QUALITY CONTROL (What people REALLY want to hear)

[Wildstyle K]

when i worked at live 105,  we  were all shocked when the pd  showed us the results from the research.  everything  we  were  tired of,  and hated  ,  was   top 5...   everything we loved  was  at the bottom.    thats  the  sad truth..   chili ppeppers, linkin park , beastie boys,   all at the top. thats  what  the lemmings want.  thats what theyll get.

WELCOME to the real world.  You and I and others here are music geeks.  We love music; we love crazy, inventive, melodically unique music.  We crave it.  We may play it professionally or we may be fans, but we often go to clubs to hear our favorites, and wouldn't flinch at driving 50 miles to hear a particularly good band or solo artist in a dive bar or at a house party. 

BUT WE ARE NOT AVERAGE LISTENERS. Average listeners want to hear something familiar, maybe it's something easy on the ears or maybe it's the headbanging rock they grew up with at age 16.  Whatever, THAT is the kind of stuff they want to hear.  This is why true music geeks can never be satisfied with commercial radio. 

Or to put it another way, mainstream music isn't art; it is the opposite of art.  Art starts at the refined level and may (or may not) eventually filter down to the masses. 

The great movie "Citizen Kane" was not considered great when it came out.  But it withstood the test of time and eventually more and more people began to see its beauty.  But sometimes this never happens.  Look at the Oscar awards of any give year and you'll find that it's the pablum and the crap that is awarded time and again. 

Look at the Beatles catalog.  The best, most musicially sophisticated Beatles songs never made it into Billboard's top 50.  The simple tunes dashed off in half an hour are the chart winners. 

I've got to say that this post deserved reposting! However, parts of that quote above wasn't always true. There was a time when mainstream music was truly creative art. For a while, especially after 2000, mainstream artists have been putting the "art" in artificial. Lyrics (and hit music in general) fell apart BIG time, but now I slowly see the true creative art sneaking its way back into the mainstream once again today. Just give it a few more years - if nothing comes along and disrupts the trend!

Notice when you compare oldies and old school with many current hits, you can detect a certain level of difference in true quality. There's a different feeling and sense of trueness.. You could cut the lack of quality present in many of today's modern mainstream hits with a knife!

The average listener don't want true quality, creativity, deepness, or uniqueness. They just want what's perceived as cool and to follow the crowds. People are sheep!  ;D

 

[KMGX]

So you think the mainstream music pre-2000 was more creative lyrically than now, eh? This puts me in the precarious position of defending current music, but here goes:

Now all you sucker. D.J.s
Who think you're fly
There's got to be a reason
And we know the reason why.
You try to put on those airs
And act real cool
But you got to realise
That you're acting like fools.
If there's music we can use it
We need to dance.
We don't have that time
For psychological romance
No romance
No romance
No romance for me mama
Come on baby tell me what's the word.
Ah word up,
-- Cameo - Word Up! (1986, Billboard Hot 100 #6)

That's pretty deep... of course there are many others like "I look at the floor, and I see it needs sweeping. Still my guitar gently weeps." From the Beatles, or great lyrics from 70s classics like "Kung Fu Fighting" because as well know, those kicks were indeed as fast as lightning. I suppose my point here is that it doesn't matter if you're as world famous as the Beatles or as relatively obscure as Carl Douglas, song lyrics across the spectrum and over time are subject to greatness and... well... poppy, unsophisticated garbage like you hear on any given CHR station.

 

[KeithE4]

Notice when you compare oldies and old school with many current hits, you can detect a certain level of difference in true quality. There's a different feeling and sense of trueness.. You could cut the lack of quality present in many of today's modern mainstream hits with a knife!

Yep, there's nothing today like there was decades ago, when the poets of rock & roll ruled, and song lyrics meant something. Ooo eee, ooo ah ah! Ting tang, walla walla bing bang! ;D

 

[Wildstyle K]

My rebuttal to this can be found here: http://boards.radio-info.com/smf/index.php?topic=170797.0

(See post reply #2 and down)

 

[indieradioguy]

The average listener don't want true quality, creativity, deepness, or uniqueness. They just want what's perceived as cool and to follow the crowds. People are sheep! ;D

Kinda-sorta true, kinda-sorta not-true. Why is "Airplanes" by B.o.B. so popular but not the nearly-identical "Airplanes, Pt. 2" with Eminem (not on "Airplanes")? One would think "Airplanes, Pt. 2" would be the track everyone likes. But, alas, it's not.

 

[Legend City]

I want to hear more ? and the Mysterians

 

[oldiesfan6479]

I want to hear more ? and the Mysterians

Yeah, and not just 96 Tears! Don't forget...

I Need Somebody
Can't Get Enough Of You, Baby
Do Something To Me (also done by Tommy James And The Shondells)

 

[Wildstyle K]

The funniest and hardest part of writing song lyrics (whether original or copied) seems to be knowing what correct punctuation should be used and where.

 

[TheBigA]

This is an entertaining subject to me. I've been to seminars comparing Boomers, Gen X, and Gen Y. We are now living with music from Gen X and Y. These are the generations where everyone got a trophy. Even if you lost, you'd win. There's no such thing as losing, as long as you tried. Apply that logic to art. The result is millions of artists making their form of music and no one telling them it sucks. Until they deliver the music to the local radio station.

Everyday my inbox is filled with press releases and mp3s of artists seeking airplay, and each one of them indistinguishable from the next. And they wonder why CD sales are in the dumpster. It's all McMusic. And they feel they're entitled to airplay.

Everyone has their theory of why radio is struggling, but mine is simple: The music sucks. If you work at a currents-based station, especially rock, what do you play? There's a bunch of no-name artists strumming the same three chords Johnny Rotton played 30 years ago. How do you distinguish between the good and the bad when it's all bad?

You want to know what the people REALLY want to hear. When someone drives past you with his windows all rolled down in the middle of winter, and his speakers are all distorted, try to listen to what he's playing. None of it can be played on the radio, because it's all obscene.

The music industry wants to charge radio a performance royalty for the opportunity to play this stuff. The same stuff the public won't buy. The same stuff the public calls our stations to complain about. Made by artists who use obscene language and never studied. The public is right when they won't pay for music. It's not worth anything. And radio shouldn't pay for it either.

 

[indieradioguy]

How do you distinguish between the good and the bad when it's all bad?

"When it's all bad"? Halfway into the year, and I can't even narrow down to 10 all the "good" music I've heard - on CD. Frightened Rabbit, Ellie Goulding, She & Him, there's a new stuff featuring Roky Erikson (13th Floor Elevators), new stuff from Devo, from Peter Wolf (J. Geils Band), even from the "Twilight" soundtrack. Go to any record store and claim it all sucks and you'd be laughed out of the place. So, the whole "it all sucks" approach doesn't work any more. It doesn't. What sucks is PPM claiming to have all the answers: indie & college stations in other markets can pay the artists a whopping 85-cents or whatever it is this week; maybe if the AM/FM suits weren't so tightwaddy stingy and could do the same, things could some day change.

 

[TheBigA]

Halfway into the year, and I can't even narrow down to 10 all the "good" music I've heard

Hooray for you. Radio isn't about appealing to one listener. It's a mass medium.