☕️ Impacts of streaming on length/quality/promotion of pop music (sorry this is kinda broad lol)
Sorry I wasn’t ignoring this but trying to give it some thought!
I always struggle with these sort of things bc I’m always worried I’m being a stick in the mud and not accepting the way in which pop culture is moving. Innovation and forecasting is probably not my strong suit. But I’ve gotta say: hate it. I think technology impacting how we actually make music is necessary and good and important to music. The AI episode of switched on pop was so enlightening and challenged me a lot in this regard! I think the music industry impacting how we make music is no bueno. There are plenty of ways in which pop artists have used the structure and limitations of money hungry labels and radio stations, etc. to create timeless music. But I think the particularly competitive field and the homogeny streaming encourages more than ever before is bad for quality. This Craig Jenkins piece I always go on about describes it well.
My one true love Mark Ronson had good thoughts about it while promoting the album that kind of sum up how I feel:
“all your songs have to be under three minutes and 15 seconds because if people don’t listen to them all the way to the end they go into this ratio of ‘non-complete heard’, which sends your Spotify rating down” and songwriters are forced to churn out hits at short order.
“Everybody shows off about how quickly they write songs these days, because of the way pop music is made,” he says. “People are like: ‘Yeah man, we wrote that song in 30 minutes,’ and I feel like: ‘Yeah, and it fucking sounds like you wrote it in 30 minutes.’ There are things written in that time that are fucking brilliant – Amy wrote Back to Black in, like, 10 minutes – but a lot of the time I think the quality’s slipped to a point where it’s just OK, where I wouldn’t feel comfortable with doing that with my own music.”
“Everything has to be produced so it sounds competitively as loud as possible coming out of an iPhone or as loud as possible when it comes out of a Spotify hits playlist; you have to make sure the kick drum and the guitar have the same loudness and presence all the way through the whole fucking song or you don’t stand a chance. It’s kind of crazy how you have to think about music now. I mean, Amy wouldn’t have let that shit happen for a second, which makes me think how Back to Black would have been received, or how it would have probably performed badly on Spotify playlists if it was released today.”