The Popular Music Industry

There are various cause and effect relationships in Chris Anderson’s essay “The Rise and Fall of the Hit.” First, the prevalence of illegal downloading, exposure to more music, and the option of purchasing single songs rather than buying an entire album caused the steep decline of music sales and marketing (Anderson 456-457). For instance, consumers can now listen to a wide array of artists on YouTube and then download the songs they like from the artist instead of purchasing an album from a highly marketed pop artist. Second, mass media was initially made possible by new technologies such as the printing press and phonograms (Anderson 459-460). For instance, newspapers allowed for news, entertainment, and politics to be widely available to

I found this quote to be a really good summary of this chapter. The Beatles and Motown had a profound effect on shaping the music industry during the sixties and for many years to come. There sound transcended British Pop, and went as far as integrated itself with traditionally American genres such as rhythm & blues and jazz. Another part of the chapter that really found interesting was the discussion of rhythm & blues intersection with white consumership. While the Billboard, one of the major outlets for music,

Questioning the correlation of commercial success and true artistry began in the light of mainstream music. Mainstream music has been given a negative connotation due to the supposed lack of originality of the artists. Repetitive chord progressions and meaningless lyrics compose the majority of “mainstream music,” making each song sound like the next . Despite these patterns in music, artists still ventured outside of what was societally normal and created music that was unheard of. Despite the potential risks in being an individual in the music industry, several groups achieved high success and maintain the popularity in the present. Creativity and commercial success can definitely exist alongside one another, and this paper will prove that through the music of the Beatles, the performance styles of David Bowie, and the grunge movement in Seattle which was fueled by Nirvana.

The broadcasting and recording industries did not solely represent the conquering racial assumptions of the 1950's, they internalized them and helped to continue them. Racial conventions permeated the organization and structure of the music industry at every level. The very existence

The music industry, a large industry that had captured the ears, the talents, the emotions of its listeners. Music has become an item that affects the lives of people everywhere, at all times. With our countless number of ways to communicate, through words, images, and sound; music has used these to speak to billions of people. Because of the wide variety that the industry has, they are separated in different genres that different type of people can listen to. Among all these genres, a genre that is alive, but does not catch so much of the attention it should get.

     The music industry is in a time of growth at this very moment. The environment for its growth has been increasing rapidly on many geographical boundaries and has been established through information technology and Internet. In this paper I will analyze how the music industry not only has been affected by Globalization as an economic institution but also that it has become a worldwide-globalized commodity. First, I will begin by analyzing how the music industry, though its consumption is not a necessity, it is affected by large economic factors and has become a large Music Market. Furthermore I will analyze how the music market has globalizing tendencies

The music industry is made of companies which produce and sell music. The music industry as we know it was solidified in the mid-twentieth century, where records succeeded sheet music as the primary product in the music business. Record companies were established, but did not last very long until the late 1980s when the “Big Six”, a group of multinational corporations consisting of Sony, MCA, WEA, Polygram, EMI, and BMG controlled most of the market. Initially there were five corporations (CBS and RCA (both now belonging to Sony), WEA, EMI, and Polygram) that had emerged in 1978 to own 60 per cent of the market. (Wallis and Malm, 1984, p. 81)

Music has played a vital role in human culture and evidence based on archaeological sites can date it back to prehistoric times. It can be traced through almost all civilizations in one form or another. As time has progressed so has the music and the influences it has on people. Music is an important part of popular culture throughout the world, but it is especially popular in the United States. The music industry here is, and has been, a multi-million dollar business that continues to play an important role in American popular culture. This is also a art form and business that is forever changing as the times and more importantly, technology changes. Technology has changed the way music is made as well as how it is produced,

America’s Top 40 was able to resist splintering until the early 90’s where stations that Aired Kasem’s show would no longer tolerate his openness to whatever made the sales charts (Fisher 2014). With the rising popularity of Rap, radio culture naturally diverged into further demographics, with the ideal model for unification becoming closer to a niche show. America’s Top 40, made countdowns into separate shows for each genres to compensate for the fragmentation of musical media (Yahr 2014). This still gave its listeners a greater variety of music than they could get from listening to other local radio stations. Despite its profound effect on both Radio Media and its listeners began to splinter, with Kasem’s show falling off air in the early 2000’s due to the newer on-demand culture (Fisher 2014). The changing culture of music culture in America changed what groups connected on associated with, yet the influence of media can dictate the social and economic trends of a nation as shown by Americas top 40’s focus on the top selling songs. Kasem cultivated music into the countdown format appealing to his listeners with an organized collection of music that appealed to his listener’s sense of identity (Yahr 2014). While ultimately America’s Top 40 retired from broadcast, Music media in many ways was able to hold itself together yet still splintered off in different directions without completely fragmenting. In the 70’s onward America’s sense of community through music was still bound to entities of music radio they were not so drastically different from each

Music throughout the years has changed significantly, all the way from classical music to heavy metal. It is evident that the society is the one who influences new music. Why? Because they are the authors, the ones who express their feelings that are later transferred to lyrics.

Popular music is often one of the best lenses we have through which to view our own cultural orientation. Many of the artistic and experimental shifts in popular music have mirrored changes in our own society. For instance, the emergence of Elvis Presley as a public figure would signal the start of a sexual revolution and the growth in visibility of a rebellious youth culture. Similarly, the folk and psychedelic music of the 1960s was closely entangled with the Civil Rights, anti-war and social protest movements. In this regard, we can view popular music as an artifact through which to better understand the time and place in which it is produced. In light of this, the state of popular music today may suggest troubling things about our society.

This creates bias, as it is not the same with male artists. Nevertheless, he discusses it is not definite and that valid decisions in relation to popular music can be confusing as preferences are subject to change Society tends to have emotional reaction to music as opposed to labeling which genre a song will entail. “It is genre rules which determine how musical forms are taken to convey meaning and value, which determine the aptness of different sorts of judgment which determine the competence of people…” (Firth.1996, p 95). He concludes by establishing that popular music affects both social and individual notions.

Categories or styles in music are identified as genres. Separating music into different genres can be achieved by identifying shared traditions or conventions in musical pieces. Simon Frith argues that genre categorization is a tool for record companies in order to gain maximum profit from their recording artists “The underlying record company problem, in other words, how to turn music into a commodity, is solved in generic terms” (1996, p. 76). Articles by Reebee Garofalo, Simon Frith, Hector Qirko and Arnold Shaw explore how musical genres are constructed, defined, negotiated, and maintained.

As time continues to change, so does the music industry as we know it. Artists of different races, genders, and differing music styles continue to emerge and create top hits on the charts. However, some of these artists chose not to associate with major record labels, or sell any of their music to them. These are the people bringing about the real changes that ought to be recognized and discussed. For this paper, I decided to look at the group Postmodern Jukebox, their background as a group, their style of music, and route they chose in this business. I believe groups like Postmodern Jukebox are changing the music industry as we know it through their commitment to producing unique music, and allowing for a diverse following that encourages living out your own true identity.

The fact that replicating a seventeen-year-old song can produce a hit in 2017 demonstrates that there is a pre-designed formula for popular music in which changing a few characteristics to make a new song sound “unique” can still result in success. This proves Adorno’s argument that the music industry produces music in an “industrial” way--popular music is centralized in its pattern and modifies some characteristics to seem “individualistic.” Though “Shape of You” and No Scrubs contain different keys, tempo, and of course, lyrics, they both rely on a chord progression of i-ic-VI-VII in a common time (MusicNotes, 1 & FindSongTempo, 1). “Shape of You” takes advantage of the fact that the audience is accustomed to listening to the same pattern, predicting that the listeners will react the same way they did with previous successful songs, thereby attaining financial success.