|
| quote: | Originally posted by Ishkur
All music production can be broken down into 3 principle facets:
The Songwriter.
The Producer.
The Performer.
Up until the 60s, very rarely was one person all three. In classical parlance, the Songwriter was the composer, putting annotated music on paper, the Producer was the Conductor, completing the Songwriter's vision through symphony, and the performer was the orchestra, playing the actual music live.
It wasn't until the rush of self-contained "bands" in the 60s who wrote, produced and performed all their own music (bands had existed long before this, but the Beatles were the first ones who really brought the idea to the forefront) that people began to think of them as one and the same, but in most pop music, those distinctions still exist. Consider, for instance, the hit pop song "Hit Me Baby One More Time". This would be categorized as:
Songwriter(s) == Jörgen Elofsson, David Krueger, Per Magnusson and Max Martin
Producer == Max Martin
Performer == Britney Spears
Max Martin is the brainchild behind other acts as well, including Backstreet Boys, Nsync and much of Christina Aguilera's early output, which is why their music sounds so similar. Say what you want about the music, you can't ignore his knack for a good pop hook since he seems to do it so effortlessly. Now, Britney may be the most famous member of this partnership, but only because she is the faceplate, the image to sell the music to the public. She isn't the marketer, per se; she is the product itself. But she in no way makes the most money out of all of them. Martin's been in the industry for 20 years, and long after she's become a joke of a VH1 special, he'll have moved on to create the next pop sensation. So he doesn't care that he doesn't have millions of adorating fans. In fact, he likes it that way. Puppetmasters don't want fame and attention. They just want money and power. And he has tons of it.
Sometimes the songwriter is also the performer, but need help from a producer to make their songs professional. Such was the pact between Michael Jackson and Quincy Jones to create the biggest selling album of all time: Thriller.
Now, in electronic music's case, typically the Producer and Songwriter are one and the same, since music production these days has literally fused with music creation (in the old days, you wrote the song first, then you recorded it. Today, most producers aren't musically educated enough to write music or even conceptualize complete songs in their head, and thus quite often write the songs as they record them, making it up as they go and do whatever sounds right to them). Who is the performer? ...why, the DJ of course. So thus, you have, for example, this dichotomy:
Songwriter: Matt Darey, Red Jerry
Producer: Lost Tribe/Westbam
Performer: Paul Oakenfold
Obviously the weird system of electronic music production management and promotion is completely at odds with the ordinary world of album-oriented marketing, but the people making the jump from the pop world to the EDM one don't know that. Thus, they really do see Oakenfold as a Britney Spears. And thus, they really do see Wizards of the Sonic or Gamemaster as Oakenfold tracks...not that he made them, but that he owns them. That they are his signature, his calling card, and that only he can play them and no other DJ can, because they're HIS tracks. HIS records that he always plays at his "shows". For any other DJ to play these records would be seen as almost blasphemous, on par with Nsync singing a Backstreet Boys song (although, sure, bands play cover tunes all the time, but not generally their direct competition).
And like Britney, the DJ gets all the fame. But unlike the pop system, again the EDM scene shows its bizzaro world behavior in nullifying the success the Producer deserves. The DJ gets the fame AND the money. It has, in recent, years, forced producers to come out of the woodwork to start DJing more since that is where the money is. They make even more money when they come out and spin just their own productions, becoming 1.5 hour commercials for their own music, like mobile sales teams (Gabriel & Dresden and Above & Beyond are the biggest culprits of this).
So what must be done with this? .....simple: We must educate all the newbs. You can start by getting this Tshirt:
 |
fantastic post! said everything I ever wanted to say about this subject..
|
