random music thoughts

The real reason why music is getting worse…

…is the title of a Rick Beato video on YouTube. You can watch it below.

Rick attributes the current state of pop music (bad) to two things:

  1. Music is really easy to make now, thanks to various software and hardware tools
  2. Music is really easy to listen to now, thanks to streaming services

I think he’s right. In the video he lays out how much work went into recording a typical rock band, with drums alone requiring multiple mics (and a good drummer), where today it’s…a drum machine. Vocalists needed to sing on pitch, and the opportunity to fix mistakes originally meant having to re-record. Then came autotune, pitch correction software and the equivalent for instruments. Now anyone could sing, and the voice could be processed any way you like. When something hit, it was easy to reproduce…and was, by everyone looking to score a hit. The sheer volume of music increased as it became easier to make. And this is before you even consider the horror of AI-generated music.

As he notes, over 100,000 songs were added to streaming services over the last year, a rate of about one per second. This isn’t a stream, it’s a torrent1See what I did there?.

Then he explains how music in the olden times (my time) was something to be sought, acquired and savoured. Sure, it feels a bit “I had to walk both ways uphill in the snow” but again, he’s right. I remember saving for an album, having to go to the record store to buy it, take it home, then listen to it. If I liked it, I might loan it to a friend. Buying an album was a thing. Today, for $10.99 a month (about what one of those albums used to cost), you get a virtually endless supply of music on demand. You don’t have to seek it out, it’s just there, in an app. Combined with the sheer volume (heh heh) of the music output, it cultivates a feeling, especially in those who are growing up with streaming services, that music is nothing special–it’s just background noise. Don’t like a song? Just skip to the next random track. Let the software build a playlist for you. You don’t need to do anything, just listen. There is no investment, no value. It’s product.

And everything kind of sounds the same.

As I’m typing this, I’m listening to Boney M’s Nightflight to Venus, a 1978 album that gleefully celebrates its disco roots. It’s silly, bonkers, but also super catchy, with terrific harmonized vocals. It even covers a nice variety of styles, not just disco. I mean, it has a cover of “King of the Road.”

Today, an equivalent album would likely be composed on a computer, probably feature hyper-processed autotuned vocals, a drum machine and probably no actual guitars. It would be musical sludge, a pile of muck in a larger pile of indistinguishable muck. But hey, there’s a million other songs on tap, so just skip to something else if you don’t like it. The pool is big.

Anyway, the video is worth a watch, and helps explain why I spend more time listening to my ripped CD collection in Windows Media Player than I do listening to the nigh-endless selection of songs on Apple Music2Consider that I started buying my own music around 1977, which is 38 years before Apple Music existed.

Rediscovering old music

I wished my living room had looked like this when I was 30. (Image generated through NightCafe)

I don’t mean old-timey music like ragtime or something, rather I’m talking about eschewing a streaming service like Apple Music and going back to my old music collection, which consists mostly of CDs I’ve purchased and ripped over the past 30+ years. All of the files are local, tucked into a folder on my PC. The app to play them, Windows 11’s Media Player, provides album art and metadata, and that’s it. It doesn’t curate, recommend, provide radio stations, “for you” or anything else. It just lets you listen to your music library.

And it’s kind of refreshing. I can listen for hours and know I’m not burning bandwidth (I know I have the bandwidth, it’s more a principle thing). There’s a tangibility that’s missing with streaming. And everything is something I’ve already picked out, bought and listened to many times already. There is a welcome familiarity, but also a chance to revisit albums (kids, ask your parents what an “album” is) I haven’t listened to in years. Certain music invokes memories of other times and places. It’s weird and, usually, kind of wonderful.

Unlike my phone, which has a truncated version of my music library, the PC has everything, so when I hit shuffle, I never quite know what will come up. I like that.

Now I’m off to listen to Anderson, Bruford, Wakeman and Howe, which sounds more like a law firm than a majority of the members of Yes.

What if music streaming suddenly disappeared?

Spotify has been in the news recently, and it has not been good news:

  • They’re pulling out of Uruguay because that country wants them to pay artists fairly
  • They’re also laying off 17% of their workforce (over 1,500 people)

On the second item, I do wonder why they needed so many people. Like many tech companies, they got silly with hiring during the pandemic, so some cuts were inevitable.

But the layoffs, Uruguay demanding fair payment and Spotify essentially saying, “We can’t pay artists fairly and also survive” made me wonder if we’ll eventually reach a point where music streaming transforms from what it is now–a frankly shockingly inexpensive way to have what is essentially endless music–to something else. Some possibilities:

  • All music streaming services start raising prices…a lot. Let’s call it The Netflix Effect because if anyone knows anything about regular price hikes, it’s Netflix. I think most people would grumble and keep paying as monthly prices climbed from $10-11 to $15. They’d get cranky at $17-18, but would still keep paying. $20 (or, let’s be realistic, what the companies would bill as $19.99) crosses a psychological barrier. We’re now twice as expensive as what people were used to. But still, I think few would bail. In fact, I feel they could raise prices to at least $30 before you’d start seeing people go without, and even those numbers would be small enough to be more than offset by the price hikes. I figure you’d need to hit around $50 a month to really get people to stop. And then we’d probably be looking at Napster: The Next Generation happening.
  • Streamers that aren’t currently owned by big tech (like Spotify) would be gobbled up by big tech. People idly speculate about Microsoft buying Spotify, for example. Why would this happen? Because the music streaming business is so marginal (Spotify has over 200 million paid subscribers and still manages to lose money) that it’s only appealing to big tech companies that can subsidize the service, keeping it as a way to get or keep people in their ecosystem (people using Apple Music will buy iPhones to listen, etc.1Yes, Apple has an Apple Music app for Android phones, but I suspect it’s a tiny market vs. iPhone)
  • A less likely scenario is companies giving up on streaming services altogether, and we go back to music as it was 15 years ago, when you listened to the radio (“Mommy, what’s a radio?”), bought albums on iTunes (iTunes, shudder) or went to a physical store to buy an actual spinning disc. I mean, most people would do the latter through Amazon, but you get the point. This would have a couple of interesting effects: I think people would buy far less music and, by that same token, listen to a lot less new music. People would get picky again, and more conservative, sticking more to known bands and performers. It’s even possible the album format could see a revival of sorts if it was no longer ridiculously easy to flip through dozens of songs with a few clicks or taps. Maybe those cheesy CD music compilations would become a thing again. But I think the odds of streaming music going away entirely is very unlikely, so this is really just playing out “What if?” scenarios for fun (but not profit).

Of the above scenarios, I think the first–price increases–is the likeliest. And we’ve already had some recently. I’m sure more are on the way.

Pyramid is a fun album

photo of great pyramid of giza
Photo by Simon Berger on Pexels.com

Yes, I used the F word.

Pyramid is the third album from The Alan Parsons Project, released in 1978. It’s one of their best and here’s why, in no particular order:

  • Released at the height of disco, it exists completely outside of disco, achieving a timelessness so many great albums have.
  • At a mere 37:46 minutes long, this is an amazingly compact album (especially by prog rock standards), yet even in its economy it manages to pack in nine songs that include six vocalists, three instrumentals, a choir, tolling bells and a tuba solo.
  • Speaking of tuba solos, Pyramid isn’t afraid to go from the sublime to the ridiculous. The epic centrepiece, “In the Lap of the Gods”, an instrumental featuring the aforementioned tolling bell, choir and lush orchestration, is followed by “Pyramania”, which includes a tuba solo and lyrics like, “I consulted all the sages I could find in Yellow Pages/But there aren’t many of them.”
  • The concept (more a theme, really) comes through more directly here than on other APP albums. Every song echoes fears of death, of inevitability, regret and loss. The one exception is the final instrumental, “Hyper-Gamma-Spaces”, a trippy reprieve that focuses mainly on keyboards.

It’s a zany, mysterious grab bag of doom. Give it a listen on your favorite streaming service and soak in the experience of vocals without autotune.

Murmur and The Dark Side of the Moon

The Dark Side of the Moon (1973) and Murmur (1983) are two albums I own and enjoy, but neither of which I listened to when they were new. As they turn 40 (!) and 50 (!!) years old, I thought I’d reflect a bit on each.

When The Dark Side of the Moon came out in 1973, I was only nine years old and didn’t listen to any specific music or bands yet. I was gravitating toward The Beatles and The Beach Boys, though (in 1973 The Beatles had only been split up for three years). I came across this album years later, getting it first on CD in the mid-80s. The transfer was so bad (or good, depending on your perspective) that you could hear the analog hiss during quieter parts of the album.

Of the two, DSOTM is more famous, of course, but I feel it’s more dated or, to be more generous, of its time. In particular, the instrumental “Any Colour You Like” sounds very early 70s to my ears. That said, the rest of the album is sleeker and more timeless, and while it isn’t a concept album in the purist sense, all the songs connect together through themes and sound collages in a way that makes it feel like a single piece, a real album album (kids, ask your parents what an “album” is!)

DSOTM is also the sound of a band coming into its own with confidence and newfound maturity. It was Pink Floyd’s eighth album and was one of the last where all the band members fully participated.

Murmur, by contrast, was R.E.M.’s debut. Listening to it now, 40 years later, it still has a weird kind of freshness to it. I mean, it doesn’t sound anything like what you hear in contemporary pop music (which I can’t address without jumping straight into “old man yells at cloud” territory), but if you sought other albums with a similar sound recorded today, Murmur would effortlessly fit in with them, because Stipe’s vocals (not as murky as legend would have it) and the band’s early experimentation in style, going from jangly pop to simple acoustic numbers, remains vibrant and clear. It’s a fun album, an early adventure, and a great example of a group that fired on all cylinders right from the start.

Although I could have picked up Murmur when it was new (I was 19), like many others, I didn’t discover it until after getting brought in to R.E.M.’s music by a later album, in this case Document (1987) and specifically, “It’s the End of the World as We Know It (and I Feel Fine)”. In retrospect, I wish R.E.M. had done more zany songs or lighter songs. Some of the best on Murmur are these, like the appropriately propellant “Catapult”. Ah, well.

The song remains somewhat the same

How did I not notice this until just now, 12 years after R.E.M. retired as a band?

The first song on three consecutive R.E.M. albums includes the word “song” in the title. It can’t be a coincidence! It also can’t mean much other than just being a goofy little thing, so probably not worthy of a Dan Brown novel (what happened to him, anyway?)

  • Finest Worksong (Document, 1987)
  • Pop Song 89 (Green, 1988)
  • Radio Song (Out of Time, 1991)

Did the word “song” appear in any of their other song titles?

No.

~fin~

The shortest and snarkiest review of Around the Sun

I am weirdly fascinated by R.E.M.’s 13th album, Around the Sun. It was a commercial and critical flop (though there are some people who really liked it), and I think Peter Buck’s assessment, circa the release of its follow-up Accelerate, though unduly harsh, has the right general sentiment:

[It] “just wasn’t really listenable, because it sounds like what it is: a bunch of people that are so bored with the material that they can’t stand it anymore.”

Peter Buck

I don’t think it’s not listenable (and Buck probably doesn’t either, really), but I remain intrigued by how the whole album is so refined and carefully constructed, yet utterly tepid.

And then I came across this, which is actually a follow-up to the person’s full review, and it made me laugh out loud because that’s the kind of mood I was in:

Full review can be seen here.

Random music thought: The song “Aftermath” is actually pretty decent, but could have been better if the tempo had been boosted. It feels like it’s always running about two beats behind where it should be, if that makes sense (I am not a musician or even musician-adjacent).

Microsoft’s new Media Player is making me miss Groove

Not really. Groove was terrible, and I’m sure the new Media Player almost has to be better by default. But when I go to my Music Library and sort by Artist, this is the image it presents for ABBA (ABBA is the first artist in the list):

Yes, it’s the Bee Gees’ late younger brother, ABBA Gibb.

Right next to that is a photograph of Alan Parsons, or possibly some stand-up comic who had a sitcom in the 90s called The British Pop:

“Yo, dig my project.”

I will say this: After sampling a few songs, they actually do sound better than in the fossilized software known as iTunes. So there’s that. But I also checked The Magnetic Fields’ album 69 Love Songs and yes, it has all three virtual discs smooshed together like so:

1, 1, 1, 2, 2, 2, 3, 3, 3

Which I suppose is an interesting way to experience the album, a pseudo-shuffle play without actual shuffling required.

Unsurprisingly, our glorious future of streaming music means that even downloaded songs from Apple Music are nowhere to be found in Media Player, as Apple has them DRM’d and hidden away, playable only through iTunes or an app like Cider that uses Apple’s specific APIs (and then it streams the songs anyway, instead of playing the local version on the computer).

Maybe I should go full hipster and start buying vinyl again.

(lol no)

Disco Inferno: a visualization

How the lyrics for “Disco Inferno” appear in Apple Music (Mac version):

Burning

As you may or may not recall, the song is 10:51 minutes long. That is a lot of burning. The conventional wisdom is people don’t listen to the lyrics, and that would apply even more for a song meant to be danced to in a disco (inferno). But streaming music services means we can not only see the lyrics, we can follow along to them in real time and appreciate just how utterly inane they are when depicted visually. I don’t mean this as a bad thing. In fact, the idea of “Disco Inferno” actually having profound or meaningful lyrics is way more disturbing than seeing the word “burning” appear 24 times in a row.

Why are YouTube comments so weird? They are weird.

Or “Nice song…IF YOU’RE DEAD AND/OR DYING.”

The algorithm burbled up Queensrÿche’s “Silent Lucidity” on YouTube, and it’s been awhile since I listened to the song, so I watched the video.

It’s still a very nice song, and yes, it still sounds a lot like Pink Floyd. I submit that if Dave Gilmour recorded vocals for it and had included it on The Division Bell, no one would have suspected a thing. In fact, it might have been picked as the best song on the album. Zing!

Anyway, I started reading the comments because I wanted to see if people were still making the comparison to Pink Floyd (the song was released as a single way back in 1991), but instead I found what almost feels like a parody of YouTube comments, where everyone is proclaiming how old they are for reasons (??) or how the song means something to them because someone they know died or nearly died or maybe they themselves died, which I guess are things that can happen, but most especially happen in YouTube comments. Am I a bad person to find these comments weird? Probably. Here are some samples:

I played this song after I was dealing with health issues 4 years ago. And 3 years later today, I’m now cancer free!

85 years old and music is my life.

Just played at my Mother’s funeral.

Boyfriend of 6 years only ever played this song for me after he was diagnosed with cancer.

PLEASE SHOW YOUR CHILDREN THIS MUSIC

I’m a 97 years old man and i love this song so much!!!.

OMG Im 55 years old and heard this song yesterday

It’s my late husband’s birthday today

Reminds me when I was in rehab for a year

My mom would play this song for my brother and I when we were younger. She passed away 5 years ago today.

This was the first song I heard in ICU after coming off sedation .

My late husband practiced and practiced until he got this just right on his guitar.

My son is special needs, almost died at 20 days old

My dad passed away one month ago because of covid-19, he dedicated me this song when I was just a kid

And an actual Pink Floyd reference!

Una obra maestra a nivel Pink floyd. En mi top 10 de temas preferidos del rock! Translation: A Pink Floyd level masterpiece. In my top 10 favorite rock songs!

Oh, and here’s the actual video, for reference:

Rhyming is hard, he said to the bard

Did you know that the song “Tubthumping” from the album Tubthumper (there’s a good trivia question–which was the song, which was the album title?) rhymes the word “down” with the word “down”? It’s true!

I get knocked down
But I get up again
You're never gonna keep me down

It’s just catchy enough that you never notice until 20 years later, like me.

Why am I listening to The Go-Go’s so much?

I don’t know, but I am, and I’m not sorry!

I recently grabbed their third album, Talk Show, which I never got back on its original release in 1984. Sorry, Go-Go’s, I’m one of those people who helped contribute to the album’s relative unpopularity. I enjoyed the (hit) single “Head Over Heels” but for whatever reason the album as a whole didn’t appeal to me. I think the cover actually was a negative. Not only is it incredibly 80s (which offers a certain amount of kitsch value now), but it demonstrates a serious lack of imagination–unlike the album, which is actually their most sophisticated. Let’s compare covers:

  • Beauty and the Beat: Not only is the title great all on its own, the cover features the band members pseudo-anonymously dressed in towels with beauty cream covering their faces. It’s fun and clever.
  • Vacation: This one looks like a postcard from the 1950s, with retro typefaces and colors, and the band water skiing in formation in puffy pink and white outfits. Once again, it conveys a tremendous sense of fun.
  • Talk Show: This one is simply the five members of the band all photographed straight-on, the photos cropped and lined up to span the cover. There’s a multicolor border. That’s it. Even leaving aside the fabulous 80s hair and fashions, this cover is just boring. It also turned out to be prescient, because it was the first cover to not actually have all the band members posing together, hinting at the split to come after the album was released. Also, I still don’t know what the asterisk after the words “talk show” refer to.

There’s only one more studio album to go, 2001’s God Bless The Go-Go’s, which is allegedly a fine but not outstanding addition to their sun-dappled oeuvre. This means I’ll soon probably put these albums aside for a while. For now, though, I got the beat.