The Future of Music
 

There is no denying that the music industry is changing. That has been a given for many years now. Napster all the way back in the early 2000’s signified the beginning of the end for traditional music creation, distribution, and sharing. But it’s 2012 now. It’s 2012 and I think only now are we beginning to see what this giant mess the digital world has created will leave us with.

Here’s what I have taken from recent years:

The album, though much easier to create due to the affordability of home recording equipment, is dead. While there are purists like me who refuse to devolve into the world of the single, the truth is there is just not the interest in the album experience that there used to be. The reason is because most people are casual music listeners, and streaming music as well as Youtube has made it easy to get your hands on just the song you want.

It will take much more than even a hit single to enter into legendary status. What do I mean by legendary status? I mean an artist that will be remembered for generations after the one they became famous in. There are a few holdouts in the pop world that I feel have made it in the traditional sense…Lady Gaga, for example. I don’t like her, but somehow she has forced herself onto the scene, everyone noticed, and many many people buy her albums. Madonna is sitting in the shadows wondering if she can still pull that off. Everyone else is a throwaway flavor of the month. For this reason, I feel the next few years could be considered what I like to call the “One-Hit-Wonder Era”. I’ve heard so many songs that have become giant hits that everyone has forgotten about now that it makes my head hurt. Owl City’s “Fireflies”? Foster the People’s “Pumped Up Kicks”? Gotye’s “Somebody That I Used to Know”? Yep…one hit wonders all around. I even think Gotye’s album is pretty good…but it won’t last.

While the above paragraph makes me seem a bit cynical, I do appreciate what today’s music scene has done for me. I’ve just been discovering the wonders of Spotify. It’s like a musical playground…most everything I want to listen to, I can. For free. While this has killed a bit of the music hunt that I used to love, it has done away with the annoyance of tracking down a download. Now if I want to listen before I buy, it’s no longer illegal. As an audiophile, I can get lost in a new music hole easier than ever. It’s just sad that I am rare. It has also jaded me to a lot of music. I am so saturated with new stuff that I rarely give albums the time I would have in the past. It’s rare these days when I feel that special click with an album.

Streaming music will also be the end of standalone mp3 players. Throw an app on your phone, and you can listen to whatever you want. Why would you need an mp3 player? I myself am starting to question its utility. I both miss my old physical music collection, which I now hope to start building up again in the form of vinyl with albums I discover off Spotify and I am also tired of dealing with so many devices. Call me a sellout, but I love having one gadget that does everything I need. The only thing that freaks me out about this is the fact it’s not permanent. Let's say hypothetically that something happens to the internet...there goes all the music I want to listen to. I love my massive music library. However, with so much streaming music, what’s the point of even having that besides the fact that its still more tangible than a streaming file?

So where do you guys think all of this is heading? I can already tell I’m going to sound like a old fart once I have kids…”In my day, we had these things called albums….and they were awesome”. I really miss them sometimes.

Anyway, feel free to post any random thoughts you have. Any other theories? Does anyone think I’m full of ****? I’ve been feeling so disillusioned about music lately…and I need to talk about it.

I find all of these observations very depressing, being that I'm strongly in favour of physical ownership and the album format.

I must admit that I'm also saturated with music. I can't count the number of albums I've purchased that I've only heard once, let alone the albums I thought were great but never purchased to hear again.

It's depressing for you and me both. I never thought it could happen, but I've officially entered the "What happened to the good old days?" stage of my life.

I'm still struggling with finding a way to reduce the amount of saturation I'm presented with...I know there are brilliant albums I've listened to over the past few years that I can't even remember. It's depressing because I know if I had a physical copy sitting on my desk, I'd start browsing one day, run into it, and pop that sucker in. As a digital file on my computer, it's very easy to overlook or ignore.

I personally think that it's a two edged sword. The art of a standalone album does seem like a dying art but only commercially. I doubt we will ever see multiple artists selling millions of albums like they did in the preceding decades because you can just grab the best/well known track off an album via the net (in whatever form) and move onto the next band.

The reverse side is extremely positive, never before have fans been able to sample and explore the sheer diversity of music because of the net and many bands both past and present are getting exposure they could only dream of even 15 years ago. Maybe that's why the album seems to be dying. The media and maybe close friends were pushing select albums and you barely had no choice other than to buy if you wanted to listen but now fans can turn around and say bollox, I found this band instead and they are 10x better so I am listening to them instead and therefore the listening demographic is much wider spread.

I agree though Spotify is generally good and I barely download anymore and don't have to worry about finding this or that link. For a five spot a month I now have Spotify unlimited and have already found some great music.

I use RYM to rate items, and if it's below a 2.5 I won't bother with it again, but that still leaves me a good couple hundred albums I liked but may never hear again.

To help deal with it temporarily, I randomize the albums in my library every day and listen to whatever it selects, but it's not the most effective solution. I'm not complaining though. It's great feeling like there's simply too much good music.

I was having an off-kilter conversation with a guy I share an office with not so long ago over fusing microcontroller chips with the human brain and the possibilities it could bring. It got me thinking about the possibility of streaming music directly to the human brain and doing away with the needs of mp3 players or streaming to your phone. However I think we're still a long way off from becoming cyborgs.

But more seriously, the future of music will become more and more focused on accessibility. Streaming to phones and other portable devices seems growing at the moment and in the future it could be possible to stream music to your digital watch. People are also caring less and less about sound quality with is a real shame. Vinyl, cassettes and even CDs sound so much richer compared to 128kbps mp3s and streamed audio that it's hard to figure out why people want to compromise sound quality for the sake of accessibility.

True, I guess I shouldn't complain too much...having too much music isn't really bad haha. Still, I just worry that the album being a dying art (even commercially) will diminish the quality of albums in the future. If no one wants to buy them or are interested, why put your heart and soul into an album's worth of material? Great singles make me want more, and most of the time I get more in the form of a complete album. I don't like that if I want more of a band, all I can look forward to is heaps of crap and one great song.

That actually doesn't sound like a bad idea. It might not be the most effective...but at least some of the stuff I don't play often will get a spin here and there.

Only audiophiles such as ourselves really notice quality like that. It really does take a trained ear. I've noticed my hearing is much more discerning than most people as a result. There is a digital watch somewhere in my girlfriend's room that goes off the same time every night, but it's very faint because it's buried somewhere. Every time I mention how annoying the beeping is, she looks at me like I'm crazy. She can't even hear it, no matter how hard she tries.

I'm with you, especially about the ownership thing. I really don't like the idea of music access via subscription. It puts you far too much at the whim of what the provider chooses to carry.

How are kids getting their start in music these days anyways? When I was a kid I used to sort through my mom's cassettes for my first musical education, and after a while was allowed to pick my own from the CD club she was a member of, and this was all before I was 10. The very idea of a 10 year old having free reign of the internet and ipods and cell phones really bothers me.

That's true in a lot of cases. I played some vinyl to my youngest sister not so long ago (she doesn't even have a CD player, she's purely mp3s) and she didn't even seem to care about the sound quality.

I didn't even have internet access until I was 17, and even then it was a shitty dial-up connection so downloading music was out of the question. In a way I'm kind of grateful because I probably wouldn't appreciate physical music and decent sound quality the way I do now. What I'm really worried about though is young people destroying their hearing with mp3 players from a very early age.

Poor baby. I didn't have an internet connection until I was 27. :laughing:

By internet connection do you mean telegraph? ;)

clk... clk... clk-clk-clk... clk... clk-clk... clk-clik

Dude, I didn't even have cable tv until I was 19.


I'm not going to quote the whole thing but...

First off, welcome to being old :thumb:

I don't think mp3 players will go away. My ipod has become THE key device in road trips that take me through big chunks of rural Canada that have little to no cellphone service, never mind active wi-fi. Streaming anything? Forget it.

On the actual bigger issue at hand Jackhammer nails it, I can't really add much to his comment. I really like the bit about how the media and our peers would push particular albums, it's a situation where the expansion and widening of the target market reduces the potential for upward success. It's transforming from a pyramid to a pancake.

To be honest I looked at this weeks album charts and it had the usual mix of pop, R&B, hip hop, indie, folk and compilations as it probably would have done 15 years ago so I don't really see anything changing there. As for the singles chart, they've been full of one hit wonders forever, here's this weeks singles chart from 1997..

1 Olive You're Not Alone
2 Sarah Brightman & Andrea Bocelli Time To Say Goodbye (Con Te Partiro)
3 Eternal featuring BeBe Winans I Wanna Be The Only One
4 Katrina & The Waves Love Shine A Light
5 The Cardigans Lovefool
6 No Mercy Please Don't Go
7 Shola Ama You Might Need Somebody
8 The Rembrandts I'll Be There For You
9 Damage Wonderful Tonight
10 R Kelly I Believe I Can Fly
11 Toni Braxton I Don't Want To
12 DJ Quicksilver Bellissima
13 Rosie Gaines Closer Than Close
14 Elvis Presley Always On My Mind
15 North & South I'm A Man Not A Boy
16 Blackstreet Don't Leave Me
17 911 Bodyshakin'
18 Placebo Bruise Pristine
19 Ginuwine Tell Me Do U Wanna
20 Aaliyah If Your Girl Only Knew / One In A Million

I mean seriously how many of those do you remember?

I also think it's also too easy to get caught up in the 'everybody downloads now' way of thinking, they don't. My sister has zero interest in gadgets & computers apart from facebook & still buys CDs, so do a lot of the people I work with. My parents wouldn't know how to find & download anything from the internet if I left them detailed instructions, and even then they have no way of playing MP3's on their sound system.
It's worth noting that CD sales still account for 3 of every 4 albums sold in the UK.

While this future you're predicting might happen I think you're going to have to wait for at least 2 generations of people to die off first.

I probably download more music than anyone on here, but I also own several hundred CD's and I have been buying music on a weekly basis of late.

I may not have been around back in the day, but there is no doubt that music as a whole is flourishing at the moment. The idea of an "album" losing it's value does not hold any weight to me.

There will always be artists who create worthwhile albums, and there will always be artists who include a load of filler. That is not a new thing.

Maybe the idea of the physical copy is diminishing, but it certainly isn't hindering the production of great music.

The ****?

It was being used on a British Telecom advert at the time.

Just playing Devil's advocate...you can cache playlists and albums from Spotify on your phone for offline use. I'm just trying to think of this from the perspective of a young kid just getting into music. With it so readily available, why go for the hunt? For the time being, holdouts such as ourselves will keep the market going, but I honestly think it will be diminishing sooner rather than later.

Haha, that's a fair point. However, I can also name many many bands and artists from 1997 that are remembered and/or are relevant today. I think the amount of THOSE acts is diminishing. Then again, maybe I'm just feeling really disillusioned about music at the moment and it's affecting my opinion.

Maybe it's just me but I really can't think of a defining album from the last decade. One that everyone and their dog owned. I can think of several from the 60's all the way up to the late 90's. That in itself makes me feel as if the album art form is just not what it used to be. Sure, I can' think of albums I myself loved and of course if you look hard enough there is great music out there, but I'm talking about music everyone can get behind...even casual listeners.

I think part of the problem looking around the state of music today is that hindsight 20/20. We can't see the path of influence as it's occurring. Given another 10 years, it will be far more obvious who from the last decade made a lasting impact.

duga

I don't think there needs to be such an album any more. The internet has allowed for more selective tastes.

i can't either.

I totally agree with this.
I used to make a point of trying to listen to as many albums as I could that there was a some sort of buzz about whether it be websites or other people telling me. Eventually I stopped because I was so bored of listening to so many mediocre albums and 'flavour of the month' albums that barely had a lifespan of 2 weeks. The internet has made everything faster, things happen in weeks when previously they would happen over months.

These days I take my time listening to new stuff. I could probably count on my fingers & toes how many new bands or albums I checked out in 2011 & 2012 the way I see it is if they really are as good as people say they are they'll still be around for me to listen to in a few years time.

I don't see myself missing out on anything.

You are missing out, but I wouldn't say anything completely mind blowing has been released in the last two years. Maybe a few game changers in their particular fields, but that's it. But then again, those albums don't come around too often anyway, it's not a reflection on the music industry at the moment.

Yeah the way I see it is I can listen to everything that comes along in the last couple of years hoping I find something good, or I can spend my time cherry picking the best music from over 50 years of recorded music history and catch up on the newer stuff later on when it's lasted some time.

This whole thing of 'I checked out this band before anyone else did' doesn't really interest me anymore.

I think you have it right to be honest, but I have so much time on my hands at the moment so I am able to do both, which gives me a healthy balance of knowing where music is heading, and also discovering great music in the process (and lots of it is being made now).

Huh, modernisation has taken it too far, it seems. Youth nowadays (yes, the same one I'm part of, sadly enough) can't focus on a single thing, everything needs to be faster and faster, quickly check if somebody has tweeted anything, leave a little comment on Facebook here and there, I am guilty as well, but what's there for me to do about it? Internet is an awesome invention, but it has its downsides and these are that everything must be faster and easier. Go find a track from last year that has been in the charts for a reaosnable amoutnof time and is over 5 minutes long. Prtety much impossible. The purists will always be there, but still, it's next to impossible to stop the modernisation. Culture in general is fading away, I mean, look at the songs made nowadays. Every popular song seems the same, it's either pop or dance (or dubstep but that isn't even music anymore). I sincerely hope for another revival of rock like in the 90's, but I fear that music has taken severe brain damage. Mankind is going down the ****ter anyways.

This, exactly. A large chunk of what I listen to on a regular basis would be inaccessible here in the midwest, even if it were possible to order from a catalog, there would still be very scant choices. I've gotten into most bands through the internet, since I've been using it since I was like 10-11, and I don't know what I'd have done if I'd never had them, I don't think I would have survived my teenage years if it weren't for certain ones.

Saturated with music, I like that.

I think good music will always win out in the end. A lot of music today sounds a certain way just for the sake of sounding cool. This music is always short lived. Music has to mean something, has to hit you somewhere. Music has always been good ( with bad in there ). And throughout the ages, people have always viewed change in a precarious way. All things come to pass and we need to just go along with the ride and stop worrying about the future of things when we are in the present.

I just thought to myself that maybe today's music can be compared to the 80's. In the 80's, slick production really took off so everyone really hit on a similar sound. Pop music these days is similar...slick production has now been introduced to the masses for cheap, so now everyone wants that dancey-dubsteppy-club ready sounding kind of tune. I just heard an add for J. Lo's new album on Spotify, and sure enough it sounds very derivative of the current sound. I've heard Pop songs playing and they have really random ass bass drops...what is the need for that?

I think this is where the hindsight thing might come in...we can look back at the 80's and pick out the stuff that lasted like the Smiths, Tears for Fears, etc but at the time it was probably really hard to tell what the classics were going to be. Maybe that's where we are at right now and I should just be patient.

Still...I just really want a timeless modern classic. I've been aching for one.

I think Funeral has a really good shot at standing as a classic album of the 00s. Same with For Emma, Forever Ago, and obviously Kid A (though it's narrowly an 00s album).

On the same note, I think Merriweather Post Pavillion and My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy received more acclaim than either album deserved, and in hindsight won't have much of a lasting impact.

The problem is albums like Shabazz Palaces "Black Up" won't go down as all time classics because they aren't known enough.

What becomes regarded as a classic isn't necessarily related to how popular it was when it came out. There are a lot of album from the 90s that get referred to as classics around here that, frankly, I had never heard of (or was only dimly aware of) when they came out.

I agree with that point, but what I am saying is that there isn't a hope in hell that an album like Black Up would gain Legendary status in the wider world, like what happened with The Smiths and Tears For Fears (to use duga's example).

It's just the World we live in now. And as Pedestrian said, the albums that gain mega hype, such as MBDTF and MWPP aren't even that great. (and I would argue the same for pretty much all globally encapsulating albums in the past)

I think when people say "music is dead, or "music isn't culture defining anymore" they are mainly talking about rock, and traditional pop music. And that is true, rock and traditional pop doesn't define our culture anymore. I'm 16 and I think that we're living ina great time for music. Lots of fantastic hip hop, dance, pop and yes, even dubstep albums and songs have came out in the past few years. When I think of music that is going to be remembered as important to todays generation, I think of stuff like Skrillex(as dumb as that sounds, I know dub/brostep isn't very popular here, but I genuinely think he's one of the most interesting pop artists the world has had in a while) and dudes like Clams Casino, just because they are creating new sounds, and are making music at least interesting again instead of re-hashing the past.

Not sure I understand what you're getting at. How is what you're describing any different from how things went in the past?

Yeah, I realised half way through that there wasn't much difference between past and present and ended up confusing myself.

the future of music is point click drag and drop :P

Seriously there are skilled musicians/producers who are they do is exceal at making music from any genre ...all the do is go to the studio everyday they have every toy and gadget at there finger tips and they make music ..like a 9 to 5 job

and they sell there music to the artist ... they never go on tour or play it live they just stay in the super studio and make music a Music factory

this is the present of music

Right, the idea of a "universal" album that everyone owns and likes is a thing of the past and will never return. Music is so fragmented now and everyone listens to their own "thing" in their own little bubble. There are thousands of bands out there we have access to and there's simply too many of them to stand out or for everyone to come to a universal consensus on. Once the internet hit, those times disappeared.