The State of Music Today

This is an excerpt from a longer essay that I thought would be suitable here, the rest of which is available at my other blog:

Music, as well, has hit a period of stagnancy. Though many argue that there are groups out there creating sounds that are both good and fresh, such music is not being heard by or broadcast to the mass market for the most part. Even if it was being put out there, there is a huge portion of the listening audience that prefers to hear the same songs and artists that have already been on the radio for many years. Of the list of the top 25 highest grossing tours of 2010, eleven of those acts have been performing for over twenty years (two more, the Dave Matthews Band and Tim McGraw, are also close to that mark, with the former having been formed in 1991 and the latter releasing his debut album in 1992). There are only four artists on the list who’ve debuted within the last three years:
Lady Gaga coming in at number 4 on the list, Taylor Swift at 15th, Justin Bieber at 19th, and Miley Cyrus at 22nd. That said, those four are hardly groundbreaking artists musically, with the majority of their material derived from rehashing previously successful pop and country music. Even Lady Gaga’s performance art antics are all homages to other performers of years gone by.

What it comes down to is that people know they’re going to like something that they’ve heard or seen before and already liked; by extension, the film, television, and music industries play to that concept. Unless someone has already been extremely successful with a prior project, in order to push something new, a person or group needs to come out and demonstrate that they can generate their own buzz and following. Otherwise, producers and studio executives feel far more comfortable pushing a product already known to have appeal. In the music community especially, as a result of the combination of that attitude trickling down from the top and the transparent desires of the listening community as a whole, many new artists will move in a direction that will lead toward success as opposed to innovation (a.k.a.”selling out”). It takes something truly extraordinary, bold, and fortuitous at this point to break through that pressure barrier.

To return to the matter at the heart of this, people have come to take for granted that if they want to hear something again, they just click on the song and listen. In a sense, it’s related to the old adage that “absence makes the heart grow fonder”. When something’s not always around, you grow to appreciate it more while it’s there. Conversely, the more commonplace and accessible something is, the more you begin to take it for granted. Music, at this point, has become abstracted into an ever-present background to life, and there’s no need to experience anything new if you don’t desire to do so: each person is solely in charge of the music that they take in. Services like Pandora and Last.fm have made great strides in exposing people to new music that they never would have encountered otherwise, yet they still pander to that concept that people like what they’ve already heard, with each service carefully engineered to match the next song with the listener’s sensibilities. In a very real way, the wealth of music that’s available at all times is hurting the creative ebb and flow of music as an art form by not challenging the public to experience new sounds, as well as by cultivating a lack of appreciation for the actual beauty and intricacy of what is being heard. After all, a note on its own is much like that picture of a sunset: it can be beautiful to a certain extent, but its real beauty and power is derived from the context in which one finds it.