The entertainment industry has been associated with a variety of metaphors: a fun-house of mirrors, a fantasy factory, an island of illusions and illusionists, etc. etc. Big Music certainly takes up it's enormous share of this perception, as albums said to go multiple-platinum are discovered to not even go gold, performers discovered to not perform on their own albums (see Milli Vanilli), alleged ghost writers for other performer's supposedly self-written work (see Kanye West), and on, and on.
This article in The Atlantic gives a bit of insight into one of the worst-kept secrets in the music business - who is actually doing the creating? Look at the writing credits of most popular albums today by the likes of Swift, Grande, Minaj, Maroon 5, and the like - you'll likely see one name on those credits more than any other: Max Martin. He, along with a small cabal of Scandinavian-native writers and producers, are supplying the majority of what America sees and hears now. The writing credits you see on these records should be taken with a grain of salt (or maybe, a shaker-full), since there is no real way to tell how much each person given credit actually contributed to the writing of the song in question - and as the article indicates, the performer's writing credit may be for simply changing a word or phrase - "change a word, get a third". And of the performers you see on TV and hear on the radio, very few of them can actually claim to be "artists". For most of them, their careers are carefully managed down to the minutia of what lipstick color or what clothing accessory to wear. The formula for this, in fact, has been taken to a science in the world of J-Pop and K-Pop, where there are dedicated schools where prospective performers go to learn the craft of pop performance. A book, now referenced heavily by the pop music industry in those countries, contains what can be described as the "formula" for packaging a pop act in those (and increasingly, this) market: which chord progressions to use in which countries, which clothes to wear for a given audience, which hand gestures and idioms to use, etc. etc. Market-tested and focus-grouped formulas now govern the entirety of the pop world.
None of this manufacturing of culture is new. Motown Records, back in the Sixties and up to the early-Seventies, had this kind of packaging down to an assembly-line process - an inhouse charm-school for the performers, writer/producers wrote and produced, the Funk Brothers house band played, the singers sang. All potential releases were given the ultimate up-or-down by Berry Gordy himself. Other record labels and managers engaged in similar practices - even The Beatles had to go through a period of grooming in order to shed the remnants of their Hamburg wild-boys days and become the clean-cut mop tops that dominated pop back in the early-to-mid-Sixties. Producer-Songwriters like Lieber and Stoller, Chinn and Chapman, Rodgers and Edwards (Chic), and others, supplied the songs and the sounds for countless performers. So how is this any different than what is being done today?
Two things: Technology, and the change in buying habits brought about in large part by technology.
Back in "the day", there were analog tape machines, analog mixing desks, real musicians, real engineers and technicians, and more often than today (in my opinion), real singers. In other words: TALENT. Back then, there were a few tricks that a producer or engineer could use to coax a performance out of a singer who either didn't quite have the chops, or who had the chops but not the head that day, such as slowing down the tape so that a singer can hit a high note he or she otherwise could not. There was no Autotune, which allows a producer to snap an out-of-tune note into place. There was also not the advanced editing tools of today, which allow a producer to copy a perfectly-played part and paste it in the appropriate places in the song (among a host of other things). The change in recording technology is further detailed in Dave Grohl's excellent film Sound City, about the venerable studio in Van Nuys. As stated in the film, software such as Pro Tools now enables people who otherwise "have no business being in a band, to become stars", to quote noted producer and former Sound City runner Nick Raskulinecz.
Then there's the Internet, and all of the byproducts of it's introduction as a public utility in the early 1990s. I don't have to get into all of those details here, as they have been written about extensively by myself and many others much more expert on the subject than me. But consider this: our society has always had a propensity to favor instant gratification. We don't like to wait for anything, whether it be the latest release from our favorite band or singer, or much of anything else. With iTunes, YouTube, and other outlets, we no longer need to wait. These days, a song can literally be recorded in the morning, mixed and mastered in the afternoon, and be on your iPod the same evening. And as for the songs themselves - one big hook is no longer enough to get you a hit - you need a bunch of hooks, sometimes only seconds apart. For an old school listener like me, when I try to listen to this newer breed of pop song, I'm left to wonder exactly how am I going to remember it? Up to the decline of Grunge in the late 1990s, a song needed a couple of strong hooks, and enough time in the song for those hooks to sink in and "hook" into your head. The new songs try to put in hook after hook after hook, in rapid fire succession. Too many hooks, to me, means no hooks at all - like the cliche, "If everything were special, then nothing would be special." And no memory of the song means it's just another four-or-so minutes of disposable sound.
To me, all of this is just another reason why I'm looking to find artists/stations/outlets who think about music the way I do. It's not just background music, or mere "ear candy" - it's an experience which I need to feel I'm an active participant in.
