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Success of pop
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| Romchik22 |
I've been having this debate with my friends regarding hip-hop and current "rap", and the argument was from my friends side that pop-music was actually good music, I said otherwise. What I have a hard time to explain is, why the is it soo successful. Bieber clearly lacks talent, Drake says lyrics that have NO SENSE, Niki minaj is complete trash and Guetta is absolutely brutal @ being dj let alone he doesn't mix at some events.
Why is POP soo successful, specially today??! |
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| klobo |
ive had plenty of arguments with people about this subject haha! people are just tooo narrow minded and listens to whatver mass listens to. catchy lyrics.good looking artist..... the society and social media tells them that rihanna and lmfao is the new and that its gooodd.
I was at cafeteria this pass saturday and cannot believe they still plays the sameeeee f....king songs after 2-3 yrssss of same commercial crappppp!!
those people u argue with probably never heard a techno song.
Solution to the problem is show them what real music is!! |
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| Dykes_on_Jay |
| michael jacksone and kids. |
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| Adam420 |
| Marketing dollars |
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| Romchik22 |
I don't really think it's all about marketing. I think it's a certain level of education, plus what does music really mean to you on a personal level. For instance, if I make a bunch of people that like Guetta, Avicii, and the rest of pop culture listen to the EDM music that I listen to, they'll say "WTF IS THIS CRAP"... While any random person may enjoy Avicii, Guetta, and rest of pop. It's as if POP music doesn't require "thinking", it's a bit like a porn... Get a hard-on, whack-it and then cum and that's where it pretty much ends. As for most of us, music has a much bigger meaning then a 5 min gratification.
Or how often did I hear my friends tell me " where's the drop " , as if there's only that in EDM... WE NEED TO EDUCATE PEOPLE!! |
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| Adam420 |
| Most people don't really want to think about what they're listening to. I've realized that for most people it's actually not about music but about songs. I think most people can't stand to listen to instrumentals, for example, they just don't see the point. |
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| Fran666 |
| quote: | Originally posted by Romchik22
I don't really think it's all about marketing. I think it's a certain level of education, plus what does music really mean to you on a personal level. For instance, if I make a bunch of people that like Guetta, Avicii, and the rest of pop culture listen to the EDM music that I listen to, they'll say "WTF IS THIS CRAP"... While any random person may enjoy Avicii, Guetta, and rest of pop. It's as if POP music doesn't require "thinking", it's a bit like a porn... Get a hard-on, whack-it and then cum and that's where it pretty much ends. As for most of us, music has a much bigger meaning then a 5 min gratification.
Or how often did I hear my friends tell me " where's the drop " , as if there's only that in EDM... WE NEED TO EDUCATE PEOPLE!! |
you never thought that some people just don't give a ? not everyone has a passion for music. any catchy beat will do the trick for them.
saying it's about education is a bit pretentious.
edm is supposed to be about fun. partying. dancing and more dancing.
if you want to be an elitist in music, you are in the wrong style of music imo ;) |
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| Dj Nacht |
I put this up on Facebook the other day but nobody responded to it. I'm glad you brought this subject up .:gsmile:
It's from the the book I'm currently reading.
Extracted from chapter 8 of The Blind Watchamker. I extracted it the best I could from an online pdf.
http://uath.org/download/literature/Richard.Dawkins.The.Blind.Watchmaker.pdf Go to page 218 and start reading from "But if this is an analogy for sexual selection". I don't suggest you read the copy and paste I did, it is missing stuff.
But if this is an analogy for sexual selection, it is so, at best, only in that I have called the 'weak' sense. Let me jump now straight to the nearest approach I can think of to a 'strong' analogy: to the world of 'pop' records. If you listen to discussion among aficionados of pop records, or switc...h on the mid-Atlantic mouthings of disc jockeys on Explosions and spirals 219
the radio, you will discover a very curious thing. Whereas other genres of art criticism betray some preoccupation with style or skill of performance, with mood, emotional impact, with the qualities and properties of the art-form, the 'pop' music sub-culture is almost exclusively preoccupied with popularity itself. It is quite clear that the important thing about a record is not what it sounds like, but how many people are buying it. The whole sub-culture is obsessed with a rank ordering of records, called the Top 20 or Top 40, which is based only upon sales figures. The thing that really matters about a record is where it lies in the Top 20. This, when you think about it, is a very singular fact, and a very interesting one if we are thinking about R. A. Fisher's theory of runaway evolution. It is probably also significant that a disc jockey seldom mentions the current position of a record in the charts, without at the same time telling us its position in the previous week. This allows the listener to assess, not just the present popularity of a record, but also its rate and direction of change in popularity.
It appears to be a fact that many people will buy a record for no
better reason than that large numbers of other people are buying the same record, or are likely to do so. Striking evidence comes from the fact that record companies have been known to send representatives into key shops to buy up large numbers of their own records, in order to push sales figures up into the region where they may 'take off. (This is not so difficult to do as it sounds, because the Top 20 figures are based upon sales returns from a small sample of record shops. If you know which these key shops are, you don't have to buy all that many records from them in order to make a significant impact on nationwide estimates of sales. There are also well-authenticated stories of shop assistants in these key shops being bribed.)
To a lesser extent, the same phenomenon of popularity being
popular for its own sake is well known in the worlds of book
publishing, womens' fashions, and advertising generally. One of the best things an advertiser can say about a product is that it is the bestselling product of its kind. Best-seller lists of books are published weekly, and it is undoubtedly true that as soon as a book sells enough copies to appear in one of these lists, its sales increase even more, simply by virtue of that fact. Publishers speak of a book 'taking off, and those publishers with some knowledge of science even speak of a 'critical mass for take-off. The analogy here is to an atomic bomb. Uranium-235 is stable as long as you don't have too much of it in one place. There is a critical mass which, once exceeded, permits a chain reaction or runaway process to get going, with devastating results. An 220 atom bomb contains two lumps of uranium-235, both smaller than the critical mass. When the bomb is detonated the two lumps are thrust together, the critical mass is exceeded, and that is the end of a medium-sized city. When a book's sales 'go critical', the numbers reach the point where word-of-mouth recommendations et cetera cause its sales suddenly to take-off in a runaway fashion. Rates of sales suddenly become dramatically larger than they were before critical mass was reached, and there may be a period of exponential growth before the inevitable levelling out and subsequent decline. The underlying phenomena are not difficult to understand. Basically . we have here yet more examples of positive feedback. A book's, even a pop record's, real qualities are not negligible in determining its sales but, nevertheless, wherever there are positive feedbacks lurking, there is bound to be a strong arbitrary element determining which book or record succeeds, and which fails. If critical mass and take-off are important elements in any success story, there is bound to be a lot of luck, and there is also plenty of scope for manipulation and exploitation by people that understand the system. It is, for instance, worth laying out a considerable sum of money to promote a book or record up to the point where it just 'goes critical', because you then don't need to spend so much money on promoting it thereafter: the positive feedbacks take over and do the work of publicity for you. The positive feedbacks here have something in common with those of sexual selection according to the Fisher/Lande theory, but there are
differences too. Peahens that prefer long-tailed peacocks are favoured solely because other females have the same preference. The male's qualities themselves are arbitrary and irrelevant. In this respect, the record enthusiast who wants a particular record just because it is in the Top 20 is behaving just like a peahen. But the precise mechanisms by which the positive feedbacks work in the two cases are different. And
this, I suppose, brings us back to where we began in this chapter, with a warning that analogies should be taken so far, and no farther. |
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| Casa |
i can appreciate great pop music as much as i can appreciate the most obscure electronic tunes. Following a principle such as "it's good for what it is" seems to work for me.
If im listening to the new release on Ostgut Ton, i'm obviously looking for something different than the latest Alicia Keys record. There's beauty and talent in every genre, it's finding what elements you connect with. There's just as much garbage techno as there is garbage pop. Discrediting something because it's more accessible is very uneducated in my opinion.
I love listening to something like "Alicia Keys - Girl On Fire" and trying to decipher what the engineers and producer's did to the drum track, or how they eq'd her voice as much as I enjoy trying to re-create marcel dettmann's distortion settings on his O/V/R remix.
these are my ideas and I guess coming into dance music from a technological background and not a dj background has something to do with it. I just like music that is well made for it's sound or scene. Just keep in mind that no matter how obscure your music tastes are, the music you listen to will always be "commercial" to someone else. Just construct your own reality with your music.
if you don't like what's being played on the radio, then don't listen to the radio, simple as that. The next time you are in a chat with someone that listens to strictly chart-topping pop, ask them what they like about it. Chances are they will say that it's happy and fun and makes them dance. If that's what someone looks for in music, then all the best for them, they clearly don't view music the same way as you do and there's nothing wrong with that.
I recommend this lecture to anyone interested in the music industry.
http://www.redbullmusicacademy.com/...vibe_over_money |
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| corjay9 |
there's a reason its called pop music, it stands for popular music. People who listen to pop music aren't fans of music, they listen to whats on the radio because hearing a kick drum drop on the 4 doesn't give them boners, and thats fine.
To them music is not a passion, maybe that person is into reading.. and you bring up this book you thought was great because it was a New York Times best seller, and he'll look at you and call you a moron because you don't know good literature. Some people love wine.. you can tell them man I tried this insane wine this weekend and they'll laugh at you, etc... there's no point in arguing over things that are subjective.
and thats life. |
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| WittyHandle |
| quote: | Originally posted by Fran666
you never thought that some people just don't give a ? not everyone has a passion for music. any catchy beat will do the trick for them.
saying it's about education is a bit pretentious.
edm is supposed to be about fun. partying. dancing and more dancing.
if you want to be an elitist in music, you are in the wrong style of music imo ;) |
I agree with most of this. Music should be about feeling good, whether it be fun, a sad song when you're down, or any other emotion we feel. Not everyone is as passionate about music, just as not everyone is as passionate and educated about movies as other people, painting, sports, whatever. Unfortunately, this seems to be a perfect style of music for elitists to prosper. I just see elitism as a real sign of personal weakness. Like what you like, no matter how weird or popular it is, and allow others the same respect. |
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| Dykes_on_Jay |
| saying that pop fans are not fans of music is pretty ridiculous though. they pay to go see concerts, buy merchandise and assure the artists success. you can be a fan of music without being a musical encyclopedia. people enjoy certain things in their own ways. hot dogs are , but it does not mean that people who eat hot dogs don't like food. |
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