The state of regular music: they don’t make stars as big as before – National

Norma Desmond hit something in the 1950 film Sunset Boulevard. A silent movie stars whose career was decimated by talking photos, she refused to change with the times. “I’m big. It is the photos that became small, “she said.

Fast-forward to today and that quote could be applied to the concept of regular music. We still have stars, but the mainstream became small.

Let’s start by defining ‘mainstream’. These are the ideas, trends, attitudes and activities considered normal, known, wide and sides, and something that almost everyone participates at a certain level. In other words, if the average person knows something in society, culture or politics, it is part of the mainstream and binds everyone together with general knowledge and attitudes.

Before 2000, the regular attitude dominated everything. Everyone received their news and culture from television, newspapers, the radio and magazines. We all went to the same films, watched the same must-see network TV shows, talked about the latest series about the large cable channels and read the same books. When it came to music, we had our preferences, but because there was so much less music than there is now, we could at least have some consciousness of most music at some point, even songs and artists that we didn’t like.

At that time there were five most important cultural gatekeepers. Record labels explored talent and only signed artists with potential commercial attraction or real artistic merit, which limited the number of new albums to around 3000 a year. If you managed to release a record, you hoped it would be sold in record stores. But stores filtered the delivery of available music even more to exactly what they thought they could sell.

Radio focuses on playing music that holds an audience for as long as possible and things were even further. The same with video channels. Music magazines were there for Backup: news, information, interviews and reviews/recommendations. These publications were often our only real guidance in the personal and professional life of our favorite musicians.

Those artists who survived all five rings of ruthless and vicious cultural filtering became our greatest stars. And boy, those stars were big.

Let’s look at radio alone. In the 1960s, 70s, 80s and 90s we all had one or two favorite radio stations on which we were dependent on music. We had to wait until our favorite songs came up, which meant that we eventually heard a lot of other music. If there was a song that we didn’t like, fine. We were patient to wait for it. There was always the promise that something better was discussed afterwards.

In the meantime, we also became aware of everyone’s favorites. This was especially the case for everyone who only had the Top 40 radio when they were younger. We were fed a bit of everything all the time. In that pre-internet Glory Days of Top 40 and FM Rock Radio, we were closely familiar with almost everything that happened in music at a certain moment.

The result was that large music stars were omnipresent. Even if you had zero interest in them or their songs, they were so common that you had no choice but to participate in their career, even at a distance. They were part of the common musical vocabulary of society and everyone spoke the language. Musicians drove culture and we were all swept into what they did. The music was everywhere, so we recorded everything.

We would have bought it all, but we were limited by what we could afford. Those artists who really received our attention also received our money, a financial investment by the fan in the artist. Because we have eliminated money for an expensive raw material (and compared to the day, music ownership was very expensive), our relationship with the artist went deeper. We had a piece of them.

But when the Internet started to assert itself around 2000, traditional cultural gatekeepers started to lose their monopoly. First via apps such as Napster, then with iTunes and iPods, then with smartphones and streaming, we got unobstructed access to more music than we had ever dreamed. We discovered after discovery, from a cool new indief band to a French dance duo.

Everything about our relationship with music started to change when record labels saw their hundred-year-old business model saw-ons music on pieces of plastic-inort. Fewer and fewer people went to record stores, which resulted in the collapse of international chains. Labels could no longer afford to advertise in music magazines, causing an income in turnover and forced many to forgot. Streaming made numbers available immediately on request. YouTube made a video clip to come to Muchmusic and MTV superfluous.

Radio has survived; It is still powerful, profitable and popular, although the level of influence has changed if a cultural gatekeeper has changed. Everyone with a smartphone is now his own music director, able to listen to the song we want, whenever we want, where we happen to be and on whatever device we have. Most of the 21st century no one was able to tell us to which we should listen or let us wait to hear it. We love our little niches. Who doesn’t want to have control in a world where everything seems uncontrollable?

And for the most part, people love this. Who does not want to be independent and are in charge of the music (and all the other culture) that we allow in our lives? And with more than 200 million songs available on the streaming music platforms, there is virtually nothing we have no access to. In contrast to the days of yesteryear when we were knowing that song or video that something else was coming on the other side, there is no reason to get through something that we don’t like.

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Music culture is now a series of individual and hardly associated self -organizing communities that come together and break up with alarming frequency. The common and consensus needed for the kind of common music culture and language that we had before 2000 is dead and it does not come back. Anyone who operates until the old assumptions may just as well apply to be a project manager on the tower of Babel.

Of course, we still have large acts such as Taylor Swift, but it’s different. If this was 1995, so many people would have been exposed to her music that she would have been more exponentially more popular than she is now. Today walk to any person on the street and ask them to name three Taylor Swift -Singles. How many could that do? In the meantime, if you had done the same with The Beatles in 1967, a typical grandmother could rattle the entire discography of the group, complete with release dates and catalog numbers, including all Japanese releases.

Music graphs tell a different story than 30 years ago. Compilation tricks are different. And those statistics reflect the behavior of the public that did not yet exist at the time. Who thought we would use terms as a track equivalent albums (Teases) in compiling the weekly graphs?

Try this experiment: look at the weekly most streamed near -graph on Spotify. You will probably recognize a lot of the names; How many songs can you hum? If these were the old top 40 days, you could fully sing 75 percent of the songs – even those you hated. Oh, Tay-Tay is monstrously huge. It’s just that there used to be much more like they were – and they were bigger because everyone knew everything about such stars.

Oh, we still have superstars, but today they come without the omnipresence and universality that they did 30 years ago. That feeling, that understanding, that feeling that by listening to a certain song/artist you were part of something unimaginable bigger, something that everyone was a part and in which participation participated, was traded for direct access to the whole music of humanity, or something that is added.

For better or worse, there is less common culture nowadays when it comes to music. That means being mainstream – that is, having that attraction for casual music fans who are happy to sing along and tap their fingers on the wheel – is just one of the many musical roads available today. Mainstream artists miss their former cultural dominance. (Music industry Pundit Bob Lefsetz has written a lot about this In case you want to make a backup.)

Being a regular artist is today part of one of the many thousands of niches that we find in music. The role of mainstream as a binder has disappeared. If the center cannot hold, what will it gate in the coming decades for music?

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