The Disappearance of bands in popular music.

[Blumlein 88]

Rick Beato on something I had noticed, but not to the extent it has changed. Top of the charts for popular music has very nearly no bands in the charts anymore. All solo or duo singers. He discusses some of why that has become the case. It is an 8 minute video.

For instance in the top 400 streams on Spotify in the past year only 3 are bands and one of them was the Beatles. I think another was Coldplay.

Also considered were number one on the charts per week. In the past it would be nearly half bands. In the past 5 years it has only happened for 3 weeks.

Thought that was a bit interesting. Among a few musicians I know, bands don't seem to get much chance locally either. If so it is only to play for free. More common is groups of soloists getting together for the odd night on a semi-regular basis. Or doing studio sessions.

 

[DonH56]

I know a number of studio and live ("pit") musicians who have retired, quit, or at best started second(ary) careers in the past decade or so. Too many reduced orchestras, or even cut back to just a keyboard reduction, perhaps with a drummer and one or two instrumentalists.

 

[holdingpants01]

pop music is not guitar/rock based anymore, that's the whole secret, I saved you 8 minutes of name dropping his favorite bands

 

[MaxwellsEq]

I think that it's easier for an individual to promote themselves on social media than for a group, band, company or government. There's something inauthentic about non-individuals posting on Insta.

 

[Grotti]

I recommend Rick Beatos videos on the global top ten download charts: obviously the majority of people (customers) has a totally different approach to music as I (or supposedly the majority on this forum) have.

I also remember him stating, that the last number one hit in the USA, which included a key change in the song, was in the early 2000....

This doesn't explain the phenomenon of bands disappearing from the charts though....

 

[Mart68]

Starting a band, writing songs, rehearsing was something to do to pass the time, back in the day.

Now there's too many other distractions for teenagers.

Getting a drummer was never easy even back then. At least getting one who actually had a drum kit, anyway.

God alone knows how hard that must be now.

Pal of mine, drummer, his band were due to support The Fall, would be about 1980. He was sat having a pint and Mark E Smith sits down opposite and asks him when they are going on.

My pal told him 'We should be on now but the bass player hasn't turned up'.

I asked 'What did Smith say to that?'. He said, 'He just laughed.'

 

[Axo1989]

Rick Beato on something I had noticed, but not to the extent it has changed. Top of the charts for popular music has very nearly no bands in the charts anymore. All solo or duo singers. He discusses some of why that has become the case. It is an 8 minute video.

For instance in the top 400 streams on Spotify in the past year only 3 are bands and one of them was the Beatles. I think another was Coldplay.

Also considered were number one on the charts per week. In the past it would be nearly half bands. In the past 5 years it has only happened for 3 weeks.

Thought that was a bit interesting. Among a few musicians I know, bands don't seem to get much chance locally either. If so it is only to play for free. More common is groups of soloists getting together for the odd night on a semi-regular basis. Or doing studio sessions.

If you think that's a negative (I'm not sure I do) the solution is obvious. Just listen to metal. Apart from the odd ingenue like Poppy, it's almost all bands.

It's also possible there are more bands than ever, they just don't chart like they used to. I have no exposure to Spotify, but I can't possibly make time (in one lifetime) to listen to all the potentially interesting bands currently producing work. Much less all the interesting artists. Of course he's correct that the de-emphasis of bands is a side-effect of digital production and promotional strategies.

The bass beats when he made a point made me laugh.

 

[Geert]

One more band dissappeared in the last 24 hours

 

[napfkuchen]

If you think that's a negative (I'm not sure I do) the solution is obvious. Just listen to metal. Apart from the odd ingenue like Poppy, it's almost all bands.

Many of these bands also do everything (artworks, songwriting, production, distribution, marketing etc.) on their own. No need for production studios and record labels to be involved in the process. I also listen to a lot of electronic music / synthwave artists where one-person-projects are even more common. To me this is really impressive. In addition, these artists often have no problem crossing genre boundaries and providing some variety. In contrast, chart music is "orchestrated" in all aspects; the artist is just a small cog in the big machine. Originality cannot arise in this way because the end product is carefully tailored to the target group in all aspects.

 

[Vacceo]

Among the genres sung in Spanish, such as bachata, merengue, salsa and so on, the decline is massive with the arrival of what is labeld as "Urban Latino Music" which is the pop-ization of genres such as dancehall, regaetton, dembow and so on. The reason is simple: if you take a Juan Luis Guerra record, you´ll see you need around 30 musicians to create it. To play that live, you have to pay the salary of all those people, all the technical staff to make it sound, pay for the tickets of all musicians, transport the instruments...

Now, get a producer-composer and a singer, a PC, a streaming service and there you go; you have Bizarrap, Bad Bunny, Carol G or whatever. A fraction of the price, a lot more profit.

If you think that's a negative (I'm not sure I do) the solution is obvious. Just listen to metal. Apart from the odd ingenue like Poppy, it's almost all bands.

It's also possible there are more bands than ever, they just don't chart like they used to. I have no exposure to Spotify, but I can't possibly make time (in one lifetime) to listen to all the potentially interesting bands currently producing work. Much less all the interesting artists. Of course he's correct that the de-emphasis of bands is a side-effect of digital production and promotional strategies.

The bass beats when he made a point made me laugh.

I reckon I listen to something quite small: Extreme Metal. In 30 years of listening to the genre, I have never seen as many bands as there are now. Concerts are more limited for the above reasons (it´s not as terrible as the genres discussed above, not by a lightyear), so the tendency is to organize mid-sized festivals to get a bunch of the big names on them.

All points considered, the scene is healthier and more varied than ever. Better quality? Well, just by share number, great stuff will come up but with the usual "Pareto ratio", which is a lot better than in the 90´s.

So yeah, in a nutshell, Beato is basically saying "the stuff I listen to is not mainstream anymore!". Well, who cares if it is as long as it is still played.

 

[Chr1]

Personally I love how music is so diverse now. There are still a shit load of bands out there. Good, bad and indifferent. Just so happens there's also a lot of other types of music too. Same applies with them. Reckon we are all the better off for it too.
I get tired of folks lamenting the state of current music and pining for the days of yore...
However I guess that is always going to be a thing too.
PS I am almost 60, so no spring chicken myself...

 

[Mart68]

I get tired of folks lamenting the state of current music and pining for the days of yore...

Once you're over fifty it's an entitlement. Like getting free travel on the buses.

 

[goat76]

Pal of mine, drummer, his band were due to support The Fall, would be about 1980. He was sat having a pint and Mark E Smith sits down opposite and asks him when they are going on.

The Fall is a great band!
One of my favorite songs by them is "Janet, Johnny And James". It also happens to be PJ Harvey's favorite song by The Fall.

 

[Mart68]

The Fall is a great band!
One of my favorite songs by them is "Janet, Johnny And James". It also happens to be PJ Harvey's favorite song by The Fall.

They are but it's only in my dotage that I've started to appreciate them and I'll probably never get through their whole back catalogue now.

I saw PJ Harvey back in 1991 but I have no recollection of it. Only know that I did as my mate's girlfriend insists that I was with them there at the gig. But they were wild times.

 

[EERecordist]

I have seen some of his videos, and to me, they fall into Homer Simpson's "old man yells at cloud" meme.

Just as the Beatles wrote "money can't buy you love," success can't buy you harmony. Group interactions are governed by the equation n^2-2n. The more band members, the more relationships which can deteriorate. This was also discussed in the famous book The Mythical Man Month on why large projects slow down.

A solo performer with technology is not creatively slowed down by interactions, cooperation, and collaboration. Prince is famous for bringing a demo recording he did solo and was signed

The other trend is cost reduction. Les Paul was the first to use multitrack recording which allowed overdubs in sync. As the track count expanded, different parts could be recorded anywhere in the world at any time. The musicians did not all have to be together at the same time or place.

Drum machines, all kinds of synths, and now, for film scoring, synthetic orchestras reduce highly skilled labor costs. I was listening to the latest Dune soundtrack, and the string parts are a synthetic orchestra section. AI composition is here: "make a composition trained on these skilled works by others, with this length." It should be possible to give it a timeline for dynamics and feeling linked to picture, the movie already shot and edited.

I find many people today are attracted to DJs, solo "artists" using other people's works. How the small number highly paid DJs then pay the producers of DJ tracks is a problem which is struggling for solution. Aslice, one company doing it, just folded. Twitch, a casual solo DJ platform, is trying to stay out of Copyright jail with their new system.

 

[Blumlein 88]

Otoh, sometimes collaboration results in art that no single solo artist would have come up with. That is what is lost when very nearly everything is from solo artists. Such interactions may be filled with turmoil at times. Yet such is sometimes energy for creativeness that otherwise never happens.

 

[Chrispy]

Makes me think of all the recordings from "bands" that were actually mostly done by The Wrecking Crew type studio musicians....

 

[Multicore]

I've been thinking about this for a few years. I imagine computer music production is a huge part of it. You just don't need musicians let alone bands to make recordings any more. I mean you do need them to make certain kinds of music for aficionados but to make mass-market entertainment you really don't.

 

[Multicore]

Starting a band, writing songs, rehearsing was something to do to pass the time, back in the day.

Now there's too many other distractions for teenagers.

In a lot of cities the overheads have increased dramatically making that harder to do. Back then the cover charges didn't need to be so high and audiences could get some live music entertainment for less than the cost of their drinks. Here in Boston the number of live music venues has dwindled depressingly in the last quarter century. There are still plenty of students here but the cost of college education has also inflated badly and there are fewer undergrads taking the old casual approach to their studies.

 

[stoo23]

Regardless of his specific opinions, one should Not merely disregard Rick Beato's videos,.. as he has done some truly exceptional interviews with some great people, which are definitely worth listening to