The Allure of Listening, Chapter 16 - Democracy, Elitism, Simulations and Large-Language-Model A.I. in a Post-Pandemic World

 And you think change is limited to living in an all-populist world? Friends, you haven't factored in the hologram and robot musicians yet!

Not that many Swifties were paying attention in the summer of 2023 when several leading economic analysts reckoned that Taylor Swift’s “Eras” tour and film could have been the primary factor keeping the U.S. out of recession in 2023. Fans and parents certainly knew, when the “waiting room” model of ticket access led to ticket prices as high as $5,000. Similar high demand led to four-figure ticket prices for Beyonce and Bruce Springsteen, and even prices approaching $1000 for artists like rapper J. Cole. Several national and global tours in 2023 turned into “happenings” not that different from Swift’s – tours by The Cure, Peter Gabriel, boygenius, and the duo of Death Cab for Cutie and Postal Service, generated buzz that surprised everyone, particularly when a “legacy” rock act was involved. And in case the music industry picked up too much hubris, particularly during the 2023 Hollywood writers’ and actors’ strikes, it was humbling to remember that both the music and film industries were dwarfed by the gaming industry, which felt smaller impacts from lockdown than any of its cultural brethren.

    New album releases continued to drive a lot of streaming traffic, but the exhaustion many had expected to hit during pandemic seemed to finally become a reality in 2023-24, as releases from the biggest names in rap, indie, and pop seemed a bit lethargic. Marketing seemed to make up for ennui, though, because releases from virtually every second-tier pop newcomer – Bonzie, Clairo, Suki Waterhouse, Beabadoobee, and dozens of others – generated almost as much hype as new studio offerings from Halsey, Billie Eilish, The Cure, and Post Malone. In extreme cases, like the launch of Charli XCX’s brat, the album defined the season in more domains than music.

    The sheer number of new releases escalated significantly by the second half of 2024, but many releases seemed somewhat forced and uninteresting. The world needed Wet Leg and the British “mania” bands (black midi, Dry Cleaning, Black Country New Road, Sports Team, English Teacher, Yard Act, Squid) to kick the music world from its torpor. One of the few bright spots in Trump’s return to office at the end of the year is that pop music became its own secret society, bringing back hints of the late 1960s/early 1970s underground ambience, because many fans lived by the assumption that few Trump voters understood good music.

    The pop world could thank a huge wave of women newcomers in 2023-24 who spoke primarily to teens, but won over many adults, including Chappell Roan, Lizzy McAlpine, Tartie, Renee Rapp, Sabrina Carpenter, Samia, and many others.  The gender one-sidedness was no accident. Men under 40 were playing less and less of a role in music, literature, visual arts, and performing arts in the 2020s. Studies from The Economist and other sources consistently showed that young adults worldwide were becoming more bifurcated from 2010 to 2025 – women grew more intelligent, empathetic, and creative, while young men grew more conservative and insular. It was no accident that the knuckleheaded “manoverse” represented one of Trump’s major electoral bases in late 2024.

Another 2024 music trend yet to be deciphered is the shift to country experiments by many pop artists during the course of the year – Beyonce’s Cowboy Carter spurred a flurry of y’all efforts from Lana Del Rey, Post Malone, Jelly Roll, Orville Peck, Hurray for the Riff Raff, and the unlikely duo of Julien Baker and Torres. At the end of 2024, Chappell Roan even extended this to fierce country parody, courtesy of the new “The Giver (She Gets the Job Done)” which debuted on SNL. A bigger buzz also was generated by new releases from legacy acts like Peter Gabriel, Rolling Stones, and Blink-182, if only because the new works from geezers seemed to show more energy than those from some of the newer artists.

    In 2023, a slight dip in music offered for streaming services was noted, and savvy analysts realized it could be accounted for, at least in part, by musicians writing solely for the TikTok platform. TikTok initially had strict parameters for minute-long lengths of tunes, a necessary riff in the first 20 seconds, riffs ranked according to viral spread, etc. In 2024, the constraints were lifted slightly and songwriters were offered better compensation. Nevertheless, the move to one platform seen as superficial by many sparked a torrent of criticism. One session musician said “I used to be startled by a musician whose portfolio consisted entirely of streaming links. Now I’ve run into musicians whose entire portfolio consists of TikTok songs, and I’m left sort of speechless.”

    Still, the focus on “TikTok first” led to a discernible drop in music aimed at large streaming platforms. Some composers just found reels-based platforms like TikTok more fun than the vast giga-forest of Spotify, where even great works could get lost in endless fields of chaff.  Within the TikTok-verse, there was a lot of rapid viral sharing of riffs that took advantage of mutual placement in films and video games, but that could lead to a restriction in originality as much as a new creative dimension. Ideal algorithms call for optimizing riffs in the first two seconds of a song, repeating known memes in a new work, and similarly playing the meme field for what is fast and attractive. This also means that the viral speed of up-then-down is many times faster than a typical streaming community. The first couple years of the 2020s gave us only a taste of TikTok’s potential level of influence – provided it is not banned in U.S. markets.

     There’s something important to remember when discerning TikTok’s supposed central role in 2020s pop music: vast dimensions of music take place under the radar of even the most avid music lover. Music industry analyst Bob Lefsetz fell in love with the British Victorian-baroque women’s band The Last Dinner Party in the summer of 2024, and lamented that if it was 1985, MTV would make sure everyone knew their name. The point is, everyone the band cares about does know their name. Many of their U.S. tour cities sold out within minutes of the ticket sales first being announced. Such fans in high school, college, and their mid-20s not only know the name of The Last Dinner Party, but also the names of many of the British mania bands mentioned above. The fans use a mix of TikTok, Spotify, YouTube, and social media sites to learn of new artists, and no one cares about the lack of a central unifier like MTV, AM radio, AOR radio, etc. Lefsetz is just upset that more boomers remain in the dark, just as many music fans in their 40s and 50s remain in the dark, but that’s their problem for not paying stricter attention.

    Music critic Marc Hogan points to another factor not often recognized when legacy artists or their estates sell music catalogs – a roster that included Michael Jackson, Whitney Houston, Neil Young, Bruce Springsteen, Stevie Nicks, Katy Perry, and Shakira. Hogan points out that the back catalogs are quietly being bought up by private equity firms, who spent $12 billion on music catalogs in 2021 alone.  Some private equity firms work with companies like Primary Wave to “dress up” old hits for forced re-entry into the Top Ten, but Hogan reminds us that merely by listening to old favorites like “Firework” or “Born to Run,” we are lining the pockets of Carlyle or Blackstone – in essence, replacing the former dominance of big record labels with the new dominance of hedge funds and private equity. Blackstone made the biggest such move late in the summer of 2024, when the fund acquired Hipgnosis, the biggest of the songbook consolidators, for $1.6 billion.

    There is also a more active version of back-catalog buyouts, with an intent to cash in on tribute markets by offering something even closer to the O.G. artist. This is exemplified by the ABBA founders’ acquisition of the KISS back catalog and image rights in the spring of 2024. To be more precise, the catalog and image rights were purchased for $300 million by ABBA founder Bjorn Ulvaeus’s company Pophouse, the same company responsible for the ABBA Voyage hologram tour. The interesting issue isn’t how quickly Pophouse can take KISS holograms on tour. More to the point is whether the investor owners of music catalogs create dozens of virtual-reality performers showing us immortal images of Katy Perry and Stevie Nicks.

    Just as many of us never dreamed how popular the tribute-band market could be over time, one must be careful about dismissing the prospect of going to concerts of holographic clones dating from the 1960s through the 2020s. For a certain kind of music consumer, the hologram may be better than the living musician.

    Something else was driving new music, though only as a future troublemaker. The first public platforms of large-language-model A.I., like ChatGPT, arrived in early 2023 and immediately led to fears that human creativity would be replaced by apparently-sentient A.I. The concern arose first in the image-generation A.I. platforms. Visual art made by A.I. certainly was more impressive than anticipated, but was unlikely to be mistaken for human art. Before the impact could truly be felt in music, artists in all fields raised two fundamental challenges that could slow A.I. development as much as the self-imposed guardrails set up by A.I. startups in the summer of 2023: First, the training of the core neural networks at the heart of LLM A.I. required millions upon millions of data sets, which A.I. companies acquired by “scraping” public databases as well as databases that may not have been so public. Comedian Sarah Silverman was the first in a long line of artists to sue the LLM companies, saying that using training sets with some of her material constituted copyright violation. Second, music critics suggested that music created by machine sentience would be perceived as automatically inferior to that based on human creativity.

    The first of the challenges was sure to be fought out in multiple courtroom domains through the 2020s and beyond. The latter was more troublesome, as the typical music fan might not be depended upon to prefer the real human. Remember how the “craptastic” argument played out in MP3 lossy compression, after all. Since so many humans were not necessarily adventurous in seeking out new sounds, and preferred their music served up as wallpaper, if an A.I. platform (or a hologram of a familiar artist) combined just the right mix from multiple decades of riffs and emotional triggers, it’s possible many fans would prefer the machine product.

    There might be many steps in the A.I. world on the road to reaching true machine-generated music. ChatGPT might perform a more advanced version of the Pandora/Spotify playlist development, to tailor each playlist specifically to one person. While that sounds harmless on its own, the A.I. platform might create a hermetically-sealed “silo” far more effective than the hundreds of niche stations offered by Sirius XM. In effect, each playlist is curated for precisely one listener, and the notion of sharing music or using music in a collective environment fades away.

    Many musicians are beginning to realize that a ChatGPT music creator might not be a competitor, but a collaborator. Electronic composer Reiner Kramer, at a 2024 electronic music conference, said the training of a neural network might some day be considered “a performative act.”

    At this point in 2024, the A.I. platform could introduce its own machine-generated music as the ultimate personalization step in audio experience – and all too many fans would think it was just great. Remember, Spotify already was offering playlists of music generated entirely by machines in the mid-2010s. Placing ChatGPT into the music-to-consumer pipeline does not represent a giant step at all. And here is where we return to the issue of the “populist” playlist created by stream-based voting, and what it has to say about mass democracy vs. elitism – there are similar problems in politics, culture, and in music itself.

    The positive aspect of new populism is the ability of bands to remain as divorced as possible from the corporate music environment, while trying to game the system so that more people can appreciate their music. The trick is in trying to preserve a way to make money, at least enough to survive as a musician. A classic case is the personal/band project of Canadian queer activist Patrick Flegel, who released an acclaimed debut as Cindy Lee in 2020, then a two-hour album, Diamond Jubilee, which arrived to rave reviews in April 2024. Cindy Lee only streams on YouTube and GeoCities. There were no LPs or CDs to support the album until a promised double-LP at the end of 2024. The one download link for FLAC files makes it challenging to donate money. And the Cindy Lee tour of North America was cancelled after a single date, leaving Flegel with no way to make operating funds for an album that many placed among the year’s best. And since Flegel grants almost no interviews, the overall media presence brings to mind Nick Drake.

    Populism can be expensive for fans, as well. When many musicians open Patreon accounts or launch Kickstarter projects, fans can go from one to the next with wallets open. The decentralized concept of house concerts, which took a giant leap up both before and even during the pandemic, has become so popular in some cities, there might be three to five house concerts per week in summer months, at least in some metro areas (not counting the free concerts many municipalities sponsor).

   The common thread in new populist political movements around the world is the disdain for experts and elitism, an understandable prejudice given the way elitist circles have hurt common interests under globalized capitalism. Yet, as Laurie Anderson pointed out in her “Only An Expert” song, experts are experts for a reason. They have gained a working knowledge of domains others grasp in only an opaque way. The most nihilist of the populists within the U.S. right now would like to go back to the pre-1880 days prior to the Civil Service, when all governing structures were handled face to face. Anyone who thinks about this for half a minute will realize that no air traffic control could take place, nor large energy grids, nor global shipping networks. Populists fail to understand that virtually every labor domain requires an immense support cast, including many managers who would be deemed elitist. Merely mailing a letter, completing a cellular call, or buying a loaf of bread, requires a support staff of thousands.

    The new “democratic” Top 40, in which fans gain access to an artist’s entire tracklist for an album, then vote by number of streams as to which rises to the top, sounds like the ultimate experiment in democracy. Yet every December, the top streams are the same Mariah Carey “All I Want for Christmas” and Wham! “Last Christmas” as topped the charts the year before. Every month, the same artists with new tracks dominate the charts, with less chance than ever that a newcomer could break the trend. This is because only a small minority of music lovers are truly adventurous, exploring the Spotify gigaverse for something new and exciting. Most music lovers prefer the familiar. If a certain amount of elitists and experts aren’t out there to give form to an evolving musical universe, the content of that universe will devolve to a lowest common denominator. This is how populism in any domain works.

    I’m still hunting down the new and unusual every day, though my brain cells and aural subsystems are getting old and tired. I don’t have a natural prejudice that prevents me from saying a machine intelligence could ever be sentient, but I will listen to A.I. works with both interest and skepticism. It may be true that we are living on the precipice of dangerous times from a climate and social-justice perspective, but I don’t anticipate the same thing to be true, at least necessarily, for music. As long as there are clubs where live music is performed, or even informal social gatherings where people can play music for each other, we will not fall victim to either A.I., or even the false democracy of hyper-streamed mass-audience music. But we have to be explorers and life-long students, as much as we are with general education topics, with books, with films.  Every art and political artifice surrounding us deserves our full attention. Music does not deserve to be wallpaper, and neither does anything else. The ultimate legacy I would like to leave from decades immersed in recorded music is Arthur Miller's description of Willy Loman from Death of a Salesman, “Attention must be paid.” To everything, and constantly.

 

                  Hope you all had fun! Watch for the 2024 list of best music on Dec. 31.

Copyright 2024 Loring Wirbel

 

The Allure of Listening, Chapter 15 - Lockdown Goads Music to Its Virtual Side

 Let's not be like the Roaring 1920s jazz babies who practiced collective amnesia about the 1918 flu epidemic at the end of World War I. The 2020 Covid pandemic had real-word effects on the deliverability of physical music, the ability to host live concerts, and the loyalty of fans to Zoom, ConcertWindow, Kickstarter and Patreon environments - and some effects are still with us today!

Covid-19 hit touring musicians with a speed that startled everyone. Tours were moving into high gear again in February 2020, just as initial reports of lockdowns in Wuhan were expanding into stories of cruise ships being quarantined. There was a general feeling that the spread of the virus might get serious by late spring. Suddenly, the NBA and NCAA basketball seasons were being cancelled, a local production of “Hair” in Colorado Springs halted all performances, and by the middle of March, many urban areas in the U.S. were on lockdown. Wire’s tour of the U.S. and Torres’ tour of Europe were cancelled so quickly, the bands were stuck in mid-tour as international flights were halted, leaving few options for bands to get home.

   Because the Zoom video-conferencing app had been gaining popularity prior to lockdown, it did not take musicians long to realize that they could sponsor home-based informal concerts that fans often pay for. But during the early weeks, revenue streams were not a high priority. In one of the first “festival” uses of Zoom, dozens of musicians gathered remotely to honor John Prine, who died of Covid complications early in the pandemic. The two-day Zoomfest was one of the first such events to brighten the homebound. Soon, musicians from Ben Gibbard to Jonatha Brooke were planning regular series of concerts Zoomed from home. (While NPR has collected its “Tiny Desk Concert At Home” series for an interested audience, it seems we are only in the first stage of the pandemic-era Zoom concerts being compiled together, both by artists and in a multi-artist “festival” format.)

    Supplies of physical products were reliant during early lockdown days on Amazon and independent mail-order outlets. Among the artists whose releases were planned near Zero Day were Waxahatchee, Pearl Jam, The Weeknd, The 1975, and The Strokes. In some states, some music releases might be offered at large general-purpose stores like Target. But in those states with the most severe restrictions, a customer could only go into Target or Walmart to get groceries, and other parts of the store were literally walled off in access. Here in Colorado, we had a mixed bag. One could buy music releases in Denver and Colorado Springs big-box stores, but not in Summit County, where the Target no pasaran bars looked like police tape. Here, the lockdown was brief enough so that by the time mid-May releases from Perfume Genius and Nap Eyes hit the streets, record stores already were open again. But in New York and other dense urban areas, strict lockdowns lasted well into late summer.

    Because it is impossible to gauge the reality of a counter-factual, we can only guess which trends were initiated and which were aggravated by the pandemic. In the realm of the decline of physical products, it seems safe to say that the slowdown preceded the lockdown by several quarters. Rappers Kanye West and Chance the Rapper already announced late in the decade that they would stop releasing physical products. The wholesale shipping and distribution tightening of late 2019 and the Apollo Masters lacquer plant fire of February 2020 both preceded the March lockdown. But the utter collapse of supply chains in multiple manufacturing realms that hit in mid-2020 made a bad situation for LP and CD delivery far worse.

    The edgiest element of pandemic performance was the occasional live protest song emerging from the BLM actions in the summer of 2020. A few such songs became local anthems, though few were recorded until John Craigie’s Greatest Hits….Just Kidding, Live, No Hits included ‘Summer of 2020’ when it was released in late 2024.

    In remote live performances, musicians had made a few faltering steps in the latter half of the 2010s to offer customers in remote areas “live online” concerts that many would pay for, but the enforced work-at-home regimes and the lack of touring possibilities drove Zoom and its smaller competitors like ConcertWindow into the stratosphere in 2020-21. In the late summer of 2020, innovators were trying new options for truly live concerts, such as live house concerts and pod-based remote live concerts in stadiums, but successive waves of Delta and Omicron variants of Covid killed the bulk of live performances well into 2022. Musicians relied more on direct-support sites like Patreon – bands sought investment for specific albums via Kickstarter as early as 2010, but the pandemic necessitated the deeper fan involvement made possible through Patreon.

    When an independent regional musician focused solely on the home market, the limits of logistical realities helped drive a house-concert business that proved a booming new venue option long after Covid restrictions ended. This was particularly true for summer months stretching into the fall of 2020. Since attendees at outdoor house concerts could practice social distancing, local heroes here in Colorado, like Jeremy Facknitz and Edie Carey, could conduct live performances in the worst months of lockdown. What was less successful was the attempt to preserve a festival environment through the use of “pod clusters” of people within large outdoor venues like sports stadiums – it was too difficult! And the minor successes reached in the fall of 2020 made some bands too optimistic about rebooting national tours. Several hit the road in the winter and spring of 2020-21 only to find themselves stymied by resurgent Delta and Omicron waves of Covid.

    What surprised many, though it may have reflected the fact that bands had little else to do, was the pace of new music in 2020-22, which kept rolling along through lockdown, inflation, and the dissolution of supply chains. Even newcomers were given proper due without benefit of support tours – Olivia Rodrigo, Wet Leg, The Linda Lindas, Pom Pom Squad, Illuminati Hotties, and dozens of other groups and soloists gained a following based solely on studio recordings. Behind all the releases was the unspoken desire, however, that musicians and fans wanted to get back to live music as quickly as possible.  Fans were desperate for novelty and levity, as Wet Leg’s instant hit “Chaise Longue” proved.

    What the pandemic no doubt slowed was the rise of a truly global music business. The U.S. and EU (including the post-Brexit UK) formed its own cloister. China trade wars during the Trump administration, and China’s severe nationwide lockdown later in the pandemic, prevented China from jumping onto the K-Pop and J-Pop bandwagons. (This was reinforced by Xi’s insistence that China’s pop bands avoid Western cultural contamination.) The wall in Asia was replicated in central Europe after Russia invaded Ukraine in February 2022 – not just because cultural contacts between Russia and the West fell to insignificance, but because Putin, to gain more cultural support for the war, hewed more closely to the Russian Orthodox Church view that Russia must go it alone in the arts, because all Western arts were suspect and corrupt.

    Musicians could scarcely depend on a music industry that would come roaring back in all aspects, though. Bandcamp, the former “gold standard” for online musician support, was acquired by Epic Games in early 2022. In September 2023, Epic laid off 16 percent of the Bandcamp staff before selling Bandcamp to Songtradr. For the time being, fans could purchase LPs and CDs, as well as download music, through the Bandcamp site, but no one felt too optimistic about how long this would last.

    Still, this was all trepidation about possible worries to come. As the pandemic began to lift in the third quarter of 2022, all the fans could think about was getting back to the arenas and clubs. And the big money to be made occasionally trickled down to musicians, at least for the first few post-pandemic quarters.

 

Coming in TWO WEEKS (Nov. 15) - The Allure of Listening, Chapter 16 - Democracy, Elitism,            Simlations, and Large-Language-Model A.I, in a Post-Pandemic World - We'll wrap this story up for now with a look at performing rock holograms, ChatBots who make music, and humans who compose strictly for TikTok!

                                                     Copyright 2024 Loring Wirbel

                                                           

The Allure of Listening, Chapter 14 - The Spread of Woke Arts in Un-Woke Times

 There were plenty of anthems available for Black Lives Matter and Occupy, but few people heard them. And all the corporations, including music companies, who had pledged DEI strategies in 2016, dropped them all in less than a decade.    2011-2019

The explosive, yet transient, expansion of the Occupy movement in 2011-12, and the Black Lives Matter movement in the months prior to Trump’s victory in 2016, signaled a growing realization by corporate America, including the music industry, that it had better act “woke,” even if concern for subjects like economic or racial justice was pretty superficial. While it took the arrival of Trump to really spur the arch-right-wing musical outliers, the greater noise made by right-populist musicians like Ted Nugent, Kid Rock, and Ariel Pink, had the paradoxic effect of showing that the assumptions among most pop artists that they should provide lip service to social-justice movements had already spread through most sectors of the music business.

   The decentralist and pop-up nature of Occupy meant that plenty of musicians showed up in various cities at spontaneous concerts, but the plans to create benefit albums mostly were   shelved, because cities cracked down on encampments quickly, and Occupy had fizzled as a long-term movement by mid-2012. Black Lives Matter, by contrast, experienced continued surges in 2016, 2018, and throughout the early months of the pandemic, due to specific acts of police violence. As a result, musicians from Algiers to Deerhoof issued music dedicated to BLM.  It was easy for musicians to pledge support for BLM, and this helped push corporations into more enlightened DEI (Diversity Equity Inclusion) strategies. (The near-universal corporate rejection of pledges for DEI and LGBTQ+ rights during the election year of 2024, due to the mere threat of a second Trump victory, showed how transitory and downright fake these corporate pledges had been.)

    Indie was going through a distinct “loud/soft” transition, with new acts like Florence and the Machine and existing acts like Mogwai stressing emphatic delivery, while Decemberists, Laura Marling, and the Civil Wars strived for understatement. And a new round of comical chaos was in gestation through bands such as Parquet Courts, Car Seat Headrest, and Ought, a movement that would reach fruition in the U.K., and in stateside bands like Bodega, as the 2020s began.

    Some millennials, particularly those who had not been around for indie-rock mini-surges in the 1990s and 2000s, like to talk about the “indie boom” of the second Obama administration, though this was dominated by more pop-friendly bands like Foster the People, fun, Bastille, and Kings of Leon. In fact, one could argue that sadcore women artists such as Lana Del Rey and Lorde arrived because too much of the music scene was oppressively sparkly-happy. Rather than dismiss the happier boom as too pop-centric, it helps to reiterate my earlier observation that every subgenre reinvented itself every few years or so. If you were a teenager during the 2010-16 period, the new music sounded just as legit as that favored by indie fans in the previous two decades. As indie became more pop-centric, it crossed over into collaborative efforts with R&B and hip-hop worlds as well, with songwriters like Grimes and Caroline Polachek co-writing songs with the likes of the Knowles sisters and Janelle Monae. Many thought that indie had no center of gravity during the 2011-17 period; in reality, the center of gravity was everywhere.

    But it was more than possible for DEI and woke strategies to misfire; in fact, artists that had launched earlier in the millenium were realizing that they had to pay attention to rapidly shifting social cues with faster response times than their predecessors ever did. The problem rarely reached the level of the type of “cancellation” experienced by J.K. Rowling during the waning Obama years; instead, artists had to pay attention to new feminist booms or queer political booms that drove emerging artists like Sophie, Chappell Roan, Snail Mail, and boygenius. And if they were slightly behind the curve, the results could be harsh. At the height of her popularity, Katy Perry released “Firework” in 2010 to a chorus of skeptics wondering if her feminist lyrics really rang true. By the time her “feminist anthem” 143 was released in 2024, the images and references seemed so cliched, the album quickly tanked.

    Despite a burst of recorded activism by bands like L7 following the January 2017 Women’s March that heralded Trump’s assumption of power, it should have surprised few observers that the first two years under Trump would involve a turning inward similar to the Reagan era. At least in the indie community, that meant the release of exceptional but deeply personal works from artists such as Mt. Eerie, Julien Baker, Tyler the Creator, and Circuit des Yeux. In the pop world, Top 40 artists recycled an endless series of duo collaborations among the likes of Ed Sheeran, Quavo, Selena Gomez, Chainsmokers, Miley Cyrus, The Weeknd, and many many more, most relying on heavily hedonistic themes. The presence of newcomers like SZA and Halsey guaranteed some salvageable elements in the forgettable pop of the late 2010s, and 2017 displayed an occasional riff-heavy tune like Portugal the Man’s “Feel It Still,” but the early Trump era proved as sobering as the 1980s descent into dance hell. The sudden popularity of BTS might lead some to conclude that K-pop provided a bright spot in a forgettable U.S. pop realm, but to my ears, K-pop only reinforced the conclusion that the era was a lame one.

    During the Trump era, R&B artists tended to make wiser use of pop charts than did indie or country artists. Where the latter would continue to drop a lone single on the charts to gauge consumers’ receptivity, Ariana Grande or Bad Bunny would release an entire album at once in streaming media, and have ten or more singles on the charts as a result. The physical album products in LP or CD might be delayed for months, if released at all. The decade proved a sad one in the hip-hop community, as the deaths in rapid succession of XXXTentacion, Mac Miller, and Juice WRLD wiped out a generation of new talent.

    The global explosion of hip-hop and pop, primarily from people of color, reflected two important trends as the decade was ending. Corporations had a desire to prove they were “woke” by pushing heavily on DEI aspects of their business model, and this led to more POC representation everywhere. But this also was an accurate reflection of where much of the new music was being made. Traditional white-rocker music was in a definite slump, and even the best music coming out of the indie charts tended to be dominated by very experimental women (Julia Holter, Circuit des Yeux, Holly Herndon, Mary Halvorsen), or Black jazz artists like Kamasi Washington. The latter musicians dwelled completely under mass-market radar, to be sure, but gave an indication of how even the pop underground was changing. And when a pop talent with an experimental edge could break the mass-market charts, as Billie Eilish did in 2019, it only reinforced the point that there was a place for experimentalism. Lil Nas X and Billy Ray Cyrus also introduced the world to the first mash-ups of hip-hop and country during 2019.

    There were also strange anomalies in the Top 10. Because the charts were now based on what people chose to stream, the Christmas charts might be filled with the likes of Gene Autry, Perry Como, and Nat King Cole, as well as holiday music of more recent vintage, such as Mariah Carey, Wham!, and Whitney Houston. A 70-year-old version of “Rudolph” breaking the Top 40 obviously made it difficult to assess how modern pop was being received.

    Bands reuniting in the latter part of the decade ran the gamut from 1980s favorites like Depeche Mode, to bands that only recently called it quits, including Panic! at the Disco and Fall-Out Boy. As all of them went on tour, the concert scene grew more inflationary and crowded by the year. Long before the post-Covid ticket scandals involving Taylor Swift and Bruce Springsteen, concert consumers had to worry about more than the ticket resellers by 2018-19. AXS and other sellers were playing their first games with “dynamic ticket pricing” for popular artists, and the price of concert tickets began to regularly reach into three figures – in fact, sub-$200 prices were considered a bargain for some artists.

    Inflation also hit the LP market in the late 2010s, long before the fire at Apollo Masters days before the Covid lockdown created a significant lacquer shortage affecting LP prices globally. If there was a bright spot, the mini-inflationary trends in the music industry prior to 2020 helped prepare consumers for the supply-chain breakdowns and concert-less months of the pandemic.

    When a global shock of any type takes place, there is a natural tendency to assume one felt precursors, but in the case of Covid, the rumblings seemed real. My wife and I visited Los Angeles to see our daughter at the end of the 2019 calendar year, and snagged tickets to a New Years’ Eve Guided by Voices show at the Terragram Ballroom promising “100 songs for 100 bucks.” The show fully lived up to its billing, and I remember telling my wife at the conclusion that “This was the most fun I’ll have in quite a while, since the 2020s are bound to bring us multiple shits hitting multiple fans at once.” If only I knew.

Coming in three weeks (Nov. 1) - Chapter 15, Lockdown Goads Music to its Virtual Side. Pods and Zooms and outdoor concert masks and walled-off Walnarts, oh my! 2020-22

Copyright 2024 Loring Wirbel

The Allure of Listening, Chapter 13 - Platforms Define Experiences

 Streaming arrives with all the subtlety of a Golden Corral all-you-can-eat buffet. Do independent musicians benefit, or does the infinite-playlist scroll mean a lot of vomiting? 2006-2011

The launch of iTunes in 2003-04 gave the music industry the first monetizable download market, but downloaded files had the shortest market dominance history in recorded music. While files still were downloaded in the 2020s, the era of market peak lasted only from 2003 to about 2008 or 2010. Opponents of streaming figured that even those customers who were short on space for physical objects would prefer downloaded files to streaming music, because there was a local instantiation of the music somewhere within the client’s control.

    But it turned out very few people cared if the piece of music was in “the cloud” or on a local disc. This may have been misplaced trust, since eventually Apple, Amazon Web Services and Google not only claimed to hold ultimate rights to music the consumer had downloaded from the streaming provider, they even claimed special rights to the consumer’s own music  – if users uploaded their own music from local storage to the cloud, the cloud owners claimed the right to modify, control, or delete that music supposedly owned by the consumer. The curmudgeon might grumble that “the cloud is never your friend,” but few people were listening, hence the short history of the dominance of downloads.

    The arrival of ubiquitous desktop broadband services and 4G/5G wireless services arrived at about the same time as Spotify’s 2011 launch. Download revenue fell at a rate of 3 percent per year from then on, estimated at $1.4 billion in 2023 and $1.23 billion by 2027. By the pandemic period, downloads already counted for less than either vinyl or CD sales. But here’s a funny thing: By 2005, vinyl LPs were making a return, even among people who did not own a turntable, because they were valued as objets d’art for the music collector to keep. In the mid-2000s, many were predicting that CDs would enjoy a similar renaissance, because lossless compression made for better audio quality than either downloads or streaming. But the latter didn’t happen. Indeed, by the mid-2020s, independent musicians were trying to scrape up the money for vinyl pressings, while distributing cassettes, Bandcamp links, links to direct file downloads, or ads for Spotify availability, because no one seemed to want the lowly CD.

     The CD’s failure to rebound was one of the only anomalies in the 20-year period from 2005 to 2025, when consumers were offered a potlatch of potential platforms and audio qualities to hear their music precisely as they wanted it. It helps to remember in the years prior to Facebook that many bands like Arctic Monkeys and Be Your Own Pet had their careers launched by the nearly-forgotten MySpace. But of all online environments, mobile streaming was the biggest winner. CDs were lagging so badly by 2015, most automobile manufacturers already had removed CD players as available options in new cars. Nevertheless, the audio industry seemed to care more about backward compatibility than the computer industry, where varieties of storage choices seemed to be made obsolete every few years. At the turn of the millenium, stacks of LPs in second-hand stores seemed as useless as VHS tapes. Twenty years later, the LPs were commanding top dollar, while VHSs (and DVDs) were just as useless as they had been in 2000.

    But did the format matter to most consumers? It depends on the habits they brought. I was one of the traditionalists who liked to arrange the spines of LPs and CDs alphabetically by artist, with works from different eras arranged chronologically. I carried that habit into folder groupings on my computer for music I had downloaded, though I tended to keep downloading to a minimum. Many consumers of streaming music on mobile media enjoyed the recommendations of services like Pandora, and the clever playlists developed by Apple and Spotify. Smaller independent artists complained that streaming was unprofitable, and this mattered to some of their fans – though far fewer people than the artists hoped. I developed a “guilt ratio” assessment for using streaming when it was necessary, but only as a last resort. I was in a tiny minority who even pretended to feel guilty about streaming.

    Meanwhile, the vinyl LP was becoming a fetish for a growing number of consumers. Before the first Record Store Day in 2007, broad-based retail outlets like Borders, Barnes & Noble, Target, and Urban Outfitters added LP sections, and even Walmart was not far behind. Record Store Day, intended to support independent record stores, was popular from its first nascent two or three years of existence, but it became apparent almost immediately that shoppers looking for rarities, particularly younger shoppers, had no turntables and no intention of purchasing such. The album was seen as a collectible. RSD in its early years could provide genuine collectibles, such as live sets and outtakes from studio recording sessions, but by the 2020s the new lists were dominated by reissues from legacy artists.

    There were many unique aspects of the new dominance of women in the charts in mid-decade. First, pop performers started dabbling in feminism, as evidenced by Lily Allen, Avril Lavigne, Alanis Morisette, and particularly Pink. They not only made up for the lackluster showings of many male artists, but women pop artists would grow increasingly adventurous to where they almost substituted for the waning of experimental noise as the decade ended. It wasn’t that all female pop artists were experimental (though Beyonce’s sister Solange Knowles and newcomer sci-fi artist Janelle Monae certainly proved that case), it was more that experimentation in the years after 2005-6 came more and more from the pop community than from rock, and particularly from women’s pop. Some women like Inca Ore were direct participants in the noise genre, and 2006’s three-disc Women Take Back the Noise compilation proved that case.

    It seemed almost inevitable that the mortgage liquidity crisis of 2007 and the heavy recession that followed would lead to a sparser music release environment in those years, and sheer volumes of new artists indeed took a hit, but the degree of buzz created by rising superstars like Taylor Swift, Adele, Lady Gaga, and Coldplay made it seem less severe than it may otherwise have been. What seemed more important from a political perspective was the number of musicians ready to speak out during the 2008 elections. Denver’s Flobots had set the tone with the powerful Fight With Tools album, and the reconstituted Rage Against the Machine, as well as Ted Leo and other performers, performed benefits for activists. 

This brief flurry of activism hit its stride in the summer of 2008 at the Democratic National Convention in Denver, when Flobots, RATM, Jello Biafra, and Wayne Kramer of MC5 took the lead in planning many demonstrations to influence policy platforms. While the nationwide series of actions led to some great one-off concerts, the activities were not sustained through the end of the year, and were largely forgotten in the aftermath of the far-bigger Occupy movement of 2011. Barack Obama’s inaugural concert had the broadest array of pop performers to date or since, but it didn’t translate to music-based social action, as Obama quickly found himself mired in the twin crises of TARP and Iraq.

    One victim of post-recession austerity seemed to be experimental and improvisational music. The death in 2007 of Sun City Girls founder Charles Gocher led to the demise of the band two years later, and suddenly the spigots turned off for constant new releases from the likes of Starving Weirdos, Vibracathedral Orchestra, and Sunburned Hand of the Man. Certainly, the cost of physical production of CDs or LPs was a factor in the waning of noise, but there seemed to be a global lack of energy as well. What was unexpected was the simultaneous expansion of sound experimentation in both pop and hip-hop fields, particularly among women artists (hip-hop had always been in the forefront of sampling both spoken word and other musicians’ works, but now this expanded to additional musical instruments and found sounds from nature). Notably absent in the race to get weird was mainstream rock. There were plenty of indie rock artists that proved exceptions to the rule, but mainstream rock acts were so late boarding the experimental sounds train, the genre could be considered the most conservative musical style out there by the 2020s.

    Social media in the Bush era, at least as far as musicians were concerned, centered largely on MySpace, though the rudimentary state of streaming pre-2010 made the network mostly a vehicle for connecting fans with bands’ pictures, tour schedules, videos, and links to purchase physical CDs or LPs. The arrival of Facebook and Twitter in the latter part of the 2000s eventually spelled the end of MySpace, though only due to laws of monopoly market dominance – neither Facebook nor Twitter really coalesced into centers for musician-artist connections. But Bandcamp and SoundCloud both were launched in 2007, and took the place of MySpace, even if both of the music hosting sites were designed less as central hubs with a common look and feel, and more for the musician to design and manage in a way they saw fit. Slowly over the course of a decade, the two sites expanded technology potentials to connect fans to unique music online, until the pandemic of the early 2020s made the hosting of remote live concerts seem a normal extension of this trend. (Apple expanded its iTunes and Apple Music services in similar ways, though in a manner that always served Apple’s proprietary interests more than the community at large.)

    Some subgenres were specific to a single online platform. Early proponents of “mumble rap,” such as Gucci Mane, Lil’ B, and Young Thug, were so specific to the SoundCloud environment, they became known as “SoundCloud rappers.” Obviously, with fame came a wider spread of platform, but many musicians from a variety of genres felt it necessary to show a little loyalty to their SoundCloud or Bandcamp roots.

    The arrival of streaming services at the turn of the decade fundamentally changed the way popularity was determined, in ways that were both democratic and overwhelming, particularly for smaller artists. First came the satellite radio services of Sirius and XM, which merged in 2008 to form a unified playlist-defined listener experience. Spotify was launched as an independent streaming company, while Pandora was acquired by SiriusXM in order to give the company a unique recommendation service using rudimentary AI features to determine what listeners might enjoy given their past listening preferences. The playlist compilation services of Spotify, Apple, and SiriusXM could genuinely be touted as making the listener more sophisticated in driving future choices, though it equally could be seen as driving listeners further into pre-defined boxes, where they seldom would listen to something outside the box.

    Hip-hop defined the million-seller side of the decade, as Eminem, Jay-Z, Kanye and Nas helped create a new megastar category where the artists achieved the type of fame earlier seen by Madonna and Whitney Houston. Regional hip-hop markets, particularly Atlanta with crunk and snap, became big sellers in their own right. It is no accident that hip-hop artists were the first to move away from all physical forms of music – the CD already was waning when the megastars emerged in mid-decade, and those same artists would not move to LPs until the very late 2010s. Kanye West was the first to say “No physical products” with Life of Pablo, but Chance the Rapper and others were right behind him.

    At the end of 2010, Billboard changed the way it compiled its Top 100 that further aided the streaming model. Instead of record labels and A&R executives pushing singles into the Billboard “New This Week” category, major artists such as David Cook, Taylor Swift, David Guetta, BoB, and the cast of Glee, would release new albums and have all the tracks from that album enter the “New This Week” category simultaneously. In theory, this allowed the listener to choose the best tracks to move up the charts into the Top 10. In practice, the vote-by-streaming method tended to favor the larger artist, as a newcomer had even less chance to break into the “New This Week” chart. It also meant that listeners had fewer filters imposed by music elites, which proved much more of a double-edged sword than most realized. This part of the streaming argument seemed to preview the debate between populism and elitism that took place in politics in the 2020s: Yes, the decision-making process of the elites had always been unfair, but without it, consumers faced a massive repository of streamed music that grew bigger every year. By the 2020s, everyone complained that drinking from such a firehose was virtually impossible. The environment for the music listener was bigger than ever, but the guides for knowing how to listen intelligently failed to emerge, which meant that hyper-democracy often equaled chaos.

    Because the vast bulk of listeners were casual in the ways they consumed music, the arrival of streaming led to a rapid decline in CD sales. The LP only survived through its art-object status. Since a USB or Bluetooth connection from a smartphone to a car was so easy to implement, CD players within automobiles began to be phased out by mid-decade. Since iPods had displaced Walkmans much earlier, very few portable players required anything more than streaming (or the arcane presence of a downloaded MP3 file). The number of consumers with audio component systems at home dwindled to a lonely few serious music wonks. Sure, mini-systems with powerful small Bose speakers remained popular, but they usually were used for streaming services. A few high-end audio component specialists survived, but dealt as much in Dolby 11.2 home theater systems as they did in audio-centric components. And as an ironic footnote for the home listener, preamp manufacturers who promoted dual-channel analog/digital preamps, dedicated the analog channel to a turntable, while the digital channel was for a streaming input, because “obviously, no one listened to CDs any more.”

Coming in three weeks (October 11) - Chapter 13, The Spread of Woke Arts in Unwoke Times - Was the supposed corporate fealty to DEI just a joke in the Trump era?

                                                         Copyright 2024 Loring Wirbel

The Allure of Listening, Chapter 12 - The Millenium Arrival of Craptastic Compression

 Turns out the format of a musical file downloaded to a local computer was the shortest-lived format dominance in popular music history! Was that the fault of MP3?    1998-2005

    Given how much the music industry later depended on lossy compression for downloads and streaming, it is a shocking anomaly to remember how the Recording Industry Association of America actually tried to block sales of the first Diamond Multimedia MP3 player in 1998, which itself was just a teaser as to how much RIAA would train the big guns on Napster two years later (Napster, the startup who promoted “free” downloading, was formed in the summer of 1999, before the millenium). Audio buffs sneered at the standardization of MP3, claiming many true music fans would demand either lossless compression like WAV, or direct dynamic compression, using pulse code modulation, in digital CDs or analog LPs. Wired magazine later pointed out that many millennials and Gen Z youth preferred the sound of MP3 to lossless compression, because they had grown up with lossy compression. The magazine called this trend “craptastic,” and pointed out that many boomers had themselves grown up listening to the Top 40 on tinny, monaural transistor radios (though few would say they actually preferred that sound to the high-end stereos they would hear in their college years).

     There was a significant difference between what happened to digital recording as a result of the CD’s introduction in the 1980s, and what happened to audio recording 15 years later due to the ubiquity of MP3. Digital recordings with high-bit-rate sampling could offer superior sound quality, but the turn to CDs also indirectly encouraged sloppy studio recording and mastering, favoring a bright and tinny sound, as we discussed in Chapter 9. Some die-hards might say that all audio compression should be kept to a minimum, but careful lossless compression taking place in the studio could lessen the overall dynamic range and impose a certain amount of gain reduction (some proponents of modern classical music, and of loud-soft progressive bands like King Crimson, would say that even reducing the dynamic range is compromising the integrity of the artist).

    In moving to lossy compression like MP3, the goal was different – reduce the overall size of a music file to make it storable on a local computer, or to optimize the bandwidth when streaming music over the Internet. The encoder removes data judged to be inaudible or irrelevant, and at high encoding rates like 320Kbits/sec and above, most people would not be able to tell the difference in the source. However, lossy compression introduces noise, distortion, and loss of detail. What is worse, each time a lossy file is sent back and forth among music editors, the file degrades, which is why most music editors insist on lossless files. So the CD was blamed for lower sound quality due to poor recording decisions made in studios in the 1980s, while MP3 reduced sound quality because quality was overtly sacrificed to improve file size. Many compressed files of the early 2000s debuted with bright and brassy bands like Foster the People, fun, and The Strokes, so it was often hard to tell the difference (which is not intended as a slur on the artist).

    What the arrival of MP3 delivery really underscored is that most people would prefer the convenience of a fully digitized music library, available through cloud services, to a local  physical instantiation of music in any format, which carried environmental costs alongside the simple reality of taking up too much space. The eventual revival of the LP, often sought out by people who did not even own turntables, showed that many people wanted the comfort of an art object in addition to an endless playlist. But the closing years of the 20^th century were the first time people became aware that digitization eventually would mean the availability of the entire music resources of the Library of Congress in an immediate form on handheld platforms. It wasn’t until the arrival of apps like Pandora and Spotify in the 21^st century that fans realized a potential downside: if the artistic output of millions of musicians was on tap all the time, how would music fans separate wheat from chaff? Labels attempted to revive interest in physical formats in 2000-01 through new digital platforms like Audio DVD and Super Audio CD. In 2004-05, a few artists like Fiona Apple, Son Volt, and Bruce Springsteen tried a “Dual Disc” flippable CD that had audio CD on one side and DVD on the other, though streaming would eventually make both CDs and DVDs all but obsolete. Instead, the biggest news of 2001 was Apple’s debut of the iTunes library and the iPod portable platform.

    While the full arrival of sampled and reassembled music would have to await the debut of better Mac ProTools, EDM music at the turn of the millenium already was feeling the impact of DJs who made as much or more use of laptops than turntables in their performances. This was not the simple song-sampling of earlier hip hop and pop tunes, or straight-out lip synching that landed Milli Vanilli in such trouble, but the full creation of new sounds using found and repurposed sounds from musical instruments and from the street itself. Musical purists would later grumble that they didn’t pay good money to see two faux-musicians drag laptops on stage, but Talking Heads founder David Byrne, in his seminal book How Music Works, said that there is no inherently greater authenticity or legitimacy between Alan Lomax dragging tape recorders to the Deep South to chronicle the blues masters, and newbie nerds creating music directly from the laptop. Byrne’s view would become accepted wisdom by the second decade of the 21^st century, but not without howls of protest from many, including the old-timey instrument community.

     In the final six months of 1999, individual artists and the music industry itself felt a sense of anticipation and palpable change awaiting the new millenium. (A stickler might say that a new millenium begins in 2001, but medieval pundits a thousand years ago considered the millenium to have begun in 1000, and the vast majority of modern global citizens felt the same way about 2000.) In the latter half of 1999, David Bowie offered the first downloadable album with Hours. Stephin Merritt encapsulated Tin Pan Alley-style pop with The Magnetic Fields’ massive three-disc 69 Love Songs. A few years later, Richard Thompson belatedly followed up with his 1000 Years of Popular Music, ending with a Brittney Spears cover. Even the somnambulant political activist world showed signs of life, with the anti-globalization Battle for Seattle offering its own musical soundtrack.

    And 2000 lived up to its billing. Many bands released defining works during the year – Radiohead’s Kid A, Modest Mouse’s The Moon & Antarctica, Pink’s debut, New Pornographers’ Mass Romantic, Death Cab for Cutie’s We Have the Facts, Eminem’s Marshall Mathers LP, Elliott Smith’s Figure 8. The recording industry was at one of its highest points in history for sheer numbers of new album releases. Yet the hint of physical intangibility was in the air, as the recording industry launched some of its first lawsuits against Napster. The legal actions held a sense of irony, given that 15 years later, labels would bow to the inevitability of streaming, which superficially seemed a lot closer to piracy than the downloadable files targeted in the Napster cases. Metallica lost a good chunk of fans by taking a more aggressive stance against Napster than did industry groups like RIAA. Ironically, so many music fans with large servers had set up file-sharing sites, which updated the shared mixtape to a shared database from which to burn CDRs, that the actions against Napster only served to drive file-sharing underground.

    What really made the 21^st-century environment so rich was a mutual-support network of like-minded musicians who helped make musicians’ rosters almost as vast as one would discover a decade later in the nascent streaming world. In record stores and on web sites worldwide, multi-band compilations were everywhere, later leading to solo recording contracts for the better bands. The process of regeneration and rebirth was larger than either the 1965-66 garage era, or the punk era of the late 1970s. And this busy activity continued, even as CDs became less profitable for all concerned. It set the stage for a streaming era where there were too many musicians for even the most obsessed music fan to hear in one lifetime. (Again, this was not reflected in singles charts, because indie musicians, with rare exceptions, did not make these charts. In fact, the Top 40 underwent a major revision in 1999 to add more hip hop and country, not only to make the charts more inclusive, but also because there were only a handful of Everclear and Matchbox 20 types who ever made the list, and a greater participation by hip hop and country was needed to flesh out a very paltry radio playlist.)

    It was fair to point out that several bands launched in the 2000-01 period moved indie back into a direct-rock sound, including The Strokes, Yeah Yeah Yeahs, and White Stripes. Several such bands survive in the 2020s, though it is fair to say that this mini-wave was the last to place guitar-centric rock in the center of indie. After that, the genre became indie-pop by default. Later in the decade, bands like Panic at the Disco!, Paramore, My Chemical Romance, and Fall Out Boy helped drive the former niche category of emo into a pop mainstream.

    Of course, the terror attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, were bound to play a sobering influence on the millenium party, but the effect was milder and shorter-lived than the major cultural shifts of Reagan years. In the month of October following the attacks, major benefit concerts were held in New York, Washington, Atlanta and Dallas, and virtually no protests were made against the U.S. intervention in Afghanistan, as it was perceived at the time as justifiable payback. Lee Greenwood hit the charts with “God Bless the USA” in October, as did Whitney Houston with her rendition of “The Star-Spangled Banner.”

    What was more disturbing was the music industry’s willingness to move to self-censorship: Clear Channel Communications sent out a list of songs “too sensitive” to play, The Strokes removed the song “NYC Cops” from the U.S. version of their debut album, Jimmy Eat World changed the name of its latest album from Bleed American to an eponymous title, and Reprise Records made its odd decision to drop the release of Wilco’s Yankee Hotel Foxtrot, to make it sound as though the refusal to release the album had something to do with 9/11 (the fact that the album was released by an affiliated label, Nonesuch, made the whole event seem like a misfire).  In any event, the effects were transient, as bands were back to their usual antics in 2002, and by 2003, anger at the invasion of Iraq was felt on both the streets and in the music industry.

    The 2003 preventive invasion of Iraq sparked transient opposition of a different sort. The invasion on false pretense had much less justification than U.S. involvement in Korea, Vietnam, Central America, or even Afghanistan a mere two years earlier. As a result, protests against the March 2003 invasion were massive and global – and had next to no effect. Because there was no draft and no long-term commitment of large numbers of U.S. troops (many advisors stayed for decades after the fact, but the Iraqi government collapsed within weeks), the protests were not sustained to any significant degree. And musicians’ interests were just as superficial as the public’s.

     Thurston Moore of Sonic Youth, in his new role as curator of many musical projects, set up protest-records.com as a repository for four hours’ worth of protest songs from dozens of bands (the site was still active 20 years later). Instead of selling CDs to make money, the site allowed users to download the songs for free, only asking for donations to antiwar groups. There also were decent political works from Dan Bern and from moveon.org. In live performances, both Dixie Chicks and Pearl Jam made significant statements against the Bush administration in the weeks following the invasion. Given their audience, it was no surprise Dixie Chicks faced scorn and complaint from the country crowd. As for Pearl Jam, Eddie Vedder was taken by surprise by the negative reaction from many fans to his antiwar stance. The latter rise of artists like Ted Nugent and Kid Rock displayed an ugly truth about the 21^st century – the music fan community could not be assumed to hold a progressive stance on many issues. Given how many artists asked Republican candidates not to use their music in later years, it was a safe assumption that many (though not all) musicians came from a progressive background, but often, their audiences were far more redneck than they were. The more generic form of disaster aid relief benefit concert remained strong, however, as events were held in 2005 for victims of the Boxing Day tsunami and of Hurricane Katrina in New Orleans.

    Top 40 charts were by then given over to a clear majority of hip hop tunes, broken only by country artists like Gretchen Wilson or Big and Rich. The few indie-style rock bands that were exceptions, such as Hoobastank, Train, or Creed, tended to have presence solely within Top 40, and not much existence outside mass-audience charts.  Billboard moved slowly to adding a dedicated “Adult Alternative” chart (it was first published in print in 1996, but not tracked online until 2008). However, such charts began fragmenting almost immediately – New Music Express and Album of the Year were excoriated by many for hewing too close to a mainstream line, while the annual list for the Pitchfork music site was derided as too hipster. In short, there was a lot of fragmentation in popular music in mid-decade, even within indie-rock domains.

    Nevertheless, a few “signifier” albums broke through the noise in mid-decade, such as Ben Gibbard’s double hit of Transatlanticism by Death Cab for Cutie and Give Up from his side project, The Postal Service. These albums meant so much to millennials that when Gibbard toured the two bands on the 20^th anniversary of the dual albums in 2023, concerts sold out everywhere. The irony from many anniversary re-hashings is that, even as millennials chided boomers for the multiple reunion concerts of bands like The Eagles and Fleetwood Mac, the bands of the 1990s and 2000s were selling packaged nostalgia in similar formats by the late 2010s and the 2020s. In fact, there was almost a standard algorithm one could use for a reunion, tied to 15^th or 20^th anniversaries of a significant album release, or a band’s formation. Oasis, for example, waited until the 15^th anniversary of the band’s breakup to launch its own reunion.

    A significant number of music consumers responded to the mainstream tedium by diving ever deeply underground, and a few clever outsider bands responded with a cavalcade of releases. Bands such as Starving Weirdos, Charalambides, Sun City Girls, Vibracathedral Orchestra, and Sunburned Hand of the Man released dozens of improvisational albums on any format imaginable. Not only were very few of these destined to be streamed at future dates, but the handmade cassettes, CDs, and lathe-cut LPs were valued as limited-edition pieces of art.

    One mid-decade milestone appeared to be well outside the realms of recorded original music, though it was an indicator of future media platforms for music development. The first release of Guitar Hero in the summer of 2005 was one of several rhythm-based video games allowing users to emulate musical instruments and vie for prowess. Initially, the games shipped with licensed playlists of songs familiar to many. Over time, however, gaming platforms became a vehicle for introducing new songs, as relevant as films or TV shows. Gaming avatars were cited as an influence when Damon Albarn, lead singer of Blur, created the virtual cartoon-character band Gorillaz in 2002. Eventually, online multiplayer environments hosted live events, with rapper Travis Scott being an innovator for the Twitch network. The evolution would take more than a decade, but gaming became part of the music user platform in 2005. In the next 20 years, surreality and virtual environments would seep into popular music with as much inevitability as streaming.

Coming in three weeks (Sept. 20) - "The Allure of Listening, Chapter 13 - Platforms Define Experiences" - (2006-2012) - As the streaming Godzilla denudes the landscape, the people shout, "To infinity and beyond!"

Copyright 2024 Loring Wirbel