Popular music - its future

[ChamberNut]

What do you see as the future of popular music (insert broad definition)?  10, 25, 100 years from now and beyond?  It hasn't been around for that long, to my knowledge (unless you include folk music, but I wouldn't).

[71 dB]

Popular music is supposed to make money, not to have a future.  

[Scarpia]

To project beyond the immediate future is futile.  

It used to require expensive and difficult to use equipment (recording studios) to make pop records and expensive equipment (LP cutting lathes and presses, radio stations) to distribute.  Now it can be made in a home studio and distributed on the internet.  The IQ-less-than-80 crowd will continued to be enthralled by pop artists marked by major labels, but independent artists will flourish and generate a richer, more diverse (if less lucrative) body of pop music in the future.

[The new erato]

Making money will always have a future.

And popular music have always been there, only it mainly haven't been notated or recorded until the last hundred years. Except the popular music written and published by major composers like Schubert, Telemann etc, and make no mistake aout it, some of it were truly popular. I thik a case can be made for Brahms Hungarian dances as an example of popular music of its day.

[Dr. Dread]

Music will not die. Some of it will be popular. 

[karlhenning]

Nicely done, Dave!

Psst! Ray! Lose the apostrophe!

[Haffner]

To project beyond the immediate future is futile.  

It used to require expensive and difficult to use equipment (recording studios) to make pop records and expensive equipment (LP cutting lathes and presses, radio stations) to distribute.  Now it can be made in a home studio and distributed on the internet.  The IQ-less-than-80 crowd will continued to be enthralled by pop artists marked by major labels, but independent artists will flourish and generate a richer, more diverse (if less lucrative) body of pop music in the future.

This is a very well written and thought out post. I often tend to think this way.

However, I get uncomfortable backing such assertions too stridently; I'm probably biased due to my "independent artist" status.

[Josquin des Prez]

I have found a way to rid us of the plague of pop music once and for all. Prevent women from having disposable income. I know, my genius has no limits. You can all thank me later. 

[Haffner]

I have found a way to rid us of the plague of pop music once and for all. Prevent women from having disposable income. I know, my genius has no limits. You can all thank me later. 

(laughing like a loon)

[71 dB]

I have found a way to rid us of the plague of pop music once and for all. Prevent women from having disposable income. I know, my genius has no limits. You can all thank me later. 

I wish there was time machine so you could go 500 years back in time to your time. 

[Dr. Dread]

I wish there was time machine so you could go 500 years back in time to your time. 

[DavidW]

Sometime in the mid-90s I lost track of pop music and I'm just clueless about it now.

[drogulus]

Popular music is supposed to make money, not to have a future. 

     I don't think the intention matters that much. It doesn't seem to matter much to me. Anyway, I can't always tell what the intention is. And if I knew that a composer was intending the "music of the future" it might not have the intended effect. So there must be something other than intentions that determines whether the music will last, like people liking it.

     Is there a reason why people should change their habits and only listen to music produced according to the approved intentions (art, permanence, etc.)? That assumes that such intentions are easily known, that there is an advantage to be gained by this procedure, and that pop music made for commercial purposes is not also made for the love of music itself.

     I was listening to a pop album the other night, Derek and the Dominos In Concert from 1970. The level of musicianship and the obvious dedication to quality can't be missed. Perhaps you need to know something about pop musicians to help overcome prejudices about them. They are musicians first, and they feel what other musicians feel, and the best of them can communicate as well as their more formally educated fellows. There are peaks of a certain kind I think only reached within an art music context, although it might be better to say only rarely reached outside of it.

     So I use these categories as a convenience, to organize my music collection, but think they don't represent essences. Oh, and though rock and roll will probably die some day, it isn't fated to die before anything else does.

     

Sometime in the mid-90s I lost track of pop music and I'm just clueless about it now.

     After a certain age pop music becomes the music of the past for most people. That happened to me decades ago. I won't be seduced by this trick of perspective into believing that good music is dead. It may not be available to me for some reason, though.

[Haffner]

       I was listening to a pop album the other night, Derek and the Dominos In Concert from 1970. The level of musicianship and the obvious dedication to quality can't be missed. Perhaps you need to know something about pop musicians to help overcome prejudices about them. They are musicians first, and they feel what other musicians feel, and the best of them can communicate as well as their more formally educated fellows. There are peaks of a certain kind I think only reached within an art music context, although it might be better to say only rarely reached outside of it.

    So I use these categories as a convenience, to organize my music collection, but think they don't represent essences. Oh, and though rock and roll will probably die some day, it isn't fated to die before anything else does.

   
    After a certain age pop music becomes the music of the past for most people. That happened to me decades ago. I won't be seduced by this trick of perspective into believing that good music is dead. It may not be available to me for some reason, though.

In regard to Derek and the Dominos In Concert, I seem to remember that being very good. I'm not a fan of Clapton, but Duane is a guitar MONSTER. Have you heard Allman Brothers Live at the Fillmore? Much better, in my opinion. Unbelievable playing.

I stopped listening to rock for the most part in 1999. It had gotten really bad by that point, and the samples I hear today are even worse. Last mainstream tunes I liked were Evanescence Bring Me To Life (except for those horrid male "vocals") and After Forever Energize Me (the latter qualifies as gothic pop but oh well).

I agree that I think the way my elders thought when I was growing up: I listen to the stuff I grew up loving, and because the best of it ican be quite "progressive" for the genre, I usually pick up new things each time I listen. I am also a big collector of 1970's bootlegs of Rock/proto-Metal concerts. Often the instrumental solos would be quite different live (sometimes the entire song), making bootlegs from that era especially exciting and relevant to me for inspiration. Bands don't do that anymore.

[drogulus]

   I saw both D & the Ds and the Allman Bros. at the Fillmore East, though I don't know which concerts made it onto the records. I might have been there for some of it in each case. Maybe it really is true that there was a Golden Age and by chance I was young enough to appreciate it or maybe that's just the way everyone feels about the music they loved and grew up with. Or maybe.....could it be?....some of both? 

    If pop music doesn't have a future then how can its past be explained? Why isn't it forgotten? It's no use saying that some conspiracy to steal our souls has defeated our inborn appreciation of the essence of quality. If we're that kind of persons than why wouldn't all of our preferences be equally suspect? Let's see, I'm responding to true greatness when I listen to classical but then the conspirators get me and I become a pop bot. Or maybe it's a conspiracy to imagine that there's this stuff called Art that you appreciate and prove that you're invulnerable...... or, maybe something else.  

[Haffner]

   I saw both D & the Ds and the Allman Bros. at the Fillmore East, though I don't know which concerts made it onto the records. I might have been there for some of it in each case.

Ernie: you rule dude.

[drogulus]

I have found a way to rid us of the plague of pop music once and for all. Prevent women from having disposable income. I know, my genius has no limits. You can all thank me later. 

    Pop music isn't a plague in the way you mean. It's more like everything that isn't signal is noise, so if I try to ignore it I'm going to be annoyed by its intrusiveness. I do ignore it most of the time because I find it very uninteresting. Most pop music is so obviously derivative and stereotypically presented that nothing about it, even what's good about it, can break through to make a connection. This shows the virtues of a taste filter, which points you in the direction of the kind of experiences that will pay off while cutting out the low yield directions. If you set the filters right, you can still respond to the best of the pop stuff and not turn yourself into a stereotypical prisoner of Good Taste. The key is to take ownership of the process and not let some dumb formula boss you around.

[Bulldog]

Pop music will always have a great future; it's what most folks want to hear (but I'm not one of them).

[Scarpia]

Haven't been to many rock/pop concerts.  I remember walking down 5th Avenue and seeing some sort of commotion.  A crew was filming a crazy looking girl in a strange pink dress leading a parade down the steps of the Metropolitan Museum of Art while some bubblegum pop was playing.  She'll never get anywhere, I remember thinking.  Turned out to be Cyndi Lauper filming the video for "Girls Just Want to Have Fun."

[greg]

I wish there was time machine so you could go 500 years back in time to your time. 

LOL