I do instrumental exclusively, unless you count weird vocal synths. Maybe the author of this study shouldn't have constrained it to the top 10...
There's a huge world of music out there. The most popular stuff is a tiny little sliver meant to appeal to the greatest number of people. For me, things have only gotten better since discovering a bunch of weird niche stuff in the '00s, especially since Bandcamp and Soundcloud gave indies a place to find an audience without investing in the infrastructure needed for streaming and sales.
I was going to say something similar but not as harsh. I definitely think that the internet has made finding niche music that less of difficult a thing, but when the set you normalize over is the set of popular music rather than all music, his argument is sound.
An interesting question (and more difficult one to answer) would be whether access to niche music has increased and more people pursue niches in general today than before.
Yeah I would definitely say electronic dance music, at least how it exists in Europe, is a definite counter example. A dance track will always have a intro and a outro for mixing purposes and will probably be between 5-7 minutes in length, regardless of weather its uploaded on Soundcloud or a limited press on vinyl.
As far as pop music goes, it seems only natural that music which was for decades made for radio will change once the primary medium changes. The main purpose of intros seems to be for the radio DJ to talk over it.
[I didn't read the article, but] I think the move to buying songs one-at-a-time has hurt the whole 'album' concept, including long intros, long interludes, and the idea of a body of work that builds on a theme.
I think that was true for the iTunes years before Spotify and other streaming services came along. Before, you had to pay for each song so you picked just a few you liked. Now, it's just as easy to play the whole album as to play one song. (In facts, it's easier to queue up an album than to play one song at a time since you have to choose what to play fewer times per time interval.)
Anecdotally, we've seen whole-album concepts become big hits in recent years: Kendrick Lamar's To Pimp a Butterfly, Kanye West's Life of Pablo, Chance the Rapper's Coloring Book, etc.
On top of that, almost all hip-hop songs these days have intro tags (which producers worked on the song.) Not instrumental of course, but non-song content none-the-less.
I've sold about 12 albums (though most are closer to traditional EP length). Never sold a single. I remember seeing some data that said that was the norm on Bandcamp. I think albums are doing fine, but maybe the amalgam of loosely connected musical product that most albums are is not working anymore.
All the albums I've sold have had a clear narrative thread going through it, while all the random assortments I did early on never sold.
Streaming allows you to pull the whole album rather than making arbitrary choices though which is a good thing.
It has however wrecked my attention span which I’m trying to fix. I bought a CD player with a monitor output and some CDs and some nice headphones. I can actually enjoy my favourite albums now.
I suppose there’s more emphasis on streaming and singles, but when someone actually aims for an album, it’s as good as ever.
If you want to avoid this, just don’t listen to popularity based radios like spotify. EDIT: Apparently it's not popularity based. I still find it's difficult to avoid single-oriented contemporary music. Ironically I've found pandora to be pretty good at this.
I used to think this until I listened to a lot more older music. A lot of pop records cut in the 50s to 60s had no "theme" other than the generic love/sex/dancing themes common to all pop music. I think the concept albums we know now are a few of exceptional concept albums that are just as uncommon then as they were now.
More directly, it has hurt the monetization of those concepts, which inevitably affects their popularity. The concept of the album is still dear enough to many people that there it will continue to exist in the fringes until something else comes along.
Yeah, this makes me sad. I mostly listen to music when I'm working, and hearing the same mix of 50 "top hits" gets tiring really fast. 45-60 minutes of music that has some similarity and continuity is WAY better.
I love listening to entire albums. I don't have favorite songs, I have favorite artists. If I like the artist, I listen to an entire album by them. I have never once in my life paid for a single song. If and when I buy music, it's by the album and not by the song.
Yeah, I've been loving Bandcamp quite a lot for this. Finally there's a truly dignified way to buy and sell copies of albums. I'm free to reencode, batch modify the tags, add replaygain tags based on EBU R128/ITU-R BS.1770, copy freely to all my devices, stream it anywhere.
It's always sad to me when a band moves off the platform, because generally speaking it means that I will not buy their album at all, except maybe on CD, or if they have a similar website which allows me to get an archive of the whole disc in FLAC.
For a brief period in my teenage years I would put my entire pirated music collection on shuffle and listen to whatever came on, but at some point I just started listening to entire albums, start to finish.
I think it began when I started listening to Nine Inch Nails and Marilyn Manson when I was 15. As artists they tended to release concept albums or at least albums that told a story from start to finish, with one track bleeding into the next effectively.
Since then listening to whole albums is all I do and when first listening to a new artist i listen to whole albums starting with their first release and working through them chronologically.
That gives me the full taste of what they are about as artists and also lets me experience their evolution as musicians over time.
This is purely anecdotal, but there are a bunch of songs I can remember hearing on the radio growing up (15-20 years ago, although the songs were much older than I was) that had extended instrumental intros that were almost always cut out; offhand, "Jump" by Van Halen and "Fly Like an Eagle" by Steve Miller come to mind, although I'm sure there are others I can't quite recall (technically the intro to "Jump" was listed as a different track on the album, but it wasn't ever played on its own, as it was only about 30 seconds long). There are also plenty of songs where the radio would play the shorter "single" version of the song, which would usually have instrumental parts cut out, rather than the album version. Although the radio format definitely encouraged shorter songs, there were plenty of workarounds already in use for longer songs.
I think in the "45" era, it was common to have under 3 min songs. Elvis, chuck berry, etc.
The graver thing for me is the awful lifting of the volume floor, so everything is loud. Apparently this became a thing in the mid to late eighties and persists. It's said MJs Thriller which has a couple remasterings shows the effect in action as the later remasterings up the effect.
It was for singles for radio, pre-streaming, but not every song on an album would be a radio-featured single, only a couple; these acted, for the album, the way that trailers for a movie work. (And, often, those radio singles were edited down from the album version of the song.)
Now (more, I think, because of pre-streaming iTunes and the like than streaming) the unit being sold and listened to by purchasers is more often the single, rather than the single being a tool to sell an album.
Personally, with unlimited streaming services, I listen to albums more than I have anytime since everything was purchased on physical media (and more than even then, because for me streaming has almost entirely displaced radio, so less of my music time is constrained by a medium which doesn't really allow listening to albums), but I don't know how common that is.
> Another verse in the song references the shortening of Joel's song, "Piano Man", from 5 minutes and 38 seconds to 3 minutes and 5 seconds to fit a radio slot, referenced by the lyrics
It was a beautiful song,
but it ran too long
If you're gonna have a hit
you gotta make it fit
So they cut it down to 3:05.
It's, like, been over 50 years since "the medium is the message" popped out loud and clear out of Marshall McLuhan's Understanding Media ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_medium_is_the_message - not bad, but the original short book also delved in classifying media as 'hot' or 'cold', which is an interesting idea in itself. Not sure I buy it, but interesting.)
If you're prepared to look beyond popular music services, there is a whole world of music out there, of all genres, that is perfectly healthy and doesn't necessarily conform to whatever is in vogue this particular minute.
I haven't listened to a popular radio station in a long, long time, and I don't use any streaming services either. I find music the old fashioned way I guess, but I wouldn't have it any other way. There's no real substitute for getting your hands dirty and digging around for the gems. I found 3 excellent new (to me) bands just this month!
We all have our passions, however, and it takes considerable time and effort to dig. For some, I guess they have other hobbies that consume that time and they're happy to hear whatever comes their way on the radio (or the stream).
I run a record label[1] and for our music that we think could have a broad appeal we are at pains to ensure there isn't too much of a instrumental intro for the reasons this article describes. It makes me a little sad that this is the case, but it is. We can watch the drop off stats after a long intro-ed song.
Yep, I hear it all the time. "No, that song is boring! No, not that one either!". Daughter with friends trying to find good hardrock songs, listening to Nightwish and such. They are 9 years old. Parents cringe and have a lecture in intros.
> To sell music for profit is to deny its worth. It is to reduce it to numbers, spreadsheets, targets. Desire cannot be quantified thusly.
> We accept donations, but do not expect them. What we do costs us little, but we cannot avoid making a loss. Nor can the artists who have to buy equipment and take time to rehearse, perform and record. Any money you give us will go to loosen these burdens and will be gratefully received. We want to beat the system but we have to survive within it.
Do you fund the recordings? Are these a lot of home studios?
Genuinely interested. Music is way more interesting than programming to me. I may have more questions for you.
The "real" version, with a fantastic build-up violin intro that to my ear at least, makes this a truly great song. Not sure how many hits, but it doesn't make it into their "top 5", so presumably below 350k hits:
Radio DJs have been cutting out intros for at least 50 years. When I was a kid I didn't have enough money to buy albums and got all my music from the radio. When I finally did start buying music I heard all sorts of intros I never knew existed.
It’s no wonder that Fela Kuti (though legendary) and Antibalas have never gone mainstream with most songs being purely instrumental for a good five minutes or more before the vocals start.
I love Fela's long intros! They're long enough that you start to think they're the song. And then here comes this whole other groove and THAT'S actually the song.
[+] [-] rainbowmverse|8 years ago|reply
There's a huge world of music out there. The most popular stuff is a tiny little sliver meant to appeal to the greatest number of people. For me, things have only gotten better since discovering a bunch of weird niche stuff in the '00s, especially since Bandcamp and Soundcloud gave indies a place to find an audience without investing in the infrastructure needed for streaming and sales.
[+] [-] noobermin|8 years ago|reply
An interesting question (and more difficult one to answer) would be whether access to niche music has increased and more people pursue niches in general today than before.
[+] [-] emptyfile|8 years ago|reply
As far as pop music goes, it seems only natural that music which was for decades made for radio will change once the primary medium changes. The main purpose of intros seems to be for the radio DJ to talk over it.
[+] [-] dhimes|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] pradn|8 years ago|reply
Anecdotally, we've seen whole-album concepts become big hits in recent years: Kendrick Lamar's To Pimp a Butterfly, Kanye West's Life of Pablo, Chance the Rapper's Coloring Book, etc.
On top of that, almost all hip-hop songs these days have intro tags (which producers worked on the song.) Not instrumental of course, but non-song content none-the-less.
[+] [-] rainbowmverse|8 years ago|reply
All the albums I've sold have had a clear narrative thread going through it, while all the random assortments I did early on never sold.
[+] [-] jgforbes|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] cjsuk|8 years ago|reply
It has however wrecked my attention span which I’m trying to fix. I bought a CD player with a monitor output and some CDs and some nice headphones. I can actually enjoy my favourite albums now.
[+] [-] drb91|8 years ago|reply
If you want to avoid this, just don’t listen to popularity based radios like spotify. EDIT: Apparently it's not popularity based. I still find it's difficult to avoid single-oriented contemporary music. Ironically I've found pandora to be pretty good at this.
Just ordered two new vinyl LPs this month :)
[+] [-] noobermin|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mikewhy|8 years ago|reply
I think limited storage space on mp3 players did more to damage albums than digital purchases.
[+] [-] differonzi|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ben_straub|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] JKCalhoun|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] nxsynonym|8 years ago|reply
I love listening to entire albums. I don't have favorite songs, I have favorite artists. If I like the artist, I listen to an entire album by them. I have never once in my life paid for a single song. If and when I buy music, it's by the album and not by the song.
[+] [-] microcolonel|8 years ago|reply
It's always sad to me when a band moves off the platform, because generally speaking it means that I will not buy their album at all, except maybe on CD, or if they have a similar website which allows me to get an archive of the whole disc in FLAC.
[+] [-] ionised|8 years ago|reply
For a brief period in my teenage years I would put my entire pirated music collection on shuffle and listen to whatever came on, but at some point I just started listening to entire albums, start to finish.
I think it began when I started listening to Nine Inch Nails and Marilyn Manson when I was 15. As artists they tended to release concept albums or at least albums that told a story from start to finish, with one track bleeding into the next effectively.
Since then listening to whole albums is all I do and when first listening to a new artist i listen to whole albums starting with their first release and working through them chronologically.
That gives me the full taste of what they are about as artists and also lets me experience their evolution as musicians over time.
[+] [-] cyberferret|8 years ago|reply
A lot of my most favourite songs are the lesser known or unreleased ones on an album.
[+] [-] pwinnski|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] saghm|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mc32|8 years ago|reply
The graver thing for me is the awful lifting of the volume floor, so everything is loud. Apparently this became a thing in the mid to late eighties and persists. It's said MJs Thriller which has a couple remasterings shows the effect in action as the later remasterings up the effect.
[+] [-] dragonwriter|8 years ago|reply
Now (more, I think, because of pre-streaming iTunes and the like than streaming) the unit being sold and listened to by purchasers is more often the single, rather than the single being a tool to sell an album.
Personally, with unlimited streaming services, I listen to albums more than I have anytime since everything was purchased on physical media (and more than even then, because for me streaming has almost entirely displaced radio, so less of my music time is constrained by a medium which doesn't really allow listening to albums), but I don't know how common that is.
[+] [-] goialoq|8 years ago|reply
> Another verse in the song references the shortening of Joel's song, "Piano Man", from 5 minutes and 38 seconds to 3 minutes and 5 seconds to fit a radio slot, referenced by the lyrics
[+] [-] B1FF_PSUVM|8 years ago|reply
Is it out of fashion at media studies joints?
[+] [-] matt_j|8 years ago|reply
I haven't listened to a popular radio station in a long, long time, and I don't use any streaming services either. I find music the old fashioned way I guess, but I wouldn't have it any other way. There's no real substitute for getting your hands dirty and digging around for the gems. I found 3 excellent new (to me) bands just this month!
We all have our passions, however, and it takes considerable time and effort to dig. For some, I guess they have other hobbies that consume that time and they're happy to hear whatever comes their way on the radio (or the stream).
[+] [-] byron_fast|8 years ago|reply
But maybe it's still right: the structure of music is dictated by who spins the media.
[+] [-] mar77i|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] noobermin|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] conatus|8 years ago|reply
[1] Records On Ribs - http://recordsonribs.com
[+] [-] Moru|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] EADGBE|8 years ago|reply
> To sell music for profit is to deny its worth. It is to reduce it to numbers, spreadsheets, targets. Desire cannot be quantified thusly.
> We accept donations, but do not expect them. What we do costs us little, but we cannot avoid making a loss. Nor can the artists who have to buy equipment and take time to rehearse, perform and record. Any money you give us will go to loosen these burdens and will be gratefully received. We want to beat the system but we have to survive within it.
Do you fund the recordings? Are these a lot of home studios?
Genuinely interested. Music is way more interesting than programming to me. I may have more questions for you.
[+] [-] fineline|8 years ago|reply
https://open.spotify.com/track/41bdgBL7tjwQOl7RpwubKU
The "real" version, with a fantastic build-up violin intro that to my ear at least, makes this a truly great song. Not sure how many hits, but it doesn't make it into their "top 5", so presumably below 350k hits:
https://open.spotify.com/track/3WBwyZLd4hzMibFg6tVqh9
Just one datapoint perhaps - but a great sounding one :)
[+] [-] dangerboysteve|8 years ago|reply
I could not imagine VH's Hot for teacher without that intro.
[+] [-] EADGBE|8 years ago|reply
Me: "A drum solo"
Two minutes later: "Daddy, I want to play drums!"
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