[S.T.C]

The music scene has changed /evolved over the last 60 years. It's seen some good times. creative times and many great bands and artists have had a chance to shine.

At the moment we still have some of them about, but they will die or retire in time and just leave their legacies on music databases.

The so called music charts are dominated by the American and Swedish writers /producers , with exception of a few artists like Adele who enjoy a certain amount of self determination , have enough clout to stand up to the big labels...but these are few.

The music industry does not support or promote any indie music or rock , or at least not prepared to spend money on them , instead just taking what the talent shows cough up.

It's a pretty sad state of affairs , it has to change in time , but to what?
Albums on vinyl have comeback, to everyone's surprise , so things can happen .

Whats the future of popular music when Max Martin and co buzz off. Has the skill of proper songwriting been snuffed out so we can enjoy one note melody  , sampling, beats ,generic melodies for evermore?

[Yodasdad]

Garlic bread, I thought that was the future.

Who knows what the future of music holds but I think sites like this show that there a still plenty of us 'proper' songwriters waiting in the wings to step in and fill the void when the time is right.

I'm sure the same goes for 'proper' bands and again, when the industry see's a need for them (or rather profit) I'm sure they'll be there ready to jump in.

That's if the industry as such still exists by then.

If this all takes too long though, I think there will need to be a period of reinvestment in musical education before the good stuff filters through. Music education is all but non existent in some schools now and most young people don't value learning to play an instrument, favouring instead Mc'ing or singing, safe in the knowledge that someone else will be there to do the actual music stuff for them.

Before too long though, there won't be as I think there will be a real skills gap. The flip side though is that it could lead to more work and better pay for 'those that can'

Yodasdad

[S.T.C]

Garlic bread, I thought that was the future.

Who knows what the future of music holds but I think sites like this show that there a still plenty of us 'proper' songwriters waiting in the wings to step in and fill the void when the time is right.

I'm sure the same goes for 'proper' bands and again, when the industry see's a need for them (or rather profit) I'm sure they'll be there ready to jump in.

That's if the industry as such still exists by then.

If this all takes too long though, I think there will need to be a period of reinvestment in musical education before the good stuff filters through. Music education is all but non existent in some schools now and most young people don't value learning to play an instrument, favouring instead Mc'ing or singing, safe in the knowledge that someone else will be there to do the actual music stuff for them.

Before too long though, there won't be as I think there will be a real skills gap. The flip side though is that it could lead to more work and better pay for 'those that can'

Yodasdad

Nothing will happen if it doesn't involve the big labels protecting their assets.
The masses could get totally bored  with the present business plan of manufactured artists , but i don't think this will happen for quite a while.
 

[Darren1664]

Interesting thread...

I have wondered whether services like Spotify might change things by bringing out 'Spotify originals' (like Netflix does for series) which might help change the direction of popular music by giving money and access to better recording facilities to those lower down the pecking order. That's just pie in the sky but is a nice idea.

Anyway, at work so can't reply properly

Darren

[delb0y]

I don't think sites like this, and the immensely talented people here, will make even the tiniest dent in popular (i.e. chart) music. Indy bands, rock. Nope, not them either. What I think will happen for popular music is that computers will soon create it all. Pretty young things will be employed to be the face of this computer generated music, and the software will be so clever at analysing 70 years of pop music and recreating all the emotional triggers, that the music created will be indistinguishable from the best that humans can create. Much of this music will be used in films (full of CGI) and TV shows (more pretty young perfect creatures) and the juggernaut will grow and grow. The not so pretty young things will have the requisite surgery and take the necessary drugs to appear as perfect as those that are projected into their 3d headsets and everyone will be happy.

I think there will be a huge undercurrent of great live bands, and great real song-writers, and I don't think any of them will bother the charts more than once or twice a year.

Yet when it happens, the very thing that makes them unique will be analysed and before you know it computers will be generating stuff that is indistinguishable from those performers, too.

You read it here first. And I wouldn't put money against it not already having happened.

[S.T.C]

Thats a more dystopian view than i would have predicted .And yes to certain degree that's probably what is happening now. They analyse music in such a way  as to create algorithms to it's potential as a hit song...we know they sample like crazy...i hear so many songs on the radio that have used  bits from other songs, even sections of melody and hooks.

I was thinking today at work about music cycles and how they are getting longer. To a certain point ,i think you could say  (rock 'n' roll  55-65 ) ( rock/ pop/ psychedelic /prog rock 65- 75 ( punk / new romantics/ soul boys etc 75-85 ) ( hip hop/trance/ edm etc 90  -2015 ...the present scene? maybe for decades?

[delb0y]

But how much prog rock, punk, psychedelic, EDM, trance, actually made much of a dent in the charts? Sure there were pockets of success, but insofar as popular music's concerned, I'm not sure those pockets were ever big enough to mean much in the big popular music picture.

There will always be cycles, but my guess is they will happen outside of the pop charts, although the marketing types will simply market their products (i.e. those pretty young things lip synching to the computer generated magic) to maximise revenue from whatever cycle and demographic is most lucrative.

In a way it's no different to what's always happened. Going back to punk. I recall the punk ethos, and the wonderful idea that anyone could do it, and I recall going to see many a rough old band that only knew three chords (or at least one barre chord shape) and were out there gigging in phlegm-flying rooms, and the fans wore all manner of wild home-made clothes and hair styles... and yet within months there were punk clothes available in department stores and bands with record deals that were marketed as punk but by golly they could play and were every bit as good as those that had existed before punk and even bands that themselves (probably wouldn't have described themselves as being punk) were marketed as such just to ride the wave and get in the charts.

What we need to pin our hopes on is the future of non-popular music. With the amount of routes to market available now, I think that's where the real magical stuff will happen and the wonderful music will be available.

[S.T.C]

I wasn't just referring to the top 40 . In many ways the charts determine how record companies function , and of course music streaming.
Morrissey said in an interview , the big labels know music is dead and they're just trying to suck up as much as they can.

I can't see a fashion led music scene like punk or rock for a long time ,if ever , because this time around the music industry will not promote it over what they have put in place...

[delb0y]

If we're not talking top 40, then I think popular music will thrive. I've been to quite a few gigs recently where an artist is only popular with a tiny percentage of the population, but that audience is still big enough to enable that artist to make a living. I don't ever see such scenarios ending, in fact I see them thriving with all those channel to markets I mentioned previously.

[S.T.C]

So the future is much like now , a two tier system where the 'industry' which is only about profit and promotion of it's own assets , continues as long as the masses out there tolerate it.

The independent artists/bands continue to do what they can with the resources available .like the internet , although with this #netneutrality issue looming, sooner or later i think it will all be monetised and controlled. 

[delb0y]

The difficult bit will be where do songwriters who don't perform fit in?

[Sing4me88]

If , as mentioned above, there are 'proper songwriters' then are there 'improper songwriters'? And, if so, who are they - the tone of the conversation would infer it is the people that make serious £$ through a songwriting career as opposed to bedroom producers who do it for  hobby? There's a self-defeating logic in there if people pause on it for the moment...

IMHO this conversation kinda verges on elitism at times and seems to imply that writing commercially is not legitimate nor difficult. I've said it before and I'll (continue to) say it again, if writing these pop songs that apparently pander to the lowest common denominator are so easy to write why hasn't anyone on here written a smash hit and made £$? I think the big hitters like Max Martin are due a lot more credit than they are given at times on here. Defining what is popular, now and lucrative is no easy feat and yet these peeps have consistently done it.

Also I'm not sure the use of modern technology lessens their talent at all. Yes, the building blocks may be more readily available but it takes a certain magic glue to put it all together in a way that clicks. After all, writers on here can avail of the same loops, samples and technology to a certain degree and they can analyse the algorithms and trends used as much as Max Martin, Dr Luke etc can but can they adapt and use this in the same way as they can?

 In any event, the move to technology was envisaged decades ago - in fact James Morrison said as much in a famous interview that eventually music would not be played by humans but by machines.

[delb0y]

Not sure which post you're responding, too, Sing4me88. But I don't disagree with anything you've said. I've been talking about how I perceived the future of popular (chart) song-writing (which was the topic), not the skillset of the current batch of popular songwriters. And I stand by my prognosis. I reckon  in 40 years then a huge percentage of the music that gets bought and played in the popular genres will be created by computers.

I hope I'm wrong, although I'll be long gone, so it won't matter to me. It won't just be music, the same will happen in many of the arts - as I've said before, that Rembrandt ...

 http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-35977315 

... that the computers have come up including analysing the brush strokes and depths, and using 3d printing to replicate it) is getting close to being indistinguishable from the real thing, except that it's an "original". And that's now, not in the future.

I reckon the real talent that the big record companies (although it'll probably just all be done by Amazon, Microsoft and Apple) will be (or maybe already are) seeking out will be software engineers. Loops and samples will be old hat and not needed at all. It'll all be brand new, perfect, and perfectly designed to tug on just the right heartstrings, leg muscles, emotions, and ear-drums.

We already have this:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LSHZ_b05W7o

which with lyrics and harmonies written by a human is a long way off computer generated song. But again, this is the level we're at right now. Isn't computer progress on an exponential curve? The future may be closer than we think - and I suspect we won't always know when we hear the computer generated stuff until years or months after the event.

[Sing4me88]

Fascinating point about software engineers being the future. I can see that - like people designing new synth sounds and patches and the likes. That kinda thing?

[delb0y]

I'm thinking more about someone who can take a song, all those and notes and words and rhythms, the way a singer breathes ... how often the breath is audible versus how often it isn't, and where in a line that little cute breath occurs, and how often that line is in a chorus, and whether it's the first line in a chorus or the last, and how many times those songs got to number one versus number ten. And do that for a little huskiness in a voice, and maybe a Scottish accent versus a Californian one, and a clean guitar sound versus a Mexican trumpet or a bagpipe, and how much reverb, and how long the intro should be and... etc. etc. for  every element in every song (i.e. a number of combinations and possibilities that it would make Deep Blue look like a 1970's calculator). The software engineer who can write the programmes that enables the computer to start this analysis, then self- teach itself deeper analysis, until that song can churn out the basic framework for hit song after hit song in a whole variety of styles. That's the software engineer I'm thinking of. Someone who can programme a computer to think and analyse and teach itself to think and analyse even more.

It is a little dystopian, I admit. But then just a few days ago I read how it's now possible to 3d print living flesh. Now! Things are moving so fast that what we can scarcely imagine today will be BAU in a few years.