06-14-2016, 12:03 PM
This is mainly about how hit songs are currently written, and mostly written by the same people. Some parts of this were in the New Yorker, so it's a bit disjointed, but reads easily and moves along quickly; I read it in a few days. He hits on a bunch of different things - songwriting, royalties, Napster, streaming, and radio consolidation.
The current method of writing for big pop stars is a complete assembly line process: there are beat makers, chord change specialists, "top liners" (who are good at improvising sung melodies and lyrics over the track) and they work together. When someone like Rihanna is going to do an album, they get a bunch of these people together and they work in different combinations over a few days to hammer out a bunch of possible tracks. Then the singer just comes in and sings. Most everything is sample-based, so there aren't even any musicians playing. It's all on laptops. So no wonder so much pop sounds similar (and lacks a compelling groove); it's not even really made by anyone playing music.
As to streaming, since the labels' income has gone way down after iTunes was introduced (people buying single tracks instead of $17 CDs) they negotiated streaming deals so that they get almost all the money, and the songwriters get pretty much nothing (unlike radio, where songwriters get royalties per play). The author talked to Mark Ribot, who made about $100 a year from streaming, and Roseanne Cash, who made about $400. So the labels are willing to destroy the careers of everyone except the top earners - the author notes that about 1% of the songs make about 90% of the money. The rise of streaming audio also gave corporations like Clear Channel the opportunity to get the FCC to cut limits on ownership of radio stations (with the argument that they needed this leverage to compete with streaming), which is why radio sucks so much now. I never listen.
At the end, I was sad.
The current method of writing for big pop stars is a complete assembly line process: there are beat makers, chord change specialists, "top liners" (who are good at improvising sung melodies and lyrics over the track) and they work together. When someone like Rihanna is going to do an album, they get a bunch of these people together and they work in different combinations over a few days to hammer out a bunch of possible tracks. Then the singer just comes in and sings. Most everything is sample-based, so there aren't even any musicians playing. It's all on laptops. So no wonder so much pop sounds similar (and lacks a compelling groove); it's not even really made by anyone playing music.
As to streaming, since the labels' income has gone way down after iTunes was introduced (people buying single tracks instead of $17 CDs) they negotiated streaming deals so that they get almost all the money, and the songwriters get pretty much nothing (unlike radio, where songwriters get royalties per play). The author talked to Mark Ribot, who made about $100 a year from streaming, and Roseanne Cash, who made about $400. So the labels are willing to destroy the careers of everyone except the top earners - the author notes that about 1% of the songs make about 90% of the money. The rise of streaming audio also gave corporations like Clear Channel the opportunity to get the FCC to cut limits on ownership of radio stations (with the argument that they needed this leverage to compete with streaming), which is why radio sucks so much now. I never listen.
At the end, I was sad.
the hands that guide me are invisible
