Has music suffered from 'slower output'?

[the masked man]

Might this be to do with the nature of pop/rock as a young man's/woman's game? I mean, we have tended to bestow far more respect on elder bluesmen and jazz artists than the so-called 'rock dinosaurs'. If this is true, the drop-off in artistic achievement might well owe as much to perceived irrelevance as it does to waning talent.

This may be changing slightly - the notion of a 'late-flowering' rock/pop artist is starting to become a little more acceptable. Jarvis Cocker didn't achieve popular success until well into his thirties; Richard Thompson's post-Fairport Convention career has had peaks well beyond that; and Scott Walker's become more experimental and respected as he's grown older. Also, Radiohead are now all in their late 30s/early 40s, and their age is not considered an issue when discussing In Rainbows.

However, I think there is still an issue in that areas of the mass media is still obsessed with youth, and this could actually be worse than it was ten years ago. Witness the storm-in-a-teacup 'scandal' over The Ting Tings allegedly lying about their ages (due to the fact that the record industry might struggle with the concept of a new duo whose combined age was 57). Again, this shows the polarisation of modern pop culture - the emergence of a monthly music press aimed at 30- and 40-somethings (Mojo, Word, Uncut) can sustain older, more established artists a little better. But the more youth-obsessed teen-aimed media demands that its new stars (like Miley Cyrus) be younger than ever, while someone like Britney Spears is considered virtually washed up at 27, already having to launch a 'comeback' album in order to regain momentum.

In conclusion, I think that pop music culture is now so piecemeal, with various fragments flying in their own orbit without touching any of the other fragments, that it's now hard to make any generalisations. Different rules apply in different situations.

[Molony]

In dance music, some artists record at an astonishing rate, so I'm not sure if this is a truism across all music. Some artists I know release 4 or 5 albums a year.

Excuse my utter ignorance, but do artists who make dance music continue into middle-age etc? In other words, are there any senior figures in dance music in the way rock/pop has Neil Young, Dylan et al?

[KeithPratt]

Well not exactly, but there are many in the electronic field (not just dance music, but in experimental areas) who are well into their sixties.

[Goat Boy]

In a word: yes.

Bands developed much quicker years ago and 60's bands are the obvious case in point here. It took the Beatles less than three years to get from She Loves You to Tomorrow Never Knows whereas a lot of bands these days seem to take a minimum of two years plus between albums. Oasis have been around for 14 years and have released 7 albums! Laughable really.

Artists need to be pushed I think and even if this results in some 'filler', usually the highs are, often, greater I think. The recording process these days as well is often far too long I think and consequently artists find it hard to distance themselves from their work with records being over produced and fussy.

[bobzilla77]

I think the real problem, which a couple folks have touched on, is that artists' most prolifically creative period tends to be during their twenties (allowing for rare exceptions). So if they have a hit right out of the gate they're likely to get stuck on the treadmill, touring for two-year cycles, gathering enough steam for a new release roughly every three years. By the time they get three albums out they're nearly over the hill. And that two years flogging the same piece of product has become essential to big business. You have to be convinced you have wrung every last available dollar out of a body of work before you can start on the next one... and once you do, it had better live up to expectations.

As the economy moves to a point where live revenues are much more important than record sales revenues, I don't see that situation improving for the big-box stars.

Then again, via the internet, artists can get stuff out quickly with very little in the way of production costs nowadays. And with digital recording being what it is, they can produce new work with less in the way of studio costs. Maybe there's a happy medium yet to be found as the various realities of the new age come together.

[Quaco]

Maybe there's a happy medium yet to be found as the various realities of the new age come together.

[bobzilla77]

[automatic_drip]

A couple of thoughts:

Spans are longer, for sure, but records are certainly much longer then they were thirty years ago. Albums that used to clock in less than 30 minutes now must clock close to 70 in the CD age. Not a healthy trend.

Bands that are at a certain level are now addressing the entire world, not just their home turf. CCR would hit the road for a month and be done with it. Now everyone tours everwhere. This generation's CCR (say The Hold Steady) tour the US three times, hit europe and the festivals, then go home and get reacquainted with their pillows. What do you write about when all you do is work?

The luxury of having so much time to distill every project down to a big statement every time eliminates a lot of the quickly cut quirkiness - they Hey Bulldog sydrome Quaco mentioned is sorely lacking these days. Where's the fun?

[The Modernist]

I don't really see the 60s/early 70s as the mythical golden age that most BCBers do, so I'm not sure that I necessarily think the heavy release schedule of that time as being all good. An awful lot of filler got released in that era, and not even The Beatles were immune to this (even a masterpiece like The White Album contains quite baffling variations in tone and quality). Wasn't it all a bit too frantic back then?

.

Only in so much that you wished some periods of music lasted longer. I would have loved more of that beat meets early psych sound, but you are reduced to pretty much searching for things released in 1966 for that. I think the rapid changes were for the most part really beneficial giving a real innovative energy to music of that time. And I regard the well of quality music released from say 64-73 as being far deeper than you do, indeed I am still discovering incredible music from that time period and often stuff that has been sadly forgotten about.
Apart from the odd perfectionist, I would say the increasing time between albums in the music of the 15 years or so is indicative of a lack of ideas in the artists concerned. They take a long time to release a record because they're not actually very inspired and don't have a lot to say.

[Django]

Generally speaking, I prefer it when an artist takes their sweet time over something.

Ryan Adams is a great example of why. When I first heard him, I thought he was a great talent, a wonderful songwriter. These days, I'm not interested in him at all, because I haven't the time or inclination to sift through his unceasing output to find the diamonds in the dogshit. Ryan Adams thinks that every single thing he writes is worthy of our attention, every half formed idea or sketch. And he's wrong. He needs to self-edit, and only put out, say, twelve songs every couple of years.

And I applaud a band like The Shins. Three great albums in 8 years. Wonderful! So they could have released 5 lesser albums in the same time. What would be the point of that? Damaging to their reputation, damaging to their listeners' confidence in them.

I can think of a handful of acts who I've lost confidence in in the last few years, because they've released too many albums too quickly, with diminishing returns - M. Ward, The Decemberists, Malcolm Middleton...

[Balboa]

Apart from the odd perfectionist, I would say the increasing time between albums in the music of the 15 years or so is indicative of a lack of ideas in the artists concerned. They take a long time to release a record because they're not actually very inspired and don't have a lot to say.

I don't think that at all - I just don't think they are under any pressure to write new material. The big bands in the 60s always talk about being under pressure to write another hit or another album. I think it is that kind of pressure cooker atmosphere that is missing from today's release schedules. Some bands would thrive and those with few ideas would dwindle - it would be interesting.

And I applaud a band like The Shins. Three great albums in 8 years. Wonderful! So they could have released 5 lesser albums in the same time. What would be the point of that?

Well I don't think that their last album was a step on from the previous one - he should have mined his creatvity harder and moved quicker. I think 3 albums in 8 years is a poor level of output - and short albums at that. It's not like his 'talent' has deserted him in this time. I can only think artists will look back on these periods of writing inactivity with regret.

I think Ryan Adams is an intriguing example - he certainly has an interesting catalogue of albums to his name. I'm not his biggest fan (although the only thing I have heard of his that I didn't at least like was 'Demolition') but I would love more people to try and do what he does. I think the results would be interesting.

[Guy E]

This is an interesting article from the New York Times. It sounds like music will be in two camps for the next couple of decades; artists who choose to remain independent and market themselves through the Internet and independent venues, and artist who sign-on for 360-degree marketing deals involving music, bookings, merchandise, etc. The big challenge will be keeping a circuit of independent venues thriving; the Clear Channel paradigm is already well established.

* * * * *

Songs From the Heart of a Marketing Plan.

By JON PARELES
Published: December 24, 2008

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/12/28/ar...&_r=1&ref=arts

IN “Creator,” the rawest track on Santogold’s debut and self-titled album, the singer Santi White boasts, “Me I’m a creator/Thrill is to make it up/The rules I break got me a place up on the radar.” It’s a bohemian manifesto in a sound bite, brash and endearing, or at least it was for me until it showed up in a beer commercial. And a hair-gel commercial too.

It turns out that the insurgent, quirky rule breaker is just another shill. Billboard reported that three-quarters of Santogold’s excellent album has already been licensed for commercials, video games and soundtracks, and Ms. White herself appears in advertisements, singing for sneakers. She has clearly decided that linking her music to other, mostly mercenary agendas is her most direct avenue to that “place up on the radar.”

I know — time for me to get over it. After all, this is the reality of the 21st-century music business. Selling recordings to consumers as inexpensive artworks to be appreciated for their own sake is a much-diminished enterprise now that free copies multiply across the Web.

While people still love music enough to track it down, collect it, argue over it and judge their Facebook friends by it, many see no reason to pay for it. The emerging practical solution is to let music sell something else: a concert, a T-shirt, Web-site pop-up ads or a brand.

Musicians have to eat and want to be heard, and if that means accompanying someone else’s sales pitch or videogame, well, it’s a living. Why wait for album royalties to trickle in, if they ever do, when licensing fees arrive upfront as a lump sum? It’s one part of the system of copyright regulations that hasn’t been ravaged by digital distribution, and there’s little resistance from any quarters; Robert Plant and Alison Krauss croon for J. C. Penney and the avant-rockers Battles are heard accompanying an Australian vodka ad.

The question is: What happens to the music itself when the way to build a career shifts from recording songs that ordinary listeners want to buy to making music that marketers can use? That creates pressure, subtle but genuine, for music to recede: to embrace the element of vacancy that makes a good soundtrack so unobtrusive, to edit a lyric to be less specific or private, to leave blanks for the image or message the music now serves. Perhaps the song will still make that essential, head-turning first impression, but it won’t be as memorable or independent.

Music always had accessory roles: a soundtrack, a jingle, a branding statement, a mating call. But for performers with a public profile, as opposed to composers for hire, the point was to draw attention to the music itself. Once they were noticed, stars could provide their own story arcs of career and music, and songs got a chance to create their own spheres, as sanctuary or spook house or utopia. If enough people cared about the song, payoffs would come from record sales (to performer and songwriter) and radio play (to the songwriter).

When Moby licensed every song on his 1999 album, “Play,” for ads and soundtracks, the move was both startling and cheesy, but it did lead to CD sales; an album that set staticky samples of blues and gospel to dance-floor beats managed to become a million seller. Nearly a decade later, platinum albums are much scarcer.

For all but the biggest names — like AC/DC, which made Wal-Mart the exclusive vendor for CDs of its long-awaited “Black Ice” album, got its own “store within a store” and sold more than a million copies in two weeks — a marketing deal is more likely to be its own reward rather than spawn a career. With telling ambivalence, Brooklyn Vegan, the widely read, indie-loving music blog, recently started a column, “This Week in Music Licensing: It’s Not Selling Out Anymore,” but soon dropped the “selling out” half of the title. There’s no longer a clear dividing line for selling out, if there ever was.

And as music becomes a means to an end — pushing a separate product, whether it’s a concert ticket or a clothing line, a movie scene or a Web ad — a tectonic shift is under way. Record sales channeled the taste of the broad, volatile public into a performer’s paycheck. As music sales dwindle, licensers become a far more influential target audience. Unlike nonprofessional music fans who might immerse themselves in a song or album they love, music licensers want a track that’s attractive but not too distracting — just a tease, not a revelation.

It’s almost enough to make someone miss those former villains of philistinism, the recording companies. Labels had an interest in music that would hold listeners on its own terms; selling it was their meal ticket. Labels, and to some extent radio stations and music television, also had a stake in nurturing stars who would keep fans returning to find out what happened next, allowing their catalogs to be perennially rediscovered. By contrast, licensers have no interest beyond the immediate effect of a certain song, and can save money by dealing with unknowns.

As the influence of major labels erodes, licensers are seizing their chance to be talent scouts. They can be good at it, song by song, turning up little gems like Chairlift’s “Bruises,” heard in an iPod ad. For a band, getting such a break, and being played repeatedly for television viewers, is a windfall, and perhaps an alternate route to radio play or the beginning of a new audience. But how soon will it be before musicians, perhaps unconsciously, start conceiving songs as potential television spots, or energy jolts during video games, or ringtones? Which came first, Madonna’s “Hung Up” or the cell phone ad?

Not wanting to appear too crass, musicians insist that exposure from licensing does build the kind of interest that used to pay off in sales and/or loyalty. Hearing a song on the radio or in a commercial has a psychological component; someone else has already endorsed it. Musicians who don’t expect immediate mass-market radio play — maybe they’re too old, maybe they’re too eccentric — have gotten their music on the air by selling it to advertisers. That can rev up careers, as Apple ads have done for Feist and for this year’s big beneficiary, Yael Naim, whose “New Soul” introduced the MacBook Air. (Sites like findthatsong.net help listeners identify commercial soundtracks.)

The Sri Lankan art-pop-rapper M.I.A. already had all the hipster adoration she could ever want for her song “Paper Planes,” which compares international drug dealing to selling records, and it turns gunshots and a ringing cash register into hooks. But having the song used in the trailer for “Pineapple Express” was probably what propelled the song to a Grammy nomination for record of the year.

(Grammy voters often seize on music from everywhere but the albums they purport to judge; they seem particularly drawn to film soundtracks.) And if the song now conjures images of the movie trailer for many listeners, that’s the tradeoff for recognition.

The old, often legitimate accusation against labels was that they sold entire albums with only one good song or two. Now there’s an incentive for a song to have only 30 seconds of good stuff. It’s already happening: Chris Brown’s hit “Forever” is wrapped around a jingle for chewing gum.

Apparently there’s no going back, structurally, to paying musicians to record music for its own sake. Labels that used to make profits primarily from selling albums have been struggling since the Internet caused them to lose their chokehold on distribution and exposure. Now, in return for investing in recording and promotion, and for supplying their career-building expertise (such as it was), they want a piece of musicians’ whole careers.

Old-fashioned audio recording contracts are increasingly being replaced by so-called 360 deals that also tithe live shows, merchandising, licensing and every other conceivable revenue stream — conceding, in a way, that the labels’ old central role of selling discs for mere listening is obsolescent. Some musicians, like the former record company president Jay-Z, have concurred, but by signing 360 deals not with labels but with the concert-promotion monolith Live Nation.

Maybe such dire thoughts are extreme, since some people are still buying music. The iTunes Music Store has sold more than five billion songs since 2003. But it’s harder and harder to find a song without a tie-in. It took Guns N’ Roses 15 years between albums to complete “Chinese Democracy,” certainly long enough to receive worldwide notice when the album was released this year. But instead of letting the album arrive as an event in itself, the band licensed one of the album’s best songs, “Shackler’s Revenge,” to a video game that came out first. Metallica fans have complained that the band’s new album, “Death Magnetic,” sounds better in the version made for the “Guitar Hero” video game than on the consumer CD, which is compressed to the point of distortion so it will sound louder on the radio. But they take for granted that the music will end up in the game in the first place. Consumers reinforce the licensers almost perversely: they pay for music as a ringtone, or tap along with it on the iPhone game Tap Tap Revenge, but not as a high-fidelity song.

Perhaps it’s too 20th century to hope that music could stay exempt from multitasking, or that the constant insinuation of marketing into every moment of consciousness would stop when a song begins. But for the moment I’d suggest individual resistance. Put on a song with no commercial attachments. Turn it up. Close your eyes. And listen.

[Guy E]

In general, I think it's better for artists to push themselves when they're in their prime. I cannot salute The Shins output level at all; four years or more between albums is ridiculous for a young band. It ended up working for them because the last album was "highly anticipated" and sold well, but for all intents and purposes it will be their final album. What's the point of releasing CD's to the youth market now? The next one will appear only after all the songs have been licensed to films, games and television commercials.

[sloopjohnc]

I also think the Shins are a poor example.

I hate to say it folks, but this ain't rocket science, it's pop music. I think we afford them a little more creative leeway than they deserve.

If artists were able to churn out stuff pretty quickly at a pretty high rate in the past, why not now?

And yes, I don't think Ryan Adams fans should be waiting for that rarities and unreleased album anytime soon.

[The Write Profile]

Just to take this thread on another tangent, but there's also the small matter that a majority of "mid-range" (in terms of commcercial success, that is) acts will probably find, increasingly, if they're not already, that the majority of their revenue will come from live shows and the accompanying merchandising, with the occasional single released via iTunes or emusic, or if they're lucky, license certain songs for film or game soundtracks (and the success of the Grand Theft Auto series has had a huge impact on that- it really has become a cultural phenomenon above and beyond the mere game itself).

The excellent article that Guy E posted reminded me of a conversation I had with a couple of local music industry types I know, and they seem to be echoing the general tone of that piece, if not the exact details. What's fascinating is this is, apparently, going to force artists to become both more productive (pump those songs out for release before the tour/to captialize on the latest film deal) and less productive (don't worry about the album just yet, it's less likely to sell or have as much commercial potential as individual songs or one-off releases, besides, you're going to make most of the gravy and the turkey on the tour). What does this mean? It probably means, once again, that a lot of the industry is probably semi-returning to the pre-album era, albeit with caveats. It's going to make for confused times, if they're not confused already, that is.


A couple of comments about artists already mentioned. It still boggles the mind that even as late as 1969 CCR could release four classic albums within the space of 18 months, let alone the Beatles four years earlier. Granted, CCR padded out a couple of their records with judiciously selected cover versions, but that attrition rate is astonishing if only because it seems so typical looking at the release dates of contemporary artists. Then again, I don't necessarily think things are slowing down now, they're just different, that's all, as certain musics tend to move towards faster release rates than others. Sorry if this is scattershot, when I get my laptop back in a week, I may string this into something more coherent!

Funny too, that Radiohead have been brought up- they're one of the groups that have signed a deal with Clearnet/Live Nation, which meant that no matter how they released In Rainbows (and c'mon, we all knew the "download only" thing was a ruse, right?), it was likely they were going to cover their costs from touring and/or merchandising. Also, it puts their "No Logo" championing in perspective, considering that Clearnet's often indulge in the very sort of brutish, corporate strong-arm behaviour that Naomi Klein was protesting against in her (flawed and dogmatic, but fascinating) book.