Taylor Swift says you're wrong if you think the music industry is dying

[Deberg_1990]

She OWNS all. Wise beyond her years





http://online.wsj.com/articles/for-t...ory-1404763219



Where will the music industry be in 20 years, 30 years, 50 years?



Before I tell you my thoughts on the matter, you should know that you're reading the opinion of an enthusiastic optimist: one of the few living souls in the music industry who still believes that the music industry is not dying…it's just coming alive.

There are many (many) people who predict the downfall of music sales and the irrelevancy of the album as an economic entity. I am not one of them. In my opinion, the value of an album is, and will continue to be, based on the amount of heart and soul an artist has bled into a body of work, and the financial value that artists (and their labels) place on their music when it goes out into the marketplace. Piracy, file sharing and streaming have shrunk the numbers of paid album sales drastically, and every artist has handled this blow differently.

In recent years, you've probably read the articles about major recording artists who have decided to practically give their music away, for this promotion or that exclusive deal. My hope for the future, not just in the music industry, but in every young girl I meet…is that they all realize their worth and ask for it.

Music is art, and art is important and rare. Important, rare things are valuable. Valuable things should be paid for. It's my opinion that music should not be free, and my prediction is that individual artists and their labels will someday decide what an album's price point is. I hope they don't underestimate themselves or undervalue their art.

In mentioning album sales, I'd like to point out that people are still buying albums, but now they're buying just a few of them. They are buying only the ones that hit them like an arrow through the heart or have made them feel strong or allowed them to feel like they really aren't alone in feeling so alone. It isn't as easy today as it was 20 years ago to have a multiplatinum-selling album, and as artists, that should challenge and motivate us.

There are always going to be those artists who break through on an emotional level and end up in people's lives forever. The way I see it, fans view music the way they view their relationships. Some music is just for fun, a passing fling (the ones they dance to at clubs and parties for a month while the song is a huge radio hit, that they will soon forget they ever danced to). Some songs and albums represent seasons of our lives, like relationships that we hold dear in our memories but had their time and place in the past.

However, some artists will be like finding "the one." We will cherish every album they put out until they retire and we will play their music for our children and grandchildren. As an artist, this is the dream bond we hope to establish with our fans. I think the future still holds the possibility for this kind of bond, the one my father has with the Beach Boys and the one my mother has with Carly Simon.

I think forming a bond with fans in the future will come in the form of constantly providing them with the element of surprise. No, I did not say "shock"; I said "surprise." I believe couples can stay in love for decades if they just continue to surprise each other, so why can't this love affair exist between an artist and their fans?


In the YouTube generation we live in, I walked out onstage every night of my stadium tour last year knowing almost every fan had already seen the show online. To continue to show them something they had never seen before, I brought out dozens of special guest performers to sing their hits with me. My generation was raised being able to flip channels if we got bored, and we read the last page of the book when we got impatient. We want to be caught off guard, delighted, left in awe. I hope the next generation's artists will continue to think of inventive ways of keeping their audiences on their toes, as challenging as that might be.

There are a few things I have witnessed becoming obsolete in the past few years, the first being autographs. I haven't been asked for an autograph since the invention of the iPhone with a front-facing camera. The only memento "kids these days" want is a selfie. It's part of the new currency, which seems to be "how many followers you have on Instagram."

A friend of mine, who is an actress, told me that when the casting for her recent movie came down to two actresses, the casting director chose the actress with more Twitter followers. I see this becoming a trend in the music industry. For me, this dates back to 2005 when I walked into my first record-label meetings, explaining to them that I had been communicating directly with my fans on this new site called Myspace.[B} In the future, artists will get record deals because they have fans—not the other way around.[/B]

Another theme I see fading into the gray is genre distinction. These days, nothing great you hear on the radio seems to come from just one musical influence. The wild, unpredictable fun in making music today is that anything goes. Pop sounds like hip hop; country sounds like rock; rock sounds like soul; and folk sounds like country—and to me, that's incredible progress. I want to make music that reflects all of my influences, and I think that in the coming decades the idea of genres will become less of a career-defining path and more of an organizational tool.

This moment in music is so exciting because the creative avenues an artist can explore are limitless. In this moment in music, stepping out of your comfort zone is rewarded, and sonic evolution is not only accepted…it is celebrated. The only real risk is being too afraid to take a risk at all.


I predict that some things will never change. There will always be an increasing fixation on the private lives of musicians, especially the younger ones. Artists who were at their commercial peak in the '70s, '80s and '90s tell me, "It was never this crazy for us back then!" And I suspect I'll be saying that same thing to younger artists someday (God help them). There continues to be a bad girl vs. good girl/clean-cut vs. sexy debate, and for as long as those labels exist, I just hope there will be contenders on both sides. Everyone needs someone to relate to.

And as for me? I'll just be sitting back and growing old, watching all of this happen or not happen, all the while trying to maintain a life rooted in this same optimism.

And I'd also like a nice garden.

[Baby Lee]

Originally Posted by Gadzooks

I like astronomy and stuff, but it's just not the same. Dane could tell about the specific elements related to Taylor Swift's audio engineering, (the use of Auto tunes, Pre-Amps, Guitar pedals, etc...)

He could also give a few backhanded comments to suggest the reason for her overall success, (open mouth, open legs, etc...).

Yeah, but he was too into little ki . . . errr. . . high fidelity music.

[Gadzooks]

Originally Posted by Deberg_1990

same. maybe this thread will bring him out of his slumber.

I think he's probably got more important things to deal with than CheifsPlanet, but who doesn't?

[Gadzooks]

Originally Posted by Baby Lee

Yeah, but he was too into little ki . . . errr. . . high fidelity music.

Yeah, I'm aware of the "audiophile" thing but I don't have the context behind it.
He came back and was playing as nicely as he could for a while.

[Baby Lee]

Originally Posted by Gadzooks

Yeah, I'm aware of the "audiophile" thing but I don't have the context behind it.
He came back and was playing as nicely as he could for a while.

I'm not exactly sure how it went down either and I was there to witness it, but he got hot and bothered over someone calling him an audiophile suspecting somehow that it was code for pedophile.

I too miss the dude overall, kind of weird that he gave so much information about his neighbors that I found his exact house in google street view. Looks like he could at least hear, if not see from his roof, the Hollywood Bowl. And without his prodding into google maps, I'd have never have learned that Miley Cyrus shares an entire back yard with the Estate of Bob Hope. Bob's estate takes up an entire 1/2 block, with the par 3 golf hole and orange orchard, and Miley's house only takes up 1/3 of the other half of the block, but still.

Then after watching the episode of Seinfeld's 'Comedians in Cars getting Coffee' with Michael Richards, I put my google maps Dane experience, with my GeoGuessr game experience to use to find a street view of Jay Mohr's house [Michael Richard has Jerry take a road in Malibu to where he thinks Sugar Ray Leonard lives, but it's Mohr's house, and Barry Katz is walking up the drive as they arrive, kind of a weird coincidence as Barry used to open for Jerry as a standup and now represents the likes of Jon Stewart, Colbert, Carolla and Mohr as an agent].

[Gadzooks]

Barry Katz is "Baby Doll"?

[Baby Lee]

Originally Posted by Gadzooks

Barry Katz is "Baby Doll"?

Aggghhhh!! No, my bad. They both appear on 'Mohr Stories' every other week and have the same drawl. Barry represents other comedians and used to be a stand-up, [Paul Rodriguez, Bill Bellamy] though both have a representation agreement with Mohr of some sort, and both are friends of Carolla's somehow.

[Gadzooks]

Here he is - James "Baby Doll" Dixon:

I feel like Kanye West. I killed Taylor Swift's thread.

[Dayze]

country music still exists? Could've fooled me with all the electric guitars and pop music.

[WhiteWhale]

It's not dying... the artists and producers are just making less money.

It won't kill the industry. The reality hasn't changed.... most artists don't make shit and the few that do make a lot. Meanwhile there are dozens of middle men on the path to reach into the artists pocket and take their money.

[KCUnited]

Music should be free. However, if you give a **** about supporting the music and the artist, you should buy the album and see their show.*

*I don't pay more than $25 to see anyone.

[chiefzilla1501]

I don't care for Taylor Swift. But I respect that she writes her own songs. That's a lot more than you can say for many pop artists today.

The reason music will see a revival is what she's not saying. Because people can now listen to music through Pandora, Spotify, YouTube, Sirius, etc... we don't have to listen to the manufactured bullshit on Clear Channel. Thank God, because Clear Channel in my opinion destroyed music for almost an entire generation.

Good music is out there. You just have to find it and have an open mind that some of it is more electronic than you're used to. And there are still bands out there with huge followings that are true, raw, good music. You just have to look beyond the Billboard charts to find them.

[NewChief]

Another theme I see fading into the gray is genre distinction. These days, nothing great you hear on the radio seems to come from just one musical influence. The wild, unpredictable fun in making music today is that anything goes. Pop sounds like hip hop; country sounds like rock; rock sounds like soul; and folk sounds like country—and to me, that's incredible progress. I want to make music that reflects all of my influences, and I think that in the coming decades the idea of genres will become less of a career-defining path and more of an organizational tool.

She must read stereogum. The theory of monogenre has been discussed at length there. This is a long but interesting read on it:
http://www.stereogum.com/1506632/dec...econstructing/

The singularity is approaching. Not just the dystopian rule of sentient robot overlords as prophesied by every sci-fi movie ever, but sure, that too. (Have you seen what Google wants us to put on our faces? Resistance is futile.) I’m talking about the musical singularity, pop music’s convergence into a single unified style I like to call the monogenre. Coldplay collaborates with Rihanna, and the resulting highly compressed mega-chorus so effectively blurs the line between softhewn alt-rock and pop-R&B that it’s not immediately clear which artist’s wheelhouse the song inhabits. Avicii scores his biggest hit by managing to mash up Mumford-style folk music with digitized dance-club thump. Look at how far apart the young Nashville musical acts Paramore and Taylor Swift started, then look at how close they are now.

Speaking of young Nashville stars undergoing transformations: Miley Cyrus is a perfect example of the monogenre in action. “We Can’t Stop,” one of the year’s truest pop smashes, is steeped in EDM sonics, masterminded by the reigning hip-hop producer of our time and carried along by melodies that could just as easily have easily been sung by Cyrus’ father on country radio. As Stereogum’s Tom Breihan noted on Twitter, the follow-up smash “Wrecking Ball” is the same sort of composite: “New wave verses, blown-out country chorus, Adele bridge, Mike Will synth-bips, all comes together somehow.” This is typical of pop music in 2013. It doesn’t always work, but it’s always coming together.

That’s perhaps a surprising development if you buy the argument that our culture is splintering beyond cohesion into a world where even former bastions of universal experience like network TV and FM radio are reduced to oversized niches. (Who won American Idol last year again?) But maybe the monogenre is happening as a response to all that stratification. On a “pure” artistic level — the follow-your-muse argument — years of overflowing hard drives, the limitless feeding frenzy of online streaming and the death of the guilty pleasure could only result in a generation of music that crossbreeds disparate styles. We’ve been hearing about the internet’s power to forge new connections on par with peanut butter plus chocolate for as long as there’s been an internet. On an “impure” commercial level — the follow-the-money argument — why put all your eggs in one basket and pray that you’ll capture the attention of a small subset of the population when you can hybridize and appeal to many different cliques? Being all things to all people is a dangerous game, but it might be the only viable game going forward for those aspiring to rock stardom as a full-time job. Just look at the No. 1 rock star on the planet: He got to the top in part by insisting on blurred lines rather than settling for “Blurred Lines,” and he certainly didn’t do it without pissing anybody off.

Indie rock is caught in the monogenre’s gravitational pull too, from Vampire Weekend’s Ariel Rechtshaid-assisted flirtation with shimmering pop and R&B to Arcade Fire incorporating James Murphy’s entire record collection into their arena-conquering anthems. Giving in to centrifugal force is an inevitable part of indie’s gentrification, which, as Steven Hyden pointed out at Grantland this week, is also part of its death rattle. Hyden offered up the sisterly pop-rock trio HAIM as evidence that indie has merged so completely with the culture at large that it has ceased to exist as a separate entity. And while there are still plenty of bands campaigning on ear-searing guitar aggression, the fact that HAIM is now considered the forefront of indie rock (they scored our Album Of The Week, Pitchfork’s Best New Music rating, and SPIN’s October cover story, for starters) speaks to the monogenre’s vast reach. These women are so poptimist that when they cover Fleetwood Mac/Sheryl Crow/Miley Cyrus you suspect that not only was it entirely genuine, but the fear of cooler-than-thou judgment never even crossed their minds. And while “It’s all just music, right?” isn’t the same thing as “Let’s combine all music into one genre!” it certainly seems like one thought led to the other for these sisters.

More than any of the music cited so far, HAIM’s debut Days Are Gone, out this week, makes the case that the monogenre doesn’t have to be a bad thing. Their music ties together so many different sounds and styles — Wilson Phillips harmonizing transposed against digital rumble on album opener “Falling”; rootsy Shania Twain balladry on “Honey & I” (or is that Amy Grant?); the howling Dead Weather gurgle-stomp of “My Song 5″; the Eagles-repurposing brilliance of the year’s finest single, “The Wire” — but you can’t see the seams. The band also pulls off the time-honored trick of coming off like a neat and tidy pop group on record while wilding out rock ’n’ roll style in concert. Days Are Gone is distinctly retro yet undeniably modern. Like the best pop musicians, HAIM is easy to enjoy but impossible to pin down.

So it goes with Lorde, the suddenly-very-famous New Zealand teen whose debut album Pure Heroine is also out this week. The first time I heard her breakout single, the shrugging, celebrity-skewering “Royals,” it was on my local alternative rock station. Last week, New York’s famed hip-hop hub Hot 97 added it to rotation after an informal Twitter poll. Somewhere in between, the song made its way to Top 40 stations as God intended and began its climb to No. 1 on Billboard’s Hot 100. What’s crazy is you can make a case for why Lorde’s songs, most of which operate in the same sonic territory as “Royals,” belong in all three of those arenas. The synth-heavy production and complex drum programming mirrors current indie production trends (hello, Purity Ring) as much as current rap production trends (hello, Noah “40″ Shebib), and the overlapping hooks and harmonies are built for sing-alongs from Girl Scout camp on up.

Just as much as the music, Pure Heroine’s lyrics suggest Lorde grew up without genre filters, same as HAIM. Sure, she casually mentions listening to a Broken Social Scene song on repeat, but how would she so deftly critique the excesses of pop and rap if she hadn’t regularly immersed herself in such music too? She is, in other words, your average millennial casually kicking out music for her fellow millennials, an obsessive consumer of pop culture whose art can’t help but be multifaceted for that very reason. She’s not just a demographic slice, she’s the whole damn pie chart. And like the Haim sisters, she’s proof that such a confection doesn’t have to be unbearably saccharine — or worse, like throwing every available ingredient into the oven at once, pinching your nose and crossing your fingers. This is the kind of coalition-building that suggests we might be able to take down those robotic overlords after all.

[

[Predarat]

How ironic, she is one of those killing it.

[rico]

Originally Posted by NewChief

She must read stereogum. The theory of monogenre has been discussed at length there. This is a long but interesting read on it:
http://www.stereogum.com/1506632/dec...econstructing/





[

Cool read, dude.

[Eleazar]

kewl Taylor Swift thread bro