Hit Song Science

Well, I guess I'll just have to settle for having an inferior taste then. :roll:

All personal likes and dislikes aside, I don't think that anyone can say what will be around in forty or fifty years. There has been a lot of great music written over the ages. My dad played in wedding bands most of my young life, so I can tell you that a lot of people getting married in the sixties danced to songs from the fifties and even the forties, but you don't hear those songs all that much anymore. And some of these are great songs. I'll gladly go on a soapbox and call some of them "timeless," but the real truth is that more than ninety percent of the songs that have written over the ages are no longer played. And I'm also fairly safe to say that ninety percent is more than a bit of an understatement.

If you don't believe this is the case, look at the history of music in our lifetime or even in the past few hundred years. How many classical composers can you name? Probably less than thirty. There surely were many, many more than that composing at one time or another.

How about Stephen Foster? Sure, many of his songs are still sentimental favorites today even though they were written almost a hundred and fifty years ago. Was he the only songwriter in the world back then?

There were people back at the turn of the twentieth century trying to dig out and archive music that from the 1800s that was already pretty lost from the world at that point, known only to small handfuls of people in particular areas. And let's not even get into the traditional songs of many, many cultures across the world that we have no record (or recording) of.

Coming even closer in time - who can sing a Jimmie Rodgers song? Besides Will The Circle Be Unbroken, what Carter Family songs do you know? Bill Monroe?

What about the big band era? This was incredibly popular stuff.

And pop music in general, the stuff that sold in the sixties (and anyone who knows me knows that I love pop music of all sorts), ran a huge range. Theme from A Summer Place was #1 on the charts for nine weeks in 1960. Get Back and Honky Tonk Women were both #1 in 1969 for five and four weeks, respectively, but so was Sugar, Sugar (four weeks).

People throughout history like to believe that the things in their lifetime are going to be around forever. That's kind of human nature, I think, and it's not meant to be debated as to whether it is good or bad. In fact, the whole "good better best" argument is always about the participants and not about the subject. The "best" music is music that makes even one single listener enjoy it and forget about his or her problems and find a moment or two of happiness. Three and a half to four minutes worth of moments for most songs, no? :wink:

But to seriously think that any of this is going to last for ages? Okay, I have to ask "what difference does it make?" The only real answer is about the listener and not at all about the music. And doesn't that miss the whole point of what music is about?

Discussions like this one run the risk of those "lists" we all like to laugh about in magazines. The "top 100 songs of all time," and the like. Those are about selling magazines. That's why you won't find many (if any) of the great country or jazz or classical guitarists (many of whom our idols listened to and learned from and copied) in Rolling Stone. In agruments, we can readily erase facts or use them to fit our personal needs. That's the beauty of numbers.

But it's also a big lie. Music isn't about "best." It's about feeling and communicating and everyone has different ways of dealing with that. So it's a no-brainer that no one song or artist or era can possibly mean the same to everyone in the world. It's actually supposed to work that way. You're not going to like every piece of music you hear. Every artist, every songwriter, every guitarist has more than his or her share of cringe-worthy material. And every artist you may avoid because of his or her name / age / genre / instrument of choice / whatever is also capable of producing something that may give you pause and possibly make you think "I really like this..."

So don't fall into the "easy explanations" no matter whatever side you're on. There have been "manufactured" artists and groups for as long as there has been a business side to music. Elvis was a truck driver, not someone who played in clubs. Some of the contestants on the today's talent shows have been working clubs for a lot longer than many of us have ever done.

Instead of sticking something with a label, try to look at all the facts. It's almost impossible to do, especially when you consider that what we know about all of music is so little. We are what we know. What we've grown up with.

We can be even more. It's a matter of listening, but nowadays (owing to the undreamed of access of music making tools across the entire world) it is also truly a matter of looking for things. Cool thing is that you can look across all of time - past, present and future - to find good music. And "good" is better than "best." :wink:

Sorry, as ever, for being so long-winded.

Peace

Very well put, David.

Music is a very broad category for all those tonal and rhythmic sounds we make for so many reasons. There are countless varieties, each of which is informed by a culture or cultures and in turn informs those same and other cultures. We may believe someone elses culture to be stupid or brutal or incomprehensible, but it is still their culture and they live it -- usually by no individual choice of their own. If the music those "other" persons make can tell me something of their lives that are so different than mine, it seems an interesting way to learn about them, as music is considered so important by humans, that we tend to put our brightest and darkest throughts and feelings into its creation.

Many cultures rise and fall, but most leave a legacy of some sort. And if those that come after recall or learn of our cultures though surviving examples of our various musical legacies, then I hope something of every type of music survives -- whether or not it resonates with my head or or heart or soul or life sensibilities.

I was about to say something similar. Time is a gigantic rock tumbler of music. The crap and rough edges are worn away quickly and forgotten. Leave the rocks/songs in long enough and it all eventually fades away. The diamonds last a very long time, but even they get worn away with time. Someone is always putting in new grit and rocks to wear away the old.

Sorry, as ever, for being so long-winded.

No need to apologise - rather. thanks for putting us back on track. Yes, there is good music in all genres....but the point wes was trying to make, I think, was that the reason the Beatles, the Stones, The Who, The Kinks, Dylan, CCR etc etc etc have stood the test of time is that they were originators and innovators - they all had a unique, distinctive sound. They took what they'd listened to as kids/teenagers and ADDED to the music - they didn't just re-hash old songs, they wrote their own songs which were influenced by what they'd heard in their younger days but added their own unique slant on it.

The point about spending years on the club circuit is well made, too - Hamburg turned the Beatles into a professional outfit. Those years spent slogging around low-paid venues all around the country and sleeping in the back of a van between gigs paid off - it was kind of like an apprenticeship. Virtually every band back in the 60's did that - but boy, did they hone their craft out on the road. British bands like the Animals, the Yardbirds, the Searchers etc learned their trade in the old Workingmen's clubs - and they were a hard proving ground. If they played a cover, and didn't do it note-for-note perfect, they'd soon get told in no uncertain terms

Anyway, here's a question - Arjen, Grunge Sunset - who or what do you think you'll be listening to in 50 years time? I'll be 101 by then - but, hopefully, I'll still be able to tune into a classic rock station - and I'll bet you they're STILL playing the Beatles and the Stones and The Who and Dylan and Pink Floyd and Hendrix and CCR and RHCP.....etc etc etc....

I wonder whose music they'll be playing from the 90's and the 00's?

:D :D :D

Vic

Look guys, I realize that you will not be hearing Classic Rock 200 years from now. But you are hearing it 40 or 50 years later and this really should not be the case. It wasn't like that in the 60's and 70's, I don't remember literally thousands of stations dedicated to playing music from the Roaring 20's, or the Big Bands of the 30's and 40's.

Whether you will admit it or not, there is a legitimate reason for this. Modern music is not making it with people, and the music industry is completely aware of this. The very fact that there are so many stations still playing this music is because there is a big void of "good" music. When I say good, I do not mean my personal opinion, I mean the general opinion of the public. It is reality, to ignore it is to be in a state of denial.

Whatever, believe what you want despite cold hard facts.

Which cold hard facts are you talking about Wes? Where can I find this list of thousands of stations, and how many stations are there anyway? I could only find this list:

http://www.radio-locator.com/cgi-bin/finder?format=clr&s=R&sr=Y

While the list may not be complete it does give an example. It has a little over 516 classic rock channels, which nowadays means every channel that focusses exclusively on the 60s, 70s and sometimes even early 80s. Modern music is more divided, but if you take only the urban/hiphop, modern christian rock and alternative there are almost 1400 channels. That excludes top40, britpop and such, which on their own already have almost as much channels as the classic rock channels.

That means modern music has over four times as much channels. That's a cold hard fact right there. And here's some more: http://faculty.ucc.edu/egh-damerow/U_S_Demographics.htm

Modern music is generally marketed to people from their early teens till early thirties. That means a little under 80 million people. The classic rock genre picks up from there and aims till about the early sixties. That's almost 110 million people.

So in short, some 'facts': There are 80 million people that would be the target audience for modern music. The classic rock music is of much larger babyboomer generation. Despite this there are four times as much modern music channels for this modern music and the big major television stations are practically exlucively modern. These are cold hard facts. If 'the overwhelming majority' is on your side then how does this happen?

Heck Arjen, I found a much bigger list than that in seconds.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_classic_rock_radio_stations

And this doesn't touch the surface, we have 3 or 4 stations in my local area, none of which are on that list. I promise you for every station that is on that list, 10 are left out.

There are more Classic Rock stations in my area than Modern Rock. There are more Hip/Hop Stations than Modern Rock in my area, and that's downright pitiful.

And adding up every station that isn't Classic Rock is not quite the way to do it. I personally do not consider Hip/Hop as Rock music, and I don't believe even young people consider it that way, as well as Christian music.

And I've already posted a partial list of the top grossing bands which are dominated by Classic Rock bands year after year. These are the cold hard facts I'm talking about.

The "cold hard facts," whether you want to see them or not, is that classic rock is listened to by a very small percentage of the world's population. And, conveniently for the music industry, it happens to mostly be the generation currently weilding most of the world's spending currency. Regardless of how many young people are listening to it and liking it, the bigget chunk of classic rock listeners are like the biggest chunk of Guitar Noise readers - male, over forty and with (various amounts of) spending cash. Anyone who has worked in advertising for the last thirty years knows this. And can give you cold hard numbers to back this up with. It's a matter of business, not a matter of which music is better.

To say "modern music is not making it with people," is to completely disregard a lot of hard facts. It would be much more accurate to say "modern music is not making it with many people who are in our demographic." If you go into any high school, would you be likely to hear more songs from the 2000's on kids' IPODs or songs from the sixties?

Things do come and go in waves, sometimes. Right now, for instance, I'm seeing a lot of kids who are very much into metal - not only the new stuff but a lot of the stuff from the 1980s and early 1990s. Why? Do the math. That's when their parents were listening to music and, consequently, a lot of kids whose parents loved this music are hearing what their parents hear. Some will rebel and go into the past in search of other music. Some will make their own. Regardless of what we think, every generation has its innovators. To think otherwise or to think that only one generation has created the pinnacle of music is not so much arrogant as it is ignorant of facts. It's kind of what happened when music charts went from radio play to actual sales, thanks to the ISBN codes. Do you remember that? That's when all of a sudden country artists were actually recognized. Arjen is spot on with his numbers. And as our generation ages, things will continue to shift toward the younger music. And business, bless their souls, will follow along.

You want proof of innovation? Look at the 1980's - Michael Jackson, Quincy Jones, Talking Heads, the Police, Prince, Lyle Lovett and k.d. lang (can't resist putting the two of them together), Rush, Metallica, Aimee Mann, Bob Mould, Living Color,Los Lobos, Joy Division, They Might Be Giants, R.E.M., and, of course, I don't have to remind you of the Pixies. That's just the tip of the iceberg.

The 1990s brings you Enya, Moby, Tori Amos, Jeff Buckley, Beck and Bjork (can't resist putting the two of them together!), Ani DiFranco (who is very responsible, almost singlehandedly, for the shift to indie music that we have now), the Fugees (as a group and as individual solo careers), Liz Phair, Portishead, and again, this is just scratching the surface. And in neither of these decades have I listed any rappers, some of whom (whether you like it or not) are very influential musically.

Just because there's a big group of people who, by their own admission, spend most of their time listening to only one type of music, this does not mean that this one type of music is better. This is OWA's argument. It just means that this is the preferred listening taste of the big group of people. That's all.

Part of the situation is that how we get our feed of music has changed dramatically in the past twenty years. And it's still changing now. Again, you can see this from history. Where did you get your music from in the 1960's? The AM radio? That's what our parents listened to. We used FM and bought albums instead of singles. Radio stations are no longer the guideposts to let us now what's going on. They haven't been for close to ten years. Again, anyone in advertising can back this statement up.

Nowadays anyone who says "there's no good music," can't be looking very hard. For heaven's sakes, there are more folks artists now than in any point of history! There's more bluegrass artists, more jazz artists, more rock artists of so many genres that some of them don't have a magic marketing name yet! How can you not find any good music?

The answer is that you want your old music. So do most people our age. Ian Anderson (singer / flute player of Jethro Tull for you youngsters) did an interview in Chicago in the early 1990s where he lamented the state of the music industry. Unlike here, he put all the blame on his audience, saying something to the effect of, "people my age should be going out and supporting new bands instead of making it possible for me to keep touring forever." David Byrne pretty much made the same observation in an article in the New York Times last year, noting that people "his age" were missing out on tons of good music. They both noted that the reason that so many stations were playing "classic rock" is because that is where the big advertising dollars are. Not because the music was better then. Again - it's about business, not about what's better.

Speaking of advertising, and tying in the whole eighties thing, you might note now that the eighties is starting to be included in "classic rock." Listen to your radios and note how many are starting to add in "newer" material. Why? The demographic is aging. I'm willing to bet you that within twenty years, the 1990s will be "classic rock," too.

I just got back from a week in Nashville where they were having a city-wide band fest called "Next Big Nashville.' It was all local bands, hundreds of them, ranging across almost every genre you can think of. Some were good, some were bad, some were boring, some were trying to be just like big name acts and some were mesmerizing. Pretty much like every era we've ever had. Or ever will.

Peace

Well David, I really didn't expect people in China or Saudi Arabia to listen to Classic Rock. Do we have to reach to extremes to win an argument? The comparison is between Classic Rock bands and Modern Rock bands. I suppose there are more people in India that listen to Sitar music than Classic Rock seeing they have a population of nearly one billion.
:roll:

And young people might make less money than us geezers, but they spend a bigger percentage of their income on music than us oldtimers FACT. Us older folks are paying mortgages and college tuition.

Ehm Wes, my list is bigger, yours doesnt even come close to 500 stations. And that still doesnt explain the relative minority of classic rock stations. In a sample of 2000 stations only 500 are classic rock. That's a fact. Where are those thousands of stations and why do you think there aren;t more modern stations? You're not backing your facts up with any proof...

David: +1. Had a good trip?

And one last thing, I do not want Classic Rock around forever. I love new bands with new sounds. I listen to Modern Rock stations almost everyday (do you??). But I'm sorry, each band sounds too similar and I end up changing back to the Classic stations, not because I want to, I am kind of sick of the stuff really. But the new stuff is generally terrible.

Arjen

The fact is, Classic Rock stations and Classic Rock bands are thriving. This was not the case back in the 60's and 70s. Back then, bands from 30 or 40 years earlier were not packing the stadiums and concert halls. Why? It's not because their fans were all dead, they were around. But the music of the time was the big draw.

The reason these Classic bands and stations are doing well is because people like the music. You seem to have difficulty accepting that.

I bet Bruce Springsteen can pack a stadium quicker than any modern band you know of. Nuff said.

Classic rock bands weren't thriving in the 60's and 70's. Wes, without meaning to you've proved Arjen's point. By your own reasoning, since classic rock bands weren't thriving, we could say that kids of that era were all going to Frank Sinatra or Elvis shows or bands from the fifties. We could say the music wasn't that great so no one went to it. To put it in your own words, the older bands (bands from the fifties and early sixties) were drawing better than the then "modern bands" (the sixties bands that went on to be "classic rock"). So why didn't these bands thrive in their own era?

The reason they weren't was because at that time, the target audience of what we now call "classic rock" (folks our age) didn't have money! We were either going to school or just getting going in jobs. Using the logic you yourself have supplied, it's now safe to say that "modern rock" will soon have a resurgence. Pretty much as soon as the boomers all die out. :wink:

And Wes, young people aren't spending their money on music. That's a fact, too. They know many more ways than we do of getting it for a lot less. When folks go to these shows that are grossing the most money (didn't we do that list somewhere in this mess), the majority of the people going are people our age. There may be some younger folks there, but most of them are boomers. Want proof? See who's advertising and sponsoring the shows. It's not chance that insurance companies and investment firms are sponsoring a lot of "classic rock" tours.

What I really don't understand about all of this, though (and forgive the aside), is why there's a need to perceive any one genre of music, or any one era of music to be "better" than another.That sounds like my parents. And, were they alive, they'd truthfully admit that that's what their parents said, too. Not to knock either my parents or grandparents, mind you. Thanks to them I pretty much find every song a delight. :wink:

Arjen - trip was delightful, thanks for asking. Believe it or not, I was in the process of getting ready to PM you before I got caught up in all this. :wink: Hopefully, I'll get a few minutes...

Peace

What I really don't understand about all of this, though (and forgive the aside), is why there's a need to perceive any one genre of music, or any one era of music to be "better" than another.That sounds like my parents. And, were they alive, they'd truthfully admit that that's what their parents said, too. Not to knock either my parents or grandparents, mind you. Thanks to them I pretty much find every song a delight. :wink:

Ain't THAT the truth! My dad (believe it or not) introduced me to "this nice British musical combo" in late 1962...The Beatles. He brought home a Harmony Bobkat not too much later. This Italian immigrant was often "off to himself" humming Beatles stuff...he even ended up a friend of Murray The K.

So maybe "hit song science" has more to do with releasing endorphins than anything else??? I've driven past plenty of hiway exits because I'd gotten "lost" to what was on the radio. What's being tapped into? "Music can soothe the savage breast."

Yeah...there's lots to be said for endorphins, I guess! As far as referring to "software" goes...sure, there's a commonality of structure to 99% of classics. Maybe that sort of mantra works? (Hey...now's the time for any psychologists out there to chime in!)

Cat