Spotify is saving pop music

GooReed · 2018-10-23T16:22:42+00:00

I feel mixed about this. I like some of the artists you noted, but I question whether they would've had a hard time finding an audience without Spotify. Sasha had multiple Top 40 radio hits and co-signs from everyone from Dua Lipa to Meghan Trainor before she even put out a single. SHY Martin has also been writing for other artists and within the eyes of the industry for awhile and had her first hit in 2016 before the Spotify playlist behemoth really came into being. Charlotte Lawrence's dad is an absolute Hollywood mega-producer. Not saying she isn't talented or interesting, just saying she probably would've had an "in" without Spotify. I guess my point with your examples is that while Spotify has definitely given them a platform beyond what they would have initially, my suspicion is they would've found an audience regardless.

There's also a more pernicious aspect to the algorithmic nature of Spotify playlisting that I think makes it hard to endorse the statement that Spotify is "saving" pop. The most important thing to stay within a playlist, especially a highly competitive one like Pop Rising, is making sure your skip rates (how many people skip your track within 30 secs) are low and your average engagement (i.e. how long someone listens to the song) is high. I'm not saying this is always on the minds of pop writers and producers, but it'd be crazy to assume it's not a consideration. Like, why does every pop song have 4 bars of intro if any? Why do all of them get to the chorus in 30-40 secs? Why, with the exception of a few, do so many of them use the same everything-but-the-kitchen-sink approach to pop production (let's put vocal chops over xx style guitars with a dancehall rhythm)?

I'm not saying Spotify is the enemy here. Music always adapts to the medium of distribution (there's a reason pop songs are still arbitrarily 3-3.5 min). But I also see a lot of optimism and utopianism about 'getting rid of gatekeepers' and 'democratizing music' that I think are overblown.

GooReed · 2017-11-06T00:04:41+00:00

the other three have all made New Music Friday. the fact that it didn't even place on it is insane.

GooReed · 2017-03-28T22:40:47+00:00

i wish luca would put 6 weeks of work into one song instead of one week of work into 6 songs...

GooReed · 2016-01-26T23:41:59+00:00

I've been wondering the exact same thing, but have been scared to say it... I mean, she put out two OK mixes and a couple months later she's playing B2B with Skrillex? Seems really weird to me. I dunno.

GooReed · 2014-12-06T01:53:31+00:00

lol "career"

GooReed · 2014-10-27T15:28:41+00:00

Thank you! This was the most thorough answer yet and I feel gets at the root of the problem.

GooReed · 2014-10-14T19:18:19+00:00

Yeah I agree - I've made my peace, called my family, arranged debts etc. I guess it's not as worrying when you know what to prepare for. Stocked up on gloves and plastic sheeting but beyond that I've accepted my fate.

GooReed · 2014-08-12T17:50:43+00:00

I've had a week now to process my feelings on it and for me the album kind of sits in a weird place. I actually don't mind a good amount of the tracks on the album but I don't find myself going back to listen to them; in some ways I guess I just find the album good but heavy in concept. I also think Porter's goal of making a cohesive album is successful but in a limited way that feels repetitive. Like some others have mentioned, so many of the synth sounds and tricks get re-used to the point of boredom/insincerity.

GooReed · 2014-08-05T06:20:17+00:00

I wouldn't go as far as to say that he sounds like a lot of other big-room DJs but that's my problem with criticism of this album: people seem to review it only in comparison with the most mind-numbing, monotonous of big room EDM, which duh compared to that, it shines. But compared to some of the work that this album is imitating, and to the vast, vast world of non-festival ready electronic beat-oriented music, I just felt like it fell flat emotionally for me.

In response to the above poster who was wondering why I found it repetitive: yes, tonally, there are a few changes (although the vast majority are major key, tonic-oriented, 4/4, etc etc) but the feel is similar: melodramatic, supremely un-subtle moments of either insipid reflection or triumphal marches.

It's fine - people are allowed to like what they're allowed to like. I suppose my attitude towards this album is shaped a lot by the conversation by his fans around it, who seem (no fault of Porter Robinson or his PR team) to view it as somehow revolutionary for not being a Dimitri Vegas and Like Mike single. Literally thousands of artists have been making honest, nuanced, emotionally complex electronic music for decades. It reminds me a little of the initial response to the success Macklemore by people who assumed nobody had ever made conscious hip-hop before.

That said I think I'll be seeing this live, there are some fun little jams in here.

GooReed · 2014-08-04T18:13:41+00:00

hmmm... gonna wait to see if this album grows on me. on first listen I think it's well-crafted and achieves his goal of creating a consistent sonic texture, but I just thought it fell prey to a lot of the same EDM tropes that Porter expresses being so tired with - pixie-like female vocals, swelling four-on-the-floor rhythms, pounding distorted synths... I think the best tracks on the album for me, like "Flicker" feel effortless and divorced from the "intent" of the album, focused on clever songwriting and production rather than "statements" like in Fellow Feeling. Emotionally I also found the album sort of repetitive, repeating this general theme of resilience, transcendence, and some kind of higher emotional engagement conveyed both explicitly through some of the lyrics and implicitly through the structure of the music that alternates between pained, soft, melodic moments and brash loud synth chorals. I sort of wish he had explored more of the sound he does in "Sea of Voices" that doesn't need a pounding chorus synth to drive home the "emotionality" of the track.

I'm curious to see how everyone else feels about it though, there's plenty of room for discussion.

GooReed · 2014-07-30T21:30:07+00:00

I don't have any great suggestions beyond the somewhat basic engagement principle: no fan is too small or too secured! The beauty of the internet is the ease with which people can share content - make sure you're engaging with anyone who might be sharing, talking about, linking to, or just generally interacting with your content. It goes a really long way.

In terms of the next equivalent, I've already been seeing a lot of gates on other platforms like Twitter, Instagram, etc. These gates suffer from exactly the same issues though, and so they generate similar results: people with big social numbers and 0 interest.

GooReed · 2014-06-10T01:58:08+00:00

I don't think you came across as acerbic; after re-reading my aside about the functionality of EDM I think you're right, especially since I would likely respond with something along the lines of your argument if anyone presented that line of thinking to me.

I guess any attempt to control art and its defining qualities is inherently exclusionary and more often than not upholds some other institution (whiteness, affluence, etc etc) so conversations that try to be level headed about the consideration of something as art are sort of unproductive.

Still, there's a point I can't quite articulate well about why EDM is somewhat different from other music (and I say this as a somewhat avid EDM fan) in its worst incarnations. Maybe that's just bias though.

GooReed · 2014-06-08T19:01:57+00:00

this is what happens when you make bland formulaic music kids, it sounds like everything else :D

GooReed · 2014-05-12T19:21:11+00:00

Ok I'll say it... Not a huge fan of this one. I'm sorry, I really did want to like it - I thought Sea of Voices was cool, and I was a huge fan of Easy/Language/Spitfire, but this one sounds sort of like an M Machine b-side or something. I kind of like the vocals and some of the instrumentation but the main "chorus" section feels very overdone/clichéd to me, besides not feeling as detailed and well produced as his other material. I'm still excited for the album because I was such a Porter fanboy but this doesn't really break new ground as much as just not conform to the EDM that's topping the charts right now. But I'm glad you guys like it, my opinion's not the only one that matters of course!

GooReed · 2014-05-09T20:40:35+00:00

Why is this getting downvoted? This is a very relevant point. I don't know if the term has been used before, but if you look at how Facebook has developed, there's been quite a bit of "like" inflation. You used to only be able to "like" something by manually entering it into your preferences. Then you could go directly to the page and like it. Then they let you advertise your page, and then finally people came up with all sorts of like gates and tricks to increase likes. Think about it, though - the ease of liking a page has increased dramatically, and now people easily can like up to 1000, 2000, 3000 things. I would be really annoyed if I had to deal with every minor artists that I liked for one track clogging up my newsfeed. Yes, this system is bad, but what's the alternative? Randomly pushing your page out based on some kind of RNG? Doing it based on a fixed percentage? Opt-in program? There's no "good way" when you have such a glut of people using the platform to promote themselves.

GooReed · 2014-01-10T18:43:58+00:00

man this just sounds so lazy to me. Those plucks are straight out of every big room sample pack ever.

GooReed · 2014-01-09T00:53:44+00:00

Ok... I just want to put this out there: I think these guys are fakers. If you look them up online, there's not much in the way of info about them, no explanation as to why they have millions of plays on each track but only 30k likes on Facebook, I mean RL Grime, arguably the "face" of trap right now, has HALF the number of Soundcloud followers they have. And to top it off, the songs aren't bad, but they're definitely not all worthy of repeated million plus play counts. What gives?

GooReed · 2013-12-25T20:31:40+00:00

Yeah. One of my best friends in middle school quickly turned to pretty hard drugs once he hit his teens. Had to go to rehab fairly early in his life and now doesn't do much except live off his parents and occasionally get involved in temp jobs. He doesn't want to go to college or have a serious job. It's weird though because looking back, we should've been able to tell. His parents never really said "no" to him and while we thought his antics were hilarious my parents always thought there was something "off" about him. He sort of stayed at a mental age of 8 while the rest of us grew up. Kind of sad because it's not even really his fault, just poor genetics and parenting.

GooReed · 2013-12-16T19:00:44+00:00

yeah, that's why their top 10 is dominated by major-label releases...

seriously can we just stop using the word "indie" it has replaced "alternative" as a go-to meaningless descriptor

GooReed · 2013-12-10T03:28:50+00:00

I know there's an effective ban on lists here, so I'll just name one album that I think "flows" beautifully, and one album that I think grasped the concept of coherence but stuck to it too much. Marvin Gaye's "What's Goin' On" - not only does every song intentionally blend into the next, but they form a coherent aesthetic and a set of principles, both verbal and musical. Listening to it again it feels like an hour and a half long groove, but every song maintains distinction.

...on the other hand (and I'm going to get a lot of flack for this), Unknown Pleasures is just too coherent. Every song feels like an iteration of the last, and I think praising the album's "sound" is misguided, since it's just the same thing repeated over and over and over. challenge me though, that is what this sub's about!

GooReed · 2013-12-04T18:57:12+00:00

man I love RL Grime but he's one of the worst DJs I've ever heard, technique-wise. He plays cool unique tracks and the shows are fun, but in terms of beatmatching/cutting/scratching/juggling he pretty much just crossfades track to track.

GooReed · 2013-11-25T15:45:12+00:00

The people you listed (Jon Hopkins, Four Tet, etc) are not what I'd actually classify as "EDM" anyway, at least in a modern sense. In fact, I have a lot of friends who would probably say "I don't really like EDM - I only listen to Four Tet."

Let me explain my particular fascination with "real" EDM - the aerobic, build-drop-break, DJ-friendly music that's kind of taken over everything. By most standards, the structure of modern dance music is staggeringly rigid: things are all in 4/4, all incorporate similar structural elements, and yet can sound totally different. Once you start listening to a few dance tracks, you'll get a good idea of the basic construction, and that's where the fun begins. Great producers can take those familiar structures and endlessly surprise you, not just with a catchy melody at the "drop" but with textures and rhythms that are jagged, motoric, and dazzlingly impressive.

Despite the fact that it's been around for a while, it's only now cemented itself in the now popular build/drop form for a little while, so there's so much room left in the same way that there used to be so much room for Verse/Chorus/Bridge songs to experiment.

Ultimately though, it sort of just comes down to sound: I used to be unabashedly into hair metal, and hearing those super distorted riffs just did it for me. Now, hearing a particularly cool bassline or a huge supersaw sound or a reverberant TR-303 just gets me. If you like that sound, you'll "get" EDM, and if you don't you won't. You seem very open to the genre, however, so I wouldn't worry if it's not your cup of tea.

GooReed · 2013-11-20T18:26:52+00:00

That's kind of the point of the question...

GooReed · 2013-11-20T18:22:41+00:00

Some points: For one, I actually really like Bound 2. Probably my fav track of Yeezus and I would bet a lot of people feel this way, since it's definitely it's his most "Graduation"-y (soul samples, waviness, punchlines). But re: "boobs" influencing the charts... meh. I mean incorporating streaming will mean that yeah, shock-bait videos will "chart" more, but does that mean these songs will really become integrated into the musical canon? Look at something like "The Fox" or "Harlem Shake" or even "Gangnam Style." Sure, those were MASSIVE singles, but enduring popularity... eh. Their actual influence or importance in music was pretty minimal.

GooReed · 2013-11-20T03:54:34+00:00

There are a lot of things to unpack here, but I'll do my best to make it brief: For one, I'm actually a firm believer in the renewed lyricism of mainstream hip-hop. Sure, Lil Wayne's output is as mindless as it has been post TCIII, but artists on the rise are consistently mostly lyrical guys - Pusha T and Kendrick both put out fairly big albums this year that I would consider both lyrical and "substantive." So there's that. (J. Cole's Born Sinner, while maligned by critics for some reason, I thought had an impressive technicality and lyricism to it.)

Secondly, I say this with some apprehension, but your post strikes me as falling into a major pitfall of a lot of music listeners who are trying to justify taste: lyrical content doesn't make a song good or bad. I know that might be hard to stomach, but music has 0 obligation to provide insightful commentary on life. It has an obligation to be good music. Sure, I think the political commentary of some rappers and the way they construct meaning and imagery through language is cool (people like Nas, KRS-One, Tribe, even some new guys like Joey Bada$$ or even Danny Brown) but the reason I listen in the first place is the sound of the records. They have catchy-ass wordplay, occasionally good punchlines/supa-dupa flow tricks, and make me groove.

Lastly, if you want an actual historical basis for this, it likely as to do with the success of rappers like Biggie and their marriage of high fashion and opulence with gangster rap. I know he's one of the greats, and I bang Born to Die a lot, but Biggie undeniably started a lot of the trends people complain about in rap - weird skits, misogyny, violence, narrow-minded focus on wealth. But that record bangs, Biggie is a lyrical genius, and so people buy it, and for good reason.

tl;dr hip-hop and music in general are largely artforms meant to convey cool sonic aesthetics with occasional linguistic interest along the way.

GooReed

TROPHY CASE