TranceAddict Forums (www.tranceaddict.com/forums)
- Music Discussion
-- Suddenly I realized the stupidity of long buildups
Pages (12): « 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 [11] 12 »
| quote: |
| Originally posted by djmetatron ahemmmm? sorry but I've read your posts here and I don't quite get what your saying about these bands either. is the fact that they have hits only because they've decided to make a cheap song that everyone will lap up? just because a group stumbles upon a hit, doesn't mean they've sold out or whatever. or is that even what you're saying? anyway, Pink Floyd is widely popular because they've made some hits yes, but I don't see what your point is beyond that. |
lol, because it's the Metatron idiot..
Ah right fuck, sorry. I kept thinking it was the sherrif from that robin hood with Kevin Coster in it. Damn, it was pissing me off, I hate that film. Dogma, right... 
lol, sokay, yeah kevin costnerhood sucked, but the original disney cartoon pwns. 
Long buildups ain't that bad most of the time - they give a song a great atmosphere on the floor. Granted, some are a bit much, example "Tribal Shock" by Katana. The snares just go on, and on, and on, and on...
| quote: |
| Originally posted by Ishkur The Beastie Boys aren't popular. "Fight For Your Right" is. Blur isn't popular. "Song 2" is. Pink Floyd isn't popular. "Money" and "Another Brick in the Wall" are. |
| quote: |
| Originally posted by Ishkur *ahem* The Beastie Boys aren't popular. "Fight For Your Right" is. Blur isn't popular. "Song 2" is. Pink Floyd isn't popular. "Money" and "Another Brick in the Wall" are. Get it? Everyone else gets it, why don't you? |
*sits down and gets some popcorn*
wonderful human beings 
| quote: |
| Originally posted by DJ Cinos Well, the System-J VS Ishkur argument was gold anyway. Now they seem to have reached a dead end.  |
*sigh* once again, you're missing the forest for the trees.
To wit: Pop music is historically retrogressive, and by that I mean it uses tried and true music models and formulas for success. It rarely, if ever, innovates, creates, or evolves new internal structures by itself, because that's not what it's meant to do. Typically, what will happen is the underground--that breeding ground of new forms and new ideas where each scene cares only about self-satisfaction and the satisfaction of its eclectic yet miniscule (and thus non-commercial worthy) fan-base--might accidently create something of worthy appeal to the masses. When this happens, Nirvana and grunge music, for instance, the pop music industry always smells money, never the aesthetics of the music, and immediately makes copycat music (by signing similar sounding bands to big labels) in an attempt to cash in on the craze. In most cases, this copycat music is an inferior, low-quality impression of the original, but close enough that the masses don't mind, because they aren't unhealthily obsessive nitpickers about their music. They just like what they hear on the radio and TV, they generally don't discriminate like the dissectors of the artform do.
(PS: The only songs I've ever heard are Song 2 and Boys & Girls. On this side of the pond, Blur is a virtual fringe group, lumped with the "alternative" set (that goes, also, for Radiohead). Beasties are far more resilient, though that has to do with the stubborn selling point of hip hop...aka hip pop, which is what they are)
ishkur is right. if some of you guys have the maturity to set your egos aside for moment, you will realize this too. this discussion of innovation and diffussion of innvations reminded me of a book i've read recently. the topic of the books is business and markets, but the principles are equally applicable in music.
in a nutshell, a chief argument is that innovators rarely capitalize on their innovations. it's the second wave of non-innovators that capitalize on the innovations. here is a selection of the first chapter...
Fast Second
| quote: |
Chapter One Spotting the Real Innovators Take this quick test: Which firm is the innovator that brought us online bookselling in the 1990s? If your answer is Amazon.com, you are wrong. The idea for online bookselling�and the first online bookstore�came from Charles Stack, an Ohio-based bookseller, in 1991. Computer Literacy bookstore, a successful retail chain, also registered an Internet domain name in 1991. Amazon did not enter this market until 1995. Another quiz: Which innovator came up with the idea for online brokerage services? If you answered Charles Schwab or E-Trade, again you are wrong. Two Chicago brokerage firms� Howe Barnes Investments and Security APL Inc.�launched the first Internet-based stock trading service, a joint venture called Net Investor, in January 1995. Schwab did not launch its Web trading service until March 1996. Both examples highlight a simple point that is at the heart of this book: the individuals or companies that create radically new markets are not necessarily the ones that scale them up into big mass markets. Indeed, the evidence shows that in the majority of cases, the early pioneers of radically new markets are almost never the ones that scale up and conquer those markets (see Table 1.1). For the last twenty years, the Xerox Corporation has been derided for its inability to successfully commercialize scores of new products and technologies, notably including the now ubiquitous personal computer OS interface developed at its PARC research center in Northern California. In reality, Xerox�s failure is more the norm than the exception! This may surprise people who have been brought up to believe in pioneering and first-mover advantages! However, there is no escaping the evidence. Henry Ford did not create the car market but the Ford company ended up capturing a lot of the value in that market in its first hundred years of existence; Procter & Gamble did not create the market for disposable diapers but it is P&G that ended up harvesting most of the value out of the mass market for disposable diapers that blossomed in the last fifty years; and General Electric did not create the CAT scanner market, yet it was GE that made most of the money out of this market. It turns out that when it comes to radical, new-to-the-world markets, the pioneers almost always lose out to latecomers. This is a puzzle. The early pioneers tend to have the necessary technology and by definition enter the market much earlier than other firms. This should, in principle, give them first-mover advantages over any latecomer. Why then do they consistently lose out and surrender the markets that they create to other firms? It�s not because the pioneers are small or insignificant players with no resources or bad management. And it�s not because their products are inferior to the products that latecomers introduce. Consider, for example, the market for personal digital assistants (PDAs). This market was created in 1993 when Apple Computers introduced its revolutionary handheld computer called Newton. Apple�s CEO at the time, John Sculley, called it �nothing less than a revolution� and predicted that it would launch �the mother of all markets,� with PDAs and similar gadgets constituting a trilliondollar market. Less than ten years later, PDA demand had grown into a billiondollar market. While not as huge as predicted at the time of its creation, it had soared from zero to $1 billion in ten years and had established itself as one of the new markets of the Internet era. Yet even a casual observer of this market at the turn of the century could not fail to notice that the company that could legitimately claim to have been the creator of this market�Apple Computers� was nowhere to be seen. Instead, all the spoils from the growth of the PDA market had gone to firms�such as HP and Palm�that followed Apple into it. It is hard to see why. Nobody could claim that Apple lost out to Palm because of lack of resources or lack of expertise. Nor could the Apple Newton be considered an obviously inferior product to the Palm Pilot. Why then did Palm succeed where Apple failed? More generally, why is it that the firms that create radical new markets are rarely the ones that scale them up into mass markets? And what does the answer to this question imply for firms that aspire to create the markets of the future? We aim to answer these questions in this book. It turns out that there are specific reasons why pioneers fail to scale up markets, and understanding these reasons will help you appreciate what the modern corporation needs to do if it wants to achieve radical innovation. Radical Innovations It should be obvious from the examples that we have used so far that this book is concerned with one specific type of innovation� namely, radical innovation. By this we mean something concrete. Innovations are considered radical if they meet two conditions: first, they introduce major new value propositions that disrupt existing consumer habits and behaviors (for example, what on earth did our ancestors do in the evenings without television!); second, the markets that they create undermine the competences and complementary assets on which existing competitors have built their success. Everyone knows that there are different kinds of innovations with different competitive effects. It is, therefore, important to appreciate that what we say in this book does not apply to all kinds of innovations, just to the subset of innovations that can be classified as radical. Our interest is in radical innovations because these are the kind of innovations that give rise to new-to-the-world markets. Not all innovations are radical. When we classify innovations along the dimensions of their effect on customer habits and behaviors and their effect on the established firms� competences and complementary assets, we get four types of innovations, as shown in Figure 1.1. The dividing points in the matrix are obviously subjective and our intention is not to defend the boundaries of a particular definition. Rather, our goal is to simply suggest that �innovation� can mean different things to different people, that different types of innovation exist, and that a given innovation may be more or less radical than another innovation. Our interest in this book is on those innovations labeled as radical innovations in this matrix. These are innovations that have a disruptive effect on both customers and producers. They are based on a different set of scientific principles from the prevailing set, create radically new markets, demand new consumer behaviors and present major challenges to the existing competitors. The introductionof the car at the end of the nineteenth century is an example of radical innovation. Incremental innovations, on the other hand, merely extend the current proposition facing consumers. They introduce relatively minor changes to the product or service, build upon the competences and assets of the existing competitors, and tend to reinforce the dominance of the established players. The introduction of new features in a car (such as four-wheel drive, power steering, and fog lights) are examples of incremental innovations. Major innovations are those that require fundamental changes in consumer behavior but build upon the established players� competences and complementary assets. For example, the introduction of picturephones could be considered a major innovation Misconceptions About Markets Created by Radical Innovation Over the past fifty years, a lot of ideas have been developed and much advice given to companies on how they can become more innovative so as to create entirely new markets. This advice has been hungrily consumed by corporations large and small. After all, what company does not want to become more innovative and what CEO does not dream about leading the way into virgin territories, discovering in the process exciting new markets? Yet, as we will show in this book, this is nothing more than misplaced hope for the majority of big, established companies! There are two reasons why we say this: first, most big companies cannot create radical new markets; second, such companies should not want to create radical new markets. Big companies are unlikely to create radical new markets for two main reasons. First, the innovation process that creates radically new markets cannot be easily replicated inside the modern corporation. As we will show in this book, radical innovations that give rise to entirely new markets are rarely driven by demand or customer needs. Rather, they are pushed onto the market by scientists working on independent projects all over the world. Supplypush innovation processes emerge in a wide variety of industries and share certain characteristics: � They are developed in a haphazard way without a clear customer need driving them. � They emerge out of the efforts of a large number of scientists and engineers working independently on seemingly unrelated research projects, who sometimes devise the technology for their own uses. � They go through a long gestation process when nothing seems to happen until they suddenly explode onto the market. Now ask yourself: Is this an innovation process that can be replicated in the R&D facility of a single firm? As we will show later, big companies cannot simply import or replicate such a process inside their R&D laboratories. But there is a second reason why big companies cannot create radically new markets: they do not have the skills or mindsets for it! Even worse, all attempts to learn the necessary skills or adopt the necessary mindsets will not do the trick for them. This is because the skills and mindsets that they currently have (and need) to compete in their mature businesses conflict with those they would need for creation. Trying to incorporate the new skills and mindsets into the existing organizational DNA will end in failure. This simple fact has not discouraged academics from continuing to offer advice to big companies on how they could adopt the skills and mindsets that will make them successful discoverers of new markets. For example, noting that big companies operate with so many rules and regulations that end up stifling creativity, several researchers have proposed that not only should the strategy process in the modern corporation be modified to allow everybody in the company to contribute strategic ideas but the culture of established corporations should be changed to encourage and promote activists and revolutionaries�rather than employees who simply obey the rules. Similarly, arguing that the incentives and planning processes within the established firm can suffocate the growth of new disruptive markets, other researchers have proposed a separate businessplanning process to develop and nurture new business creation. Yet, despite all this advice and good intentions, it is very rare to find a big company among the innovators that create radically new markets. Why not? What people forget is that successful innovation is essentially a coupling process that requires the linking of two distinct activities: first the discovery of a new product or service idea and its initial testing in the market, a process that, if successful, creates a new market niche�an activity that we will call colonizing a new market; and second the transformation of the idea from a little niche into a mass market�an activity that we will call consolidating the market. It turns out that the skills, mindsets, and competencies needed for discovery and colonization are not only different from those needed for consolidation and commercialization, they also conflict with the latter set. This implies that the firms that are good at invention are unlikely to be good at commercialization and vice versa. Some firms�primarily young, small, and agile�are good at colonization. Other firms�primarily older, established, and big� are good at consolidation. It�s extremely hard, however, to find firms that are good at both colonization and consolidation. This suggests to us that instead of advising the established corporation how to adopt skills and mindsets that are alien to its DNA, we should be encouraging it to focus its attention on what it does best: consolidating new markets. More Misconceptions To reiterate, not only is the innovation process that creates new radical markets impossible to replicate inside a firm but�even worse�the skills and mindsets that big established companies have are not the ones needed for creating radical new markets. Nor can established firms easily adopt the skills of creation, because they conflict with their existing skills. This all sounds discouraging for established firms, but not everything is bad for them! They may not be good at creating radical new markets, but, truth be told, they don�t need to. That�s because creating radical new markets is not where the money is. Real value comes from consolidating newly created markets, not from discovering them. And don�t believe those that tell you that you need to be the discoverer of a new market to then consolidate it or that those that discover the new market are the ones that consolidate and conquer it. The evidence shows that colonization and consolidation are essentially different activities undertaken by different firms. The evidence also shows that if you have the skills to discover new markets, it�s unlikely that you will have what it takes to scale up these markets; and vice versa. As a result, the companies that end up capturing and dominating the new-to-the-world markets are almost never the ones that created these markets. Given this fact, why would any established company want to create a new market? Surely, the advice we should be giving established companies is how to scale up and consolidate new markets, not how to create them. Not that the misconceptions about new markets stop there. There is now a widely held belief that even if a company does not actually create a new market, moving fast to colonize it pays off. The importance of pioneering or being first to move into a new market is something that generations of managers have been taught to accept as conventional wisdom. Yet pioneering the newto- the world markets is simply bad advice for established firms! It�s not that pioneering is bad in all cases�but for radical, new-to-theworld markets it is. If we were to take a close look at how new markets get created and how they look in their early formative years, the pattern that repeats itself again and again is the following: the companies that grow to dominate these new markets are almost never the first into the new market. The success of the conquerors of new-to-theworld markets is based not on moving fast but on choosing the right time to move�and that is rarely first. In fact, the majority, if not all, of the pioneers of new markets rarely survive the consolidation of the market�most disappear, never to be heard of again. The problem is that the pioneers of new-to-the-world markets die quickly and without first growing the market to a respectable size that would win them attention. As a result, they quickly vanish from people�s memories and the glory that in truth belongs to them is thrust upon those who came after them and successfully scaled things up into a big mass market. Thus most people believe that Edison pioneered electric lighting or even that Gillette pioneered the safety razor. Yet nothing could be further from the truth! As it turns out, the structural characteristics of radically new markets are such that pioneering by big companies rarely makes sense. Most established companies would do better if they follow the fast-second strategy. In other words, the companies that conquer radical, new-to-the-world markets do so by racing to be second. |
| quote: |
| Originally posted by Ishkur (PS: The only songs I've ever heard are Song 2 and Boys & Girls. On this side of the pond, Blur is a virtual fringe group, lumped with the "alternative" set (that goes, also, for Radiohead). Beasties are far more resilient, though that has to do with the stubborn selling point of hip hop...aka hip pop, which is what they are) |
What did I just say?
Forest. Trees. It really doesn't matter who did what or how or when or where to who...you've got a magnifying glass and you're picking out specifics. Put it down, back up a bit, and take a look at the larger picture..what it matters is what sells, and how sounds, cultures and movements are hijacked by a second generation of commentators.
To sum up what Spacey Orange said: Success never goes to the inventor, but to the exploiter of the invention.
Who invented Rock N Roll? .....and then what happened?
Who invented Rap? .....and then what happened?
Who invented Disco? .....and then what happened?
Who invented Punk? .....and then what happened?
Who invented Trance? .....and then what happened?
You starting to see the pattern?
You said, and I quote:
"To wit: commercial music, by its very definition, is very simple, tepid, watered down, safe and boring."
Now you're saying:
"Success never goes to the inventor, but to the exploiter of the invention."
When did I ever, ever, fucking ever argue against that? What I'm arguing against is the first quote, which is something you haven't defended in the slightest.
Yes, those two quotes compliment each other quite nicely, don't they?
Now answer the fucking questions, J.
The questions are irrelevant. Yes Ishkur, you are right in your cutting observation that people who invent shit don't usually get the credit, but that does not automatically equate to all commercial music being bland, watered down, tepid safe and boring, does it?
What kind of fucking syllogism is that? All those people who invented new genres were standing on the shoulders of giants too, you know. They didn't just materialise styles of music out of thin air. So by a bit of logical extension, all music is very simple, tepid, watered down, safe and boring because it owes its existence to someone else influencing it in the first place. Therefore, your comment does not apply because it is a universal application to music, you are fucking wrong and we all go to the after-party.
dominant designs (best-sellers, mass-consumer goods,etc) such as music compositions, toasters, computer programs, etc., are by their very nature consensus designs. what that means is that every consumer that purchases that design makes a trade off as to their personal needs of the product. when many people do this, the dominant design satisfies many people, but only does it adequately. each consumer is not satisfied to the fullest. so dominant designs do tend to be safe, bland, and defintely not daring. they must satisfy many, otherwise they will fail as mass consumer goods.
| quote: |
| Originally posted by SYSTEM-J So by a bit of logical extension, all music is very simple, tepid, watered down, safe and boring because it owes its existence to someone else influencing it in the first place. Therefore, your comment does not apply because it is a universal application to music, you are fucking wrong and we all go to the after-party. |
| quote: |
| Originally posted by tiestoisgod So really, no artiste sits down and rips a brand new genre out of the air whilst writing, its a combination of their influences. Example; Hendrix was a mainly blues-inspired guy. His playing & writing technique was outlandish & spectacular and took guitar playing and guitar music to new unchartered heights. Question for the Ish of all knowledge; Does that make his music innovative as he introduced new elements, or does it make it tepid and watered down becuase his main sound was blues that had by then (late 1960's) become popular due to the influx of white British artistes? |
| quote: |
| Originally posted by SYSTEM-J commercial music |
| quote: |
| Originally posted by Ishkur Right. Commercial music. Meaning music made, right from the outset, as specifically to be the most commercially appealing. Sell the most. B enjoyed by the greatest number of people. How do you make something that EVERYBODY will like? .....you make it boring and inoffensive. Nice. Safe. Plain. So....let me re-iterate: A form of music, by accident, becomes moderately successful..........the commercial industry sees this trend. Then what happens? Come on, connect the dots. I don't want to lead you by the hand through this. |
| quote: |
| Originally posted by Ishkur Right. Commercial music. Meaning music made, right from the outset, as specifically to be the most commercially appealing. Sell the most. B enjoyed by the greatest number of people. |
max walder - crown has a long build up. i think its great. =P
| quote: |
| Originally posted by SYSTEM-J Er... I assumed we were talking about music with high sales. Otherwise I'm not sure why you brought commercial music into the thread. |
Powered by: vBulletin
Copyright © 2000-2021, Jelsoft Enterprises Ltd.