Okay I get we don't have a lot of backstreet boy or Britney fans here (not one either) & I get the whole "pop music sounds the same lament, but at the same time, there's a market for it & he's excelled at creating something that sells that.
Just because it's pop music doesn't mean you can't give the guy credit for understanding his market & dominating his field.
Also I think it's important to note that just because its pop music doesn't mean it does not take an incredible amount of skill to produce well. There are a handful of producers that dominate the field because they are the best ones. Dr Luke is an example of another.
What I dislike about Dr Luke is that his artists are autotuned to the extent that they all sound exactly the same.
Katy Perry's voice could be swapped for Avril Lavigne's and many people would barely notice.
This accusation is not new in pop music, and I do like his work, but it seems no more skillful by now than finding the right formula and milking it to death with marketing machinery.
I also dislike pop for much the same reason: it's completely fabricated to produce money and little else.
But I do recognize and appreciate how good this guy is, writing and producing a hit is not trivial and also follows a portfolio approach, the difference being that his portfolio has way more successes than average.
If it were that simple to produce pop hits, any producer would do it. Consider that most of the costs are promotion (like many startups) and that the record company could get just about anyone to produce Katy Perry, but Martin's track record is beyond just about any other producer, so I think there's little doubt about his skills.
"I kissed a girl" sung by Avril Lavigne wouldn't be the same thing; Perry's persona and style was perfect for it. These guys know this and that explains half of their success. The other half is deep pockets for promotion.
Pitch correction is unable to change the timbre of a voice. If you can't easily recognize different people's (auto-tuned) voices, you would be in the vast minority of humans who lack this basic skill.
You can count me in that group, in this particular case, but maybe pitch correction is not the whole story.
Here's my point: I can identify a song as being by Dr Luke far more confidently and readily than I can identify the named artist, and I doubt I'm in such a tiny minority there.
I've got a feeling we're going to look back on this era of music with wide-eyed wonder and recognize many of his pop hits as the masterpieces they are.
Unfortunately, social norms prevent us from listening with our ears.
I never ever listen to pop-music, but every summer I used to drive my parents car for 1-2 weeks. So I always got a fresh set of songs every summer, and every year there were between 0 and 2 songs that I found genuinely good (and I knew little or nothing about the artists). The last time was in 2011 (I think) and Rolling in the deep was the only song I liked. I'll go back and look through the producers, would be cool if one turned out to be Max Martin, but I somehow doubt it.
I'm sure he gets plenty of credit in his professional life already. There's no reason to champion people who trade in valueless <whatever> simply because they are able to make a living at it. Of course he is probably a truly nice guy, and great source of conversation, but that doesn't necessarily mean he's making a valuable contribution of some kind.
I'd say it's more complicated than you're hinting at.
In this case, could it be at least in part a function of the likelihood that people will listen to and/or perform a piece of music after the copyright on that work has expired? Assuming such a thing is possible, of course.
To reduce the influence of external factors in the 'value' term. It just makes it easier to measure if one is purposefully factoring out marketing, branding and so forth.
It's fine to expect the sales of a work to go up if someone performs it well for a large enough audience, but is that measuring the value of the work, the performance, or the exposure? And basing the function on a period after copyright expires reduces the influence of stakeholders in the work who might pay for exposure.
I suppose. For me music is like fashion, it is in and of a moment. It is inspired by what came just before it, and it inspires what comes directly after it. Beyond that it takes on some sort of historical context.
>there's a market for it & he's excelled at creating something that sells that.
There's also a market for black tar heroin, nuclear missiles, drones, slaves, and so on.
>Just because it's pop music doesn't mean you can't give the guy credit for understanding his market & dominating his field.
Is pop music a good thing for the world? (It obviously isn't as bad as any of the things I listed above to avoid claims of hyperbole, but) should we think people who make pop music are doing a good thing?
Should we think 90% of the stuff produced by HN readers on a daily basis (I mean the software we write, not our comments, hehe) are good things?
Is Facebook a good thing? It just lets people stay in contact with one another, they could already do that with a phone, Facebook just makes it a little more pleasant.
Is Snapchat a good thing? It, well, I don't even know what it does, but it takes pictures and lets you share them with people or something, right? Is that really any more valuable to society than pop music?
I'm not saying Facebook and Snapchat are bad, just that they aren't really any better or worse than something like pop music. The idea is to make people a little happier, or let them do something that makes them happier. Get off your high horse. Bringing people joy or making their lives a little more bearable is just that, nothing more, nothing less.
> Should we think 90% of the stuff produced by HN readers on a daily basis (I mean the software we write, not our comments, hehe) are good things?
In the world I want to live in, would 90% of the stuff produced by HN readers, software, comments, and everythign else be good things? Sure. So in that sense, yes, they should be. Are they? Definitely not.
Is Facebook good? It definitely meets a market need; but what's the social implication of confining discourse into the channels it does? What will the generation raised on the 'like' button be like? How has social media affected journalism -- would people use phones to share linkbait about 10 Things You'd Never Believe We Found in Justin Bieber's Trash?
Snapchat is definitely a good thing. It's single-purpose enough that it doesn't replace anything else, but it add something to the toolkit of how people can communicate. It also brought the concept of ephemerality back to digital communication, which I think is invaluable. You might disagree about that, but it's definitely significant in the way that Call Me Maybe isn't.
I disagree that the idea behind pop music is to make people happier. The idea behind pop music is to make money. Sometimes these values align, and other times they don't. I've never met someone deeply fulfilled on a personal or spiritual level from playing Candy Crush; I've never seen anyone moved to tears by an N*SYNC song.
Assuming that people who make pop music are trying to make people's lives a little more bearable, I definitely think they could do a lot better. This guy is probably incredibly musically gifted, and what is he doing? Writing crap that nobody will remember to make a few bucks, in exactly the same way the greatest minds of our generation are using fantastic computing power and computing over insane amounts of data, thinking faster and deeper than any human ever could, to get people to click ads.
I think he could do better. I wish we lived in a world where he could.
I agree with everything you said, and you said what you said far better than I said what I said, so my hat comes off to you (then goes back on or my ears will get cold, this is Montana).
I would point out that, in a capitalist system, nothing is produced to make people happy, everything is produced for profit (http://www.brainyquote.com/quotes/quotes/a/adamsmith136391.h...). And that is really what I was trying to get across, pop music may be crap, but it is what is profitable, to the extent that people want to buy it (presumably because it somehow makes them happy). People who live in glass houses shouldn't throw stones, and a bunch of people building social networks and ad-targeting systems live in very fragile glass houses...
Sure. Heroin and slaves are really, really bad. Pop music is just mildly bad. That's a comparison.
The point I intended to make is that there are markets for everything.
I don't even think pop music is that bad, but being successful in a marketplace is never cause alone for accolades. Blindly worshipping people who are successful at some business venture blinds us to the ethics of whatever they're doing. Success shouldn't disable critical thinking.
> Blindly worshipping people who are successful at some business venture blinds
Completely agree, but I don't think anyone in the article or this forum could be considered "worshipping" this guy. The article was more of an observation about a not immediately apparent fact that was intellectually curious.
Not this man in particular, but in general I think people in this forum conflate "being successful in commercial enterprises" with "living a moral/fulfilling/best-possible life." As do plenty of people in society. (Definitely not all people in this forum, but certainly some, and certainly a plurality.)
No he didnt. All he did was say that its not an instant justification for something just because there is a market for it, by listing examples of things that have a market, but society doesn't want sold. Just because there is a market for something, it doesn't mean it should be sold.
I disagree that pop music is some how damaging, bad or undesirable, thats just snobbery. Its not my thing, but then I dont expect other people to like my taste in music. Its stupid, its like arguing that blue is good, and yellow is bad.
I wouldn't say pop music is damaging or bad, but it does seem undesirable in that it's very obvious that you can do far better. Listening to pop music (not necessarily popular music, but branded pop music like the Backstreet Boys and other groups mentioned in this article) seems like a waste of time in comparison to all the other things a human could do with their mental cycles.
I have pretty broad taste in music, and many other things, but it's still obvious even if I don't like something whether or not it's worth someone's time or not. This is also contextual; i.e., someone who listened to pop music and had an ear for the evolution of pop over time, was aware of people like the subject of this article, and understood the musical justification for things like catchy pop songs is probably doing a much better job of listening to pop music than I was at age 11 when I liked the Backstreet Boys.
Humans are amazing creatures full of potential. Is pop music really the best we could do? I doubt it, which is why I dislike it, and think that it's a pretty bad market to participate in.
Addressing your point directly, is pop music a good thing? Well, is music a good thing? I think yes. What makes pop music different from non-pop music? Probably something about ease of consumption. Does ease of consumption effect what makes music good? Possibly to a degree. I think its fair to say that pop music is more disposable, and also far less likely to challenge the listener - and that sometimes challenge is good.
That said, it still brings all sorts of benefits of music, and the sheer popularity of pop music makes the shared experience so much broader and possibly more powerful. So in balance, maybe pop music isn't -the best- type of music for people to listen to. But I don't really think it's -bad-. We can't really expect for everyone to wish to be challenged in all their activities and all the experiences they consume.
I'd offer in counter point that pop music normalizing some of the most base human behaviors in ease to digest packages is actually bad for us, and outweighs the benefits you propose.
You ask if pop music and the people who are writing it are doing a good thing? I think so. Pop music is abhorrent to me. I actually get nauseous listening to it. My wife on the other hand loves it. Before we got married I asked her why she liked it so much. She works in a Pediatric ER. She said, "Well, in my job and the horrible things we see, I have learned to cope with what I have to by doing four things: debrief with the other nurses, cry if I have to and not hold back, imagine that all my patients survive and go home to kind and loving parents, and listen to Top 40. It does not tax my brain any further after a 12 hour shift and is usually upbeat and tells a love story." So from my single anecdotal perspective, yes, some people need the escapism and bubblegum. Makes sense to me.
> should we think people who make pop music are doing a good thing?
...and the tech industry is any better? We're mostly driven by advertising and consumer software/electronics. (Yes, exceptions exist, but they aren't the rule).
Okay I get we don't have a lot of backstreet boy or Britney fans here (not one either) & I get the whole "pop music sounds the same lament, but at the same time, there's a market for it & he's excelled at creating something that sells that.
Just because it's pop music doesn't mean you can't give the guy credit for understanding his market & dominating his field.