Why the big, natural sound of popular music went away

[Undertoad]

"When all the artists and engineers, all the arrangers and musicians that played on giant tracks by people like Phil Spector, with 12 tambourines and two pianos -- those people were still in the studios in Los Angeles, playing. But all of that started to die -- it was the most amazing thing, this vibrant creative culture started to go away. And it was because of...."

I've removed the speaker's name, and the end of this quote, and I would like you to consider the answer. Is it because of...:

"... technology making it easy and cheap to create big sounds on computers."

"... the natural, inevitable change in popular musical fashion."

"... the greedy executive producers who didn't want to spend tens of thousands of dollars making a record that might not sell."

"... an audience not educated in music, and thus, not understanding the nuances in those old records."

"... artists being able to compete with the big, moneyed system artists by completely writing and recording music at home, alone."

"... so much competition that good songs are found without big productions."

"... an industry that shifted to making money from live music, cutting out anything that needed a large string and horn section."

And now the answer. The speaker is Neil Young and his opinion, which I find laughable, is:

"... the MP3 and the cheapening of the quality to the point where it was practically unrecognizable."

http://www.billboard.com/biz/article...w-gets-awkward

[Clodfobble]

Heh. Old people are funny.

Confession: I tend to get Neil Young and Ted Nugent mixed up if I don't think very carefully about which one is being discussed.

[Griff]

Wait. Is a dirty hippy railing against the democratization of music?

To some extent I actually agree with him. I do like ska concerts because nobody in their right mind would put trombone and trumpet samples in a keyboard and call it live music. (I'm still pissed at the Moody Blues.) Drum machines should also be reserved for the lower levels of Hell.

[Sundae]

Which of the levels though?
And which Hell?

In Dante's it gets colder the lower you go down. I don't need a drummer to tell me extreme temperatures adversely affect instruments. So maybe drum machines is all they got anyway.

Shit, maybe they come from there.
Sweet FSM, backing away from this thread, no need to send albinomonks after me for exposing the conspiracy. Him, it was him.

Make the monkeys eat Julia instead!

[sexobon]

I'm guessing that Neil Young is referring to the boom in portable music players after the MP3 replaced bulkier CD players and concomitantly the cheap, inferior, mass produced earphones/buds included with many of them. Post MP3 generations of children growing up with the technology accepted that sound quality level as the norm and have adjusted their cost to benefit ratio expectations to it. It's evidenced in what they'll settle for at the concerts they go to. Likewise with downloading individual songs to MP3 rather than buying artists' entire albums which also helped support those large performing and recording ensembles. The advent of MP3 influenced many of the alternative reasons you gave. Neil young may not have articulated it well; but, when it comes to the music industry he's not a laughable novice even if he has become prone to exaggeration (e.g. "... practically unrecognizable.") in his old age.

[xoxoxoBruce]

The music you make, is equal to the drugs you take.
But it's got to be the right drugs, and they're not the ones promoted by thugs and the media.

[xoxoxoBruce]

The result is you can listen to music anytime, anywhere, for cheap, and likely free.
In 1952 to listen to 1 song, just 1 time, cost as much as a burger.

[Griff]

Cake posted that they were getting something like .006 cents per play on Spotify. The industry seems as muddled as ever.

[Undertoad]

You will find the artists who had hits before the Internet are whining hard. But it was the previous system that was broken, not this one. The previous system led to all music for the millennial generation being pirated, and nobody getting paid. Metallica whined about that because they were big winners under that system. You might remember it as the time when we paid $15.99 for a single album. Fuck that shit.

http://business.time.com/2013/12/03/...ng-on-spotify/

Spotify doesn’t pay on a “per song stream” model, exactly: the total royalty pie is split among all rights holders based on the percentage of total Spotify streams their songs garner. But the company estimates that the average song generates between $0.006 and $0.0084 per stream in royalties. This may seem like a pittance, but Spotify’s data shows that the numbers add up, at least for big artists. The company says the biggest album on the service each month typically generates more than $400,000 in royalties. A “current global star,” who Spotify chose not to disclose, generated more than $3 million in royalty payments between August 2012 and July 2013. Spotify expects these figures to increase dramatically as its revenue increases but the number of artists splitting the money remains more or less the same.

Some back-of-the-napkin math using Spotify’s listenership data and these royalty figures provides a sense for how much money the hottest songs in music are making for artists and labels right now. Here are the 10 most popular songs on Spotify the week before Thanksgiving, with an estimate of how much money they’ve generated in royalties since they were released:

1. The Monster / Eminem / 35.1 million streams / $210,000 – $294,000

2. Timber / Pitbull / 32.0 million streams / $192,000 – $269,000

3. Lorde / Royals / 65.3 million streams / $392,000 – $549,000

4. OneRepublic / Counting Stars / 57.7 million streams / $346,000 – $484,000

5. Avicii / Hey Brother / 46.5 million streams / $279,000 – $391,000

6. Miley Cyrus / Wrecking Ball / 60.4 million streams / $363,000 – $508,000

7. Katy Perry / Roar / 64.6 million streams / $388,000 – $543,000

8. Avicii / Wake Me Up / 152.1 million streams / $913,000 – $1.3 million

9. Drake / Hold On, We’re Going Home /47.1 million streams / $283,000 – $396,000

10. Ellie Goulding / Burn / 53.8 million streams / $323,000 – $452,000

[xoxoxoBruce]

UT, who's getting that monthly revenue, artist + agent + ___ ?

[Undertoad]

If they are on a major record label, the artist gets about 18%. Same as it was 20 years ago.

[Gravdigr]

So, as far as major labels, nothing's changed?

[xoxoxoBruce]

It has as far as the quality of the product.