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Songwriting Is Changing For Streaming
- Thread starter Wombat
- Start date
Interesting! Since I don't use streaming services much I cannot say that I've noticed, although it would not surprise me at all. We only have 2-3 minute pop songs now because that was the time available on the Edison cylinder! Back in the analogue days classical pieces were routinely edited to fit on a record side etc. I do wish there were better deals available from streaming services for artists, maybe if Apple paid out after 10 seconds etc it would pay artists more and provide some real competition in the streaming market.
restorer-john
Grand Contributor
Songwriting and structure for the short attention span generations.
And here's a masterpiece from Dire Straits. All 14:18 of it. I'll take my songs well written, big intros and lots of instrumentals...
And here's a masterpiece from Dire Straits. All 14:18 of it. I'll take my songs well written, big intros and lots of instrumentals...
I've not noticed any change in the music I listen to.
Did intros and outros get longer historically because of radio DJs? They do love to talk over them.
I've been waiting for someone to release an album split into 30 second tracks, independent on where the songs start and end, to overtly game the system. This would be the opposite of what the Orb did in 92 when they had the sales for single deleted because it had too many tracks on it, so they looked up the chart rules and then released The Blue Room, 39:59 long which qualified as a single, just to make a point. One of my favourite pieces by them.
I'm also waiting for artists to realise that making music with long term appeal is the real way to be rewarded by streaming, the gold rush from a few hit singles and then a crap album does not work in streaming, people listen to the crap album once, then never again. Make a really great album and people will be streaming it in decades time, and you will have a pension. This is probably the most rock and roll idea ever.
Did intros and outros get longer historically because of radio DJs? They do love to talk over them.
I've been waiting for someone to release an album split into 30 second tracks, independent on where the songs start and end, to overtly game the system. This would be the opposite of what the Orb did in 92 when they had the sales for single deleted because it had too many tracks on it, so they looked up the chart rules and then released The Blue Room, 39:59 long which qualified as a single, just to make a point. One of my favourite pieces by them.
I'm also waiting for artists to realise that making music with long term appeal is the real way to be rewarded by streaming, the gold rush from a few hit singles and then a crap album does not work in streaming, people listen to the crap album once, then never again. Make a really great album and people will be streaming it in decades time, and you will have a pension. This is probably the most rock and roll idea ever.
- Thread Starter
- #5
Bread on the table now vs decades in the future? The music industry is about now. Longevity is incidental.
restorer-john
Grand Contributor
Tell that to TOTO. They have successfully re-toured on the back of 1982's "Africa" and the millennials.
Admission: I don't even have a copy of TOTO's best/greatest hits.
restorer-john
Grand Contributor
If you look at the recent RIAA sales report you can see that the rock category is dominated by artists that are either dead, or haven't made a good record since the 80s, the top 5 was something like the Beatles, Queen, Bowie, Led Zep etc.
Bands often change their sound when they start playing in big stadiums. I think live venues have influenced music , and so it has been for recording formats too I guess .
quite a interesting topic .
quite a interesting topic .
Not just bands (or modern bands). Much of early western music is all textural with little rhythmic complexity because the environment (churches etc) had so much reverb that rhythmic complexity would be a mess. As interior environments lowered their reverb times (improved fabric and material manufacturing), music changed. (Ok, other things also changed and instruments and harmony changed too...) African music is played outdoors and developed sometimes extreme rhythmic complexity. David Byrne has a nicely digestible (and humorous) talk about it (looking around now) - here it is:
https://www.ted.com/talks/david_byrne_how_architecture_helped_music_evolve?
restorer-john
Grand Contributor
Poor Gregorian chanting monks. No wonder they ended up busking in subway stations and underground carparks.
Yes! , I have David Byrne book on music , it's a great read .
restorer-john
Grand Contributor
I wonder if that is actually true. Whether the first person to hear a high speed back cue was either a clown back spinning a turntable or a tape recordist reverse cueing a tape. Consider most styli that were remotely HiFi would have snapped off in a high speed back-cue. Tape back cueing sounds were common from day dot when a head was brought close to, or in contact with a back spinning tape.
Chicken and egg. Did the "scratcher" try to emulate the tape sound?
This is a much bigger topic than can be covered here.
Manipulating sound this way goes back to the 1920s and 1930s, with people working with optical film soundtracks in the 1930s etc. Australia's Jack Elit made pieces with wire recorders in the 1930s (in London). Music Concrète, what is usually understood to be the birth of music based on the manipulation of recorded sound, started in the late 1940s in France (Pierre Schaeffer etc, see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Musique_concrète).
The pop music version came from street music, in the 1970s?. Not sure if they would have heard much in the way of tape rewind sounds, but maybe, I don't know for sure either way. The key thing with vinyl scratching is the affordance of the medium to allow such manipulation relatively easily - harder to do with tape in a rhythmic back-and-forth manner (I guess, I only every rocked tape back and forth to find an edit point!).
I had a good chronology on my website of musical developments related to this, but looking for it now shows that it is down - looks like the friend's server it used to be on is dead... Luckily for the wayback machine there is a decent amount still available here:
https://web.archive.org/web/20200218191432/doornbusch.net/chronology (damn, now I gotta find a new web host!)
Last edited:
Burning Sounds
Addicted to Fun and Learning
I did a community radio programme in the 80s in California. If I remember correctly the styli we used were made by Pickering and were specially made to withstand back cueing. However, the cantilevers still got bent on a regular basis. I had a late night (10-midnight) slot and there was usually no-one elase around when I came in. On more than one occasion there was a badly bent cantilever and no spare. Doing a programme with one turntable was always fun!
restorer-john
Grand Contributor
I remember my father winding open reel back and forth, cueing and listening to the sounds in about 1972.
"scratching" records for artistic purposes was definitely late 70s/ early 80s. But who knows what was going on in the ghettos, when they were spinning around on their bits of carboard in alley ways. All Grandmaster Flash and the wheels of steel.
I wonder who was the first to use either tape or record "cueing" sounds.
I would expect it organically grew out of DJ'ing, winding the record backwards to find the exact start point you want is a normal technique for decades before, as was splicing part of one record into another in real time via the mixer. Once dual DJ decks with a mixer existed and were very common it's just waiting to be discovered.
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