A Rather Lengthy Post About Music and the Internet

Recently I acquired the Humble Music Bundle and have been listening through it, which spurred my viewing Jonathan Coulton’s website (Not because I wasn’t already a fan, but because I decided I’d like to check in on possibly purchasing some more of his music). I read a fairly recent blog post of his which was a response to two other articles (links in his post) about music piracy, and the direction the music industry is moving toward in general. Now the first Article by a 21 year old BBC Intern Emily begins with the premise that she is 21 years old, and grew up in a time where owning physical media was not really of any interest to her, or her generation as an entire topic, which got me thinking “How weird is it that I not only still covet music on a physical medium, but that I’m only 2 years older than Emily.” I don’t know that there’s a defined point in time where one generation ends and the next begins, but clearly 1990 was exactly when my particular worldview would no longer be present in any newly born humans, as though it was genetically bred out of the species. Regardless of my “Apparently my thought process is no longer relevant” grumpiness, I was also one to begin amassing a CD collection using birthday money when I was around 10-12 years old, as a point of fact: It is not easy to split your meager annual earnings between videogames and music as a child, or as an adult for that matter unless your scope of interest is remarkably narrow. Suffice it to say, I’ve actually gone into the nearly exclusively digital age of music kicking and screaming, having played guitar since I was rather young (about when I started building up my music collection) and having always wanted to be in some capacity paid to create music I was frequently in pure awe of the better put together albums I own, where there are interesting and detailed liner notes, lyric sheets, etc. all in the packaging with the music I wanted. I can say that as time has progressed, regardless of how broad my tastes have become over time, I probably buy less music per year now than I ever have. This is a sore subject to me, because I want to buy music, some of this stems from the fact that I have financial obligations that extend beyond putting gas in my car, but some of it I’m sure also stems from my overwhelming distaste for paying for more than I’m actually getting. Many artists, Rush, JoCo, MC Frontalot, and a slew of others I’m not going to plug right here put out great albums, worth listening to from start to finish several times over, however (and the irony of this is not lost on me) Metallica has not since Lars famously shat upon Napster so many years ago, not produced an album that I would deem worth my 10+ dollars. Metallica is not the only band guilty of this, the homogenization of pop music has actually been well documented and has, along with the increasing prevalence of auto-tune or other pitch correction software completely killed my ability to justify a purchase of most all “pop” music. That said, I don’t deny that some pop music is quite fun to listen to, but studies like the 2nd link there do help to explain why my brain feels like mush after 20 minutes of listening to pop radio in the car (don’t judge me, our only “rock” station up here is completely useless when Free Beer and Hot Wings ends). Groups like Nine Inch Nails were able to establish themselves (or slightly more accurately, Trent Reznor established himself) and release music for free for the last several years, while offering physical copies for money, and still turned a profit. The dynamic in the industry has changed drastically. There’s a great built in form of infrastructure for these indie artists to make money without record labels, which for Sony, Warner Bros, EMI, et al really sucks. For the artists, especially artists deemed “not commercially viable”, this is an exciting period in time. That’s not to say that every artist will make money, hell, it’s not to say that every artist who deserves your money will get it, but it does mean that there is a major shift in how things are done, and as a general topic I think that it’s for the better. I want to own the physical media, I want to go to shows, I want to hear new artists, experience new music on a regular basis, and I want the artists I like to succeed. In some ways Spotify, Pandora, LastFM, Grooveshark, et al help with that (doubly so when they actually pay royalties to the artists who they stream). I love that I am able to say “I want to listen to something like MC Frontalot, and have since learned of The Lab Rats, Flobots, Z-Trip, Schaffer the Darklord, and many other artists. I quite enjoy listening to solely by being willing to let my phone tell me what I might like. We’re also now able to live on a “try before you buy” system, where you can quickly search the internet for an artist you’ve heard in passing and come across the majority of their catalog to stream for little/no monetary commitment on your part, allowing you to decide if you value their musical contributions enough to pay for them. In the past, one would be saddled with entrusting their money to the artist in good faith that an album would contain more than the 1 or 2 tracks that they had heard on the radio that were interesting to them, or believe what magazine/newspaper reviews had to say about an artist and their albums. It has become much, much harder to play the consumer for a sucker, and while I still do like owning that nice fragile plastic disc with my music on it, I don’t know that I would have it any other way. TL;DR - I still like CDs and supporting my favorite artists. I support fewer artists now than I did before, not because I pirate music, but because I am able to listen to albums before I buy them; most of them are very shitty. It has been shown anecdotally that record labels have been demoted to superfluous middlemen. Streaming media services have allowed me to find many artists I like, and I would rather support the ones that actually pay the artists. Hooray music, support artists, go to shows. That is all.

The Other Kind of "Pop" Filter

Pop music has for a good long time been meant to be catchy, upbeat, and as the name implies popular. One thing that has become unfortunately popular with the advent of digital recording processes is auto-tune. I’ve got nothing against an artist fixing a take here, or using something to add a bit of flavor to a track in a new or innovative way, but it’s gotten to the point where our pop artists aren’t even singers. Our pop artists are just bodies in front of songs. Pop music went from being talented singers whose ambition was to become famous over an ambition to become accomplished singer/songwriters. 

I’m not saying everyone needs to be terrifically well rounded, and certainly a large number of people have established themselves as very popular artists without being particularly well rounded. However we are in the midst of a revolution of Milli Vanilli type acts. The difference between groups like Milli Vanilli and Ashee Simpson  and these modern pop artists is that the ones that are using auto-tune with such bold frequency is that when we hear vocal lines that clearly don’t belong to these artists, we accept it. When the boys in Milli Vanilli were caught there was a backlash, now if you’re auto-tuned to the point of ill recognition to the “singer’s” vocal line, you’re rewarded with a recording contract and a short skirt or tight pants. Ke$ha here exhibits her talent, but voluntarily will instead prefer to record songs like this and just get them fixed.

I may not have even become so frustrated with this trend until I was driving my fiancé’s Jeep a few weeks ago.  Two of the speakers in that car are blown, and having heard Ke$ha, Lady Gaga, etc. in my car (which has a nice, fully functional stereo) and then hearing them on blown speakers again for the first time in several months was an eye opener. These songs have gone through so many filters, and are so drastically digitized; I forgot the speakers were blown until I hit a song without much of these studio effects, but the biggest culprit is auto-tune. I like techno, and in fact have been playing with A Klokwork Kaos for the last few months, helping round out the sound and add some live instrumentation to the currently all electronic sound.  

What I really have to ask here is how does this happen? Most pop music recorded in the last few years has undergone such extensive filtering that it’s hardly music anymore. Last I checked, you need working speakers to hear music, but if you’re listening to pop radio you can get by with a couple of functioning coils and torn cones, you probably won’t even notice. The strangest thing about this, is that despite my distaste for how this has come around, I don’t hate this music, I just think that we’d be better off with artists  displaying their talents