www8.gsb.columbia.edu/articles/projects/what-makes-a-hit/

(i haven't read the paper the visualization is based on)

Oh god

It is funny to me that an article might begin with a caveat along the lines of "pop music is often derided as manufactured...", and then follow that up with the most manufactured and useless I-Made-Some-Arbitrary-Metrics-To-Try-And-Correllate-Characteristics-Of-Pop-Singles-With-Chart-Performance pie-charting

There are so many things I want to learn about with regards to pop music, and statistical charting of tempos and "acousticness" aren't it; if anything, articles like these make me feel as if people are missing the point, making pop music all about "numbers" instead of "feelings"

i wanna see an analysis of those EQ tweaks they do to rev into the chorus of every song now

yeah i get the sense that these features don't adequately describe the audio analysis tools they are leaning so heavily on as the basis of their work. like the most this one says is 'sometimes the tool gets the tempo wrong by a factor of 2' but none i have seen so far has critically examined whether the select metrics these tools zero-in on are actually that salient as far as whether people respond positively or negatively to music. of course by these methods lyrical content is considered nearly irrelevant beyond its mere presence and how 'speechy' it is, lol. ridiculous.

of course by these methods lyrical content is considered nearly irrelevant beyond its mere presence and how 'speechy' it is

― dyl, Monday, July 23, 2018 12:59 PM (one hour ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

to be fair this is also the music-critic party line

"sometimes the tool gets the tempo wrong by a factor of 2" is insanely obvious to anyone who's ever used serato

another thing i sometimes wonder about these pieces that do audio analyses of hits is how often the tracks they feed into their analytical tools aren't even the correct ones. like the one i linked above says it sourced audio from spotify (if i'm understanding correctly), but, like, you don't even have to go that far back in the history of the charts before you start turning up hits that aren't on any of the streaming services or digital download stores. not to mention the many that aren't available on digital platforms as their original versions, but ARE available as bad, cheap-sounding re-recordings from 15 years later. personally when i am searching for old + relatively forgotten chart music i often have to turn to youtube when the streameries don't have the proper versions!

If I had a way to automatically deactivate the Spotify audio-attribute API whenever anybody tries to use it to explain or predict hits, I would totally do that...

ha. yeah, and dyl otm - - - i'm waiting for something like "we analyzed fifty bubblegum hits from the early 70s, and surprisingly, the feature most predictive of a hit in this period was tinny late 80s digital production"

"the late 2010s were characterized by an uptick in songs that sound as if they have been shifted up a half-step in key"

Lol that's a joke, but that's actually a good trick. When you tune the track a little sharp it pops on radio

the streameries

nice

oh I meant people pitch-shifting videos for YouTube to get around copyright detection but that works too

this is killing me

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6Q34lJ5gEJs

lmao that's deserves to take the 77 this year

lol excellent work.

loving this new mountain goats

UMS, how did you encounter this 4-year old youtube with 38 views?

Didn’t we talk about his guy recently in some thread?

I saw it on Facebook via a former ilxor

btw this guy's body of work in insane

so this is what kozelek is up to these days

Listen to @alyandaj's cover of @TheNational's "I Need My Girl" https://t.co/hfv5RvyYNQ pic.twitter.com/kCm6qp8e1C

— Stereogum (@stereogum) July 31, 2021

I was really hoping this would be the Pitchfork Peppa Pig review