When we say ‘the music industry has changed’, what we really mean is that the music industry is changing. And the ways in which that change takes place means that the idea of the music industry, as we understand it, is becoming redundant. I’m not predicting the death of the music industry or anything quite so preposterous as that. I’m just saying that it won’t exist anymore.
The music media industry (composition to consumption) used to be a thing-in-itself, with reasonably identifiable boundaries around it. Sure, some of those boundaries were hazy — I mean, there’s some potential for confusion around the extent to which a pub venue is a music business and the extent to which it’s in the hospitality industry — but essentially, as a medium, you could recognise music industry when you encountered it. A bit, in that regard, like radio and television. There are overlaps and connections all over the place – but you could (as I did) move from the radio industry to the music industry, and everyone would be clear on what had just happened.
In other words, there was Music Industry and Not Music Industry.
In the online environment, where Internet is the medium, and other media relegated to the position of ‘content’ of that medium, the game has changed.
You’re a river. Meet the ocean.
Douglas Adams put it well about a decade ago. He used to get asked by publishers and broadcasters what would happen to their businesses when it came to the internet. He used to say it was a bit like a river asking what would happen to it when it hit the ocean.
It’s not going to be a river anymore. At best, it’s a component of something much bigger, more amorphous and, with some allowances for currents, pretty much undistinguished between one river and another.
There’s no such thing as Internet Radio
I presented a conference paper in Madison, Wisconsin nearly four years ago called ‘There’s no such thing as Internet Radio’ (or some similarly provocative title) and the point that I was making was that there is nothing remaining of radio in the form we understand the word when we put it online. The political economy of radio is turned on its head, the professional practice is altered, the technical method of broadcasting is abandoned (I mean, forget radio waves), the technologically-mandated geographic focus of broadcasting is left behind, patterns of listening are transformed – and actually, the only thing that remains is that there’s sometimes talking — and there’s sometimes music.
The point of this presentation was to challenge academics and broadcasters to think about the internet as something other than simply a bigger, global transmitter. It’s a medium with its own mode of operation, with certain things it allows and encourages, and certain things it tends to make obsolete.
But what I don’t think I really made clear is that what was going on was not that radio was being replaced — rather it was being absorbed. Online, radio is no longer a medium itself, but the content of a newer medium.
According to McLuhan, this is what always seems to happen. We put plays on television and call them programmes, not televised theatre. We put oral tales into books and call them novels (it took hundreds of years before The Odyssey made this transition). We put live performances of music onto disc and call them records. You get the idea. What was once the medium itself is now the content of the new medium.
That doesn’t mean that the older medium goes away. It just readjusts the ratio of things to accommodate the new, big thing that’s just turned up in this particular ecosystem. We still have plays and campfire stories and live concerts. But they are not the dominant form of storytelling or music consumption. Or, at least, they weren’t in what I’m calling the Electric Age. Which is kind of over now. Welcome to the Digital Age.
So… given that the popular music industry is a medium, just as radio is a medium and television is a medium (remember?), and given that these older media become the content of the new medium, rather than remain media-in-themselves, we need to think about what that means for people who are involved in that media production process. That would be you.
Yes, but what should we DO?
Okay, so I know I’m starting to get ‘come on, get to the point’ encouragement from my (probably dwindling) readership – but this kind of IS the point. One of the biggest problems facing the music industries right now is that the people involved are engaged in making something that they don’t even know they’re making — and the thing that they think they’re making doesn’t really exist anymore. At least, not as a thing in itself.
The director of a play that happens to have cameras pointed at it will be a lot more successful if he realises that he’s making a television programme rather than theatre. The teller of a story will think differently about the words chosen and the structure and pace of a story if it’s written down on paper rather than told out loud. The band will take an entirely different approach to recording a record than they will to performing a concert.
Same thing applies here. We need to first acknowledge that the rules of the game have changed – or, at least, are in the process of changing at this level of magnitude. Thinking we make popular music and continuing as if the internet is just another format like records and CDs before it pretty much guarantees we’ll get this wrong.
Stopping to recognise that we’re making TV rather than theatre and recordings rather than gigs — or, in our case, Online Music (for lack of a better term), rather than popular music media — is the one thing that can stop us from making stupid, expensive and ultimately catastrophic errors.
But like the theatre director who has to understand something about the nature of the medium of television (rather than the technical mechanics of it) in order to make a TV programme, so do we have to understand something of the nature of the Internet (rather than the technical mechanics of it) to make online music.
And, of course, we pretty much have to forget about those boundaries. Just as the river of the music business has been swept up into the ocean of the internet, so too have those other media forms: television, radio, print, photography and film. We all have to realise that there’s no longer Television and Not-Television, Music Business and Not-Music-Business, Radio and Not-Radio. We can all just make Internet now.
And we have to learn how to be good at it. Understand its principles, its ways, and the ways of its consumers. We can dig our heels in and demand that things be the way they always were ‘in our day’ or we can face facts, deal with the world as it is, and learn new strategies for the new medium.
So that’s next. What is this internet thing, how does it work, and how does one understand it in such a way that you can successfully make things for it?
I’ll get to the actual techniques. I promise. But you’re going to have to eat your vegetables before you can have any dessert, otherwise you won’t grow up to be big and strong. And that’s exactly what you’re going to need to be. It’s pretty tough out there.
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[...] always insightful Andrew Dubber, has posted a very interesting post on his blog. It’s interesting to try and guess what form the new media will take.  As a [...]
[...] Dubber discusses the boundaries of the new music industry (or lack thereof). (New Music [...]
[...] New Music Strategies is always good for a read and highly recommended. In one of his latest posts, Live Theatre For Television, he talks about how the internet is a unique place that works better when it has content made [...]
[...] clips. Same deal with communities online. Those who engage survive. This seems quite close to my Theatre Director’s Dilemma [...]
30 Comments
Very insightful article Andrew, just waiting eagerly for the promised techniques…
Can’t wait!
Very very interesting indeed !
Very enjoyable, Andrew. The Electric Age is a useful catch-all term which I will certainly steal (what with Intellectual Property being in period of transition!).
Another example came along this week, showing there many still confuse the medium and the product. The IFPI’s response to changing consumer habits, even this far down the line, is to enforce a retail model
http://www.ifpi.org/content/section_resources/digital-music-report.html
“Disconnection of service for infringers should become the speeding fine or the parking ticket of ISP networks.” – effectively, this is DRM in (punitive) reverse.
I’ve always been rather fond of the ‘walled garden’ model of the ISPs’ potential – adding a dollar or two to the monthly ISP fee to be distributed (using simple-enough digital watermarking/tracking processes) amongst all content creators. A cynic would describe this as a subscription model, but if all content were non-DRM, and classified as ‘feels like free’, so users weren’t restricted with what they could do with the product, I’m sure it would grow virally.
Shame Gerd’s gone so quiet BTW – I was hoping for some more public face-offs between you both…!
Very well written post and yes just as music evolved from the minstrels playing for lords in medieval times to recorded albums now music is evolving into something digital. The Minstrels playing for lords still exists as live shows at venues so also in that regards the album will remain while digital becomes dominant.
Thanks again andrew,
Apparently, blogs are a great medium for cliff hangers. :)
I will return.
Chris B
CD Baby Podcast
Honestly, it seems like you’re beginning to restate yourself a lot. A number of these paragraphs were almost interchangeable. I only mention this because you’ve expressed interest in making your 2008 work into a book, and I would definitely be flipping past the previous 2 chapters.
Good article
And not once was I thinking ‘get to the point’
Would take another couple of chapters to do that to me!
I just genuinely laughed out loud. I read a few other pages here and thought this guy must love Douglas Adams, he’s so trying to copy his tone, and the very next place I click he’s _quoting_ him.
Very interesting stuff. But along with a few other malcontents I too must say the tease is a bit rich. After all aren’t you (one of) the one(s) postulating that the age of scarcity is over; put it all out there, hold nothing back. See, that doesn’t necessarily always work and certainly any half decently constructed narrative (or body/collection of songs for that matter)demands an arc, a calibrated flow. No?
How about you just stop using the word is?
Try removing the use of IS and perhaps replace it with “seems to me to be” or “appears to me to be”
eg.music industry is changing
becomes: the music industry appears to me to be changing
At least your readers have a chance then to form their own opinions as they go along……you’re in danger or doing a Barry with his “Muslims are not Terrorists thing”
After all…. apples are not oranges…..are they? Or are they?
Very good post…and don’t let the nay-sayers fool you, I think this is moving along nicely. Your possible detractors are returning to read so it seems you must be saying something useful!
I find it ALL very useful.
And for all the potential “Haters” out there: Change the channel if you don’t like whats on.
Keep up the good work.
I think since,, the internet is a visual medium.. shouldn’t artists focus more on music videos as opposed to selling albums..
Before the internet, the music video was used soley for promotional purposes..
It could only be seen on TV with no way to make any money from it.
Now,, the music video is a show unto itself. It can be monetized with pre roll ads,, and embedded on blogs and websites.
If I was an artist, I would find it much easier to make a really cool viral video for a good song,, and get paid from people watching my music instead of getting them to pay.
1,000,000 views at $10 CPM is $10,000. That’s just for one song.Then you also get revenue if people like it and go buy it.
Say you spend $5000 on a video,, thats still $5000 profit per song,, $30,000 profit for six good songs.. (may not sound like much but just try to sell 30,000 99 cent songs,, not gonna happen in most cases)
So then the effort makes the artist more like a television station,, where promotion focuses more on getting viewers,, as opposed to counting on people to pay for something which is essentially free
It’s not hate, just honest feedback. If I didn’t value what Andrew has to say, I wouldn’t be coming back.
Good article, as always, Andrew, but I’ll have to side with the malcontents.
I owe a good deal of insight to the NMS site – especially the news stream. It allows me to get a wider perspective of what is happening. It also serves to heighten my skepticism as to the Brave New World view such as presented here.
The Internet does allow us to do many interesting new things, it is true, but first and foremost – as far as the music industry is concerned – it is a promotional medium and a channel of distribution. I’ve still to read a convincing argument that it really does turn the rules of play upside down (apart from the superficial sense, that the consumer has, seemingly, limitless choice, as opposed to having stuff forced on the industry). I’m sure you’re yet to surprise me, though.
hhhmmm the pope “appears to me to be” catholic!!!! I’d keep using IS simply because it’s quicker to type.
Back on topic, just interests me that no one has commented on the fact that we are now “making internet”. I found that phrase very interesting and wonder what that means for those of us who thought we were just making music?
Interesting. I think I get it.
Your tattoo still sucks though.
I think the phrase ‘making internet’ is extremely helpful conceptually. It puts a foundation under the cacophony. Similarly I find, as an artist, Aaron T’s post quite helpful because he is suggesting a way to make some dough.
That said, I am a newbie when it comes to things like online ads, google ads, CPM (don’t know what this means). Perhaps Aaron, Andrew and others could pipe in with some additional commentary on Aaron’s idea. This is what I find so wonderful about NMS and Andrew’s approach–the conceptual alongside the practical make a potent combo.
cheers
AC
Like Theater for Television? How about a more concrete example, Novels for Movies.
When movies replaced novels as the dominate narrative in our culture, Hollywood, among others, quickly bought up rights to classic and popular novels as the source materials for feature films. The result was a few fine, but mostly a lot of bad films. Eventually it became clear that the best narrative model for films was the short story. Why? Because the short story is a novel stripped of its (mostly 19th century) ornamentation leaving room for the addition of the visual affectations of the new 20th century medium. This is a simplification of course but it is a general rule of movie making. Most of the content of a novel never makes it to the screen adaptation.
To summarize, in a well adapted film based on a novel, the experience within the imagination of the novel reader is put on film, not the novel itself
As you rightly pointed out with the stage play-as-opposed-to-television-program analogy, there is an often awkward transition as artists attempt to separate the essential qualities of the old media from the chaff of the old mediums formal structures. But it might be helpful for blog readers to understand that the old media you refer to is not in the literal sense a stage or radio play deliberately retro-fitted to fit a new medium that we have carefully analyzed beforehand. The reality is that artists tend to back into these transitions, almost blind to the new mediums power and scope. This inefficient process is what frustrates us when we attempt to develop content for a new medium. This is especially true when livelihoods are at stake. There is a period of ‘finding our feet’. That is where we are now with on line music.
As McLuhan said: “The content of a new medium is old media”
To paraphrase him: The experience of watching a stage play or listening to a radio play (not the play itself) becomes the CONTENT of a new MEDIUM known as television creating a new type of MEDIA known as a serialized television program.
Old media is the imported sensory experience (watching a play) stripped of the cultural/technological affectations of the previous medium and transformed by the technological overlay of the new medium. We want to port the ‘sensation’ of listening to music into the new medium of the web page thereby creating an as yet to be named type of media.
For all of those who wish to cut to the chase, if you want to make money on the Internet, forget about the old culture of music making (within the context of the Internet – it’s obsolete) and concentrate on the sensation of making and listening to music. Then port that sensation into the new medium and Bob’s your uncle. For the rest of you readers who just want to be rock stars with MySpace pages keep doing what you’re doing, you’ll be fine.
I have left a reply to this article on my own blog, Frontend
“We all have to realise that there’s no longer Television and Not-Television, Music Business and Not-Music-Business, Radio and Not-Radio. We can all just make Internet now.”
Andrew: I completely agree with what you’re trying to get at. But we are not trying to make “internet.” Making internet would comprise of connecting networks and servers.
I think what you’re trying to say is we need to take our content, in this case music, and make sure it’s dressed for the right occasion. Surely you’re not suggesting that musicians make composition based solely on the fact that it’s going to be on the internet, but rather carefully consider how it will reach their audience. Music is the medium; Internet, Radio and Television are the vehicles.
This is where I think I’m going to be controversial. And it’s something that I’ll explain in more depth as this continues (new one on the way as soon as I can pare it down to something manageable).
Music WAS the medium, just as Radio and Television WERE the media. Now they’re the content of a new medium: the Internet.
That shift profoundly changes things for all concerned.
To answer the first part of your objection, I mean we need to be ‘making internet’ in the same way that theatre directors started making television when cameras started being pointed at their plays. Television is the name of both the technological array and the medium. Same with radio. Making radio does not imply building transmitters – so I’ve kept with the convention in that respect.
To answer the second, I am absolutely suggesting that musicians make compositions based on the fact that it’s going to be on the internet. That’s just one small part of what I’m saying. I am suggesting far more radical things besides. I realise that this is not going to win me friends in certain circles.
But hopefully I can explain myself before the flame war starts in earnest.
You might tell someone you do television or do radio or do theater but when you’re asked specifically what you do, you might act in a television show or you might DJ a radio show, you might write songs or jingles for the radio, or you may even write plays or musicals for a theater. But you certainly don’t make radio or make television or for that matter make internet. You make art, you make products, you make music, and they are delivered through a medium, source or channel.
You’re basically saying what great designers of most any medium already know, you have to understand your audience (where they go, what they do, what they like, where they consume, etc…) and design for them, not for yourself. Unless your goals are completely artistic then you design for yourself.
This really isn’t anything new or bold. You’re just saying you need to understand how and where you music is being consumed and, if commercial success is what you’re after, you need to custom tailor your product to match your chosen medium (based on your audience) for the most efficient and effective consumption possible.
“Music is the medium; Internet, Radio and Television are the vehiclesâ€Â
Don’t mean to be a stickler but actually from a media ecology perspective you’ve got it the wrong way around. I’m not really interested in losing traction in the mire of slippery semantics, but the music business/industry and its conduit technologies are or were a medium and I think that’s what you meant. Music is an expression of the human spirit quite apart from any attempt to package it within various mediated forms. To call music a medium is comparable to calling ballet a form of transportation.
The distinction is very, very important. Music is, as pointed out by dear old Saint Marshall, “Human speech slowed down.†And the culture of music is too important to the future of the human race to be permanently welded to some quaint 20th century notions of a hierarchy of composers, performers, and audiences. My sense is that Dubber recognizes this fact and this is the central reason I keep coming back to this blog.
I think what we are talking about here is nothing less than the obsolescence of the popular song. Many readers do not seem to realize the extent to which ‘the popular song’ is a media artifact of a bygone age. Oh it’ll still be around, just like madrigals, but it won’t be WHERE THE ACTION IS.
Call me presumptuous but perhaps calling this blog New Music Strategies is, at this point, counterproductive. The lexical meaning of the word ‘music’ seems to have so much ill-suited baggage. The word is clearly wedded to many readers’ dearly held concepts (formed in childhood along with dreams of rock stardom). This baggage has nothing to do with music and everything to do with the cultural apparatus of the various pre-digital age mediums that served at one time or another as conduits for music. The idea of modern music AS IT WAS might be holding everyone back.
As much as it has the pall of the cultural revolution to start suggesting adherence to a doctrinaire terminology, ‘making internet’ does seem to suggest a way out of the box of the old thinking. But grammatically it’s a non-starter and I would suggest ‘making internet art’ is much clearer but it is still not the sexy marketable term that will, no doubt, eventually rise up to common usage from the collabulary.
Niche art vs. universal art.
Great music markets itself. The only reason why marketing considerations are so important these days is because product is so bad. It has by now become even impossible to write a hit. Our pop tradition is so weak that even a genius will struggle to shape something memorable and universal out of the refuse to which the public is currently attuned.
In their desperate attempts to create brand recognition, our mundane and anaemic artists/marketers are forced to think up increasingly absurd niches for themselves. On the Internet these wretches have discovered their natural home.
In his hair-raisingly cynical blog ‘The 20 Things You Must Know About Music Online’, Andrew Dubber matter-of-factly announces the death of the hit and encourages online businesses to sell less of more: since the Internet provides businesses with unlimited storage space, it makes more sense, he argues, to try and sell a few copies each of a large number of items, rather than waste time chasing one million-selling hit.
Mainstream outlets like Amazon already claim to sell fewer copies of their top one hundred bestsellers than of all their other titles together. Not that anyone is disputing it, but this state of affairs proves once and for all that our culture is in an advanced state of decay. A work of art (bestseller) is a celebration of the era in which it was made and, if it is good, is capable of communicating (selling) its cultural values to audiences that have yet to be born. The more a tradition is able to sell of less is an indication of its vibrancy. The Iliad is still going strong. What a hit!
It is rather facile to blame the Internet: the slogan ‘sell less of more’ has been in slow, steady ascendence for the last couple of thousand years. The Internet is merely a symptom of our culture’s cascade into mediocrity. We find ourselves in our age so ill equipped to achieve greatness, that a framework to accommodate selling less of more was bound to emerge. They would not have known what to do with the Internet in the Renaissance. The emergence of the Internet in our times constitutes an admission: to create a hit (=enduring work of art) is beyond our capability.
So now, rather than trying to score hits, we see an almost inconceivable number of bands and artists chasing the Long Tail: flooding the market with inane drones, the one entirely indistinguishable from the next, and yet shamelessly marketed as niche product.
If the Tail is Long, you cannot fail to catch it.
I would like to suggest an alternative title for Mr Dubber’s blog: ‘The 20 Things You Must Know About Music Online, If You Know Nothing About Music’
When a culture no longer has the strength for universal aesthetics, it seeks refuge in the niche. Society divides itself into segments. People withdraw into zones: small cliques of apparently like-minded individuals, continually splintering into ever smaller sections, and becoming more and more alienated from one another, until finally the world is made up of segments containing only one totally disconnected self. The Internet is merely an agent of this disintegration process: rivers running into one big, blue sea.
Excerpt from ‘The Democratization of the Music Industry’, by Sebastiaan Elsenburg.
http://ridinghoodmusic.com/category/drama-queen
[Sebastiaan wrote]
>It has by now become even impossible to write a hit.
Sebastiaan’s post is extremely articulate, but it’s based on an over-simplistic subjective ‘grumpy’ judgment that music has gone to the dogs. There’s no evidence that [popular] music is less innovative than it once was. There’s always been interesting/innovative material and anaemic/safe material. For every Buddy Holly there was a Pat Boone; for every Beatles there was a Leapy Lee; for every Radiohead there was an Aqua.
What I’ve always enjoyed about Andrew’s blog is that it isn’t about the actual music; it never falls into the trap of discussing the validity of one artist or song over another. It defines a high-quality product only by the fact that there is demand for it.
[Sebastiaan also wrote]
>I would like to suggest an alternative title for Mr Dubber’s blog: ‘The 20 Things You Must Know About Music Online, If You Know Nothing About Music’
How do we measure how much someone knows about music? Would you discuss Andrew’s harmonic knowledge? His appreciation of melodic form? His ability to hear a compression ratio or sample bitrate? His historical knowledge of the top 40? And even if a hypothetical individual did ‘know nothing about music’, should they be prohibited somehow from enjoying it?
It’s also interesting that to give an example of a long-lived ‘hit’ Sebastiaan has to cite the Iliad – i.e. he can’t find a popular music example. Ummmm… Summer is Icumen in? Greensleeves? Not appearing in a covers band near us any time soon, I suggest.
Just whingeing about the Internet and accusing popular culture of going to hell-in-a-handcart (which I don’t happen to believe personally) is missing the point of this blog. Andrew’s trying, I think, to observe changing trends and processes relating to the dissemination of music (and other cultural artifacts) and to discuss how creators and consumers might respond.
To be honest, the more I read about what people THINK is the future of music, the less regard I have for people who discuss the topic
The only thing I’ve learnt recently is that no matter WHAT topic is currently under discussion, it is the people who have the least to do with the core arguments who seem to have the most to say
Instead of being impartial they bring their own agendas to the table and twist their arguments to accomodate their ‘niche’ world view
People who actually make a living creating music are too busy to argue over semantics, the death of this or the birth of that. They are too busy creating the stuff that academics rush to label and disseminate.
Music will continue to be written, performed and played whether there is internet or not, new model this or that, and long after ‘web 2.0′or ‘web 3.0′. There will be some good music and some bad music. It will change, move on and adapt whether it is written about or not.
Writing about the death of art is an intellectual persuit created by the non-artistic in a vain attempt to be superior. These people are merely pompous historians with over-inflated egos who think they can predict the future, dabbling in science fiction while the world carries on regardless.
I’ve got no time for it, and these kind of bores are never invited to my dinner parties lest they contaminate my fantastic and creative friends with stories of the end of a world they were never even a part of.
Garbage. If you think it’s dead or over please stop writing about it. It only compounds your ignorance. My advice is to stop trying to predict the future and concentrate on documenting the past. Creative people are into ideas, and in that area you appear to be entirely clueless.
I often ask A&R managers whether they know in which key their favourite song was written. I have never met a single one who was able to provide me with an answer (although many of them were extremely capable of looking at me as if I were insane.)It is not on account of the internet that the music industry is failing, but on account of the fact that it is being run by dilettantes, hobbyists and marketers – people, in other words, who have had no formal education in music whatsoever. This has not always been the case. A&R managers used to be recruited from record companies’ ranks of writer’s and arrangers: skilled musicians with lifelong experience creating enduring records.
Our music industry can only be made vibrant again by a longterm cultural commitment to music education.
If you want to write a book or make a film, you go to school and learn how. Unless we start sending the young talented somewhere they can study the craft of songwriting,the music industry’s 5% signing success rate will dwindle even further. This is self-evident, although admittedly not very ‘punk’. The internet will change nothing, bring about nothing, achieve nothing; it is merely a tool with which hobbyists validate their misguided attempts to have a career in music. Hobbyists ought rather to devote more time to throwing dinner parties…
In case anyone is still in doubt as to the confusion that is rife with regards to aesthetic standards: there is no doubt in my mind that the cultural significance of Aqua far outweighs that of Radiohead.
@ Sebastiaan:
“I often ask A&R managers whether they know in which key their favourite song was written.”
– What does that prove? Isn’t it a bit like asking the person who runs the cornershop about the process of making a Mars Bar? It’s not an A&R manager’s job to know about keys. And who’s to say, in any case, that knowing what key a song is in is any indication of musical discernment? I’ve met plenty of dilettantes who could tell me 1,001 things about a song’s key, modulations, lyrics, instrumentation, timbres, and so on. These people are oh so very rarely even good company, let alone opinion-leaders.
“If you want to write a book … you go to school and learn how”
– What, like Homer did? (Okay, I know the epics weren’t in book form when Homer composed them. But I think the point’s clear: staggeringly few ‘great’ authors were taught how to write, I believe).
And – do you really think that the most influential artists (be they writers, musicians, dancers, painters …) are nicheless and universally popular? How many people do you know who’ve *read* the Iliad? I suspect that many of the works of art you’d consider great are outside Amazon’s top 100 – and that’s setting aside the question: does everyone who buys them reads them?
And even if we set aside *that* — aren’t you contradicting yourself pretty profoundly? You cite popularity as proof of greatness (“The more a tradition is able to sell of less is an indication of its vibrancy”); yet you rail against the “refuse to which the public is currently attuned”. A bit of semantic wriggling, there: isn’t “the refuse to which the public is currently attuned” just a pejorative version of “that which is popular”? Who’s deciding what’s ‘classically’ popular and what’s trashily ‘attunable to’? All very easy, with the benefit of hindsight.
And something that’s just occurred to me:
In the 18th century, there was great concern about the overwhelming popularity of the disposable Gothic/Romantic novel. There was also Jane Austen. The two were inextricably linked – Austen kicked against the prevailing “refuse” of her time.
… (Sorry, clicked submit too soon …)
In the 18th century, the novel was a relatively new form (hint), and authors were perceived to be taking swoon-inducing liberties. Epistolary novels (ie those taking the form of reproduced correspondence between characters – as written by Choderlos de Laclos and others) had come and were on the way out (again, incidentally, a new form started out with experimentation based around pre-established forms – the same pattern Dubber’s identified online).
Jane Austen kicked against the prevailing ‘refuse’ of her time. Satirising it, improving upon it, reforming it. But I’d argue vociferously against anyone maintaining that she could’ve done so *without* aforementioned refuse.
It’s a massive error to sentimentalise the artistic achievements of the past.
I don’t even know what key some of my own songs are written in so expecting an A&R man to know the answer is not a particularly good way of judging musical integrity
Give me a dumbass who gets excited about promoting my music anyday over an A&R man who knows what key it’s in
In fact don’t give me an A&R man at all, unless he’s one of the few good ones (and they do exist I’m afraid, just like there a good labels and bad labels)