Mass Produced Music

(Special Thanks to LMF for having triggered this one off)

Once upon a time, music was a creative 'art'. An expression of what the person was feeling in a way. If you were happy, you sang something cheerful or whatever. Bards would sing tales and add their own special touch to them. Artists would compose music in the form of musical scores, which other people could play and add their own feel to things.

But then music turned into a business, and it all went downhill from there. When i say "Business" I mean it turned into an enterprise for which extracting money is the only goal. While beforehand it was primarily a creative and entertaining process, now it is literally mass produced. Scores of people work on a single 'song', which is crafted in such a way as to earn the most money.

Previously, when you had an artist, the artist would have been the song's creator. Nowadays, when you say that you like a song by [artist/band], the person in front of the camera probably has very little to do with the actual song. In order to prove this point, I attempted to see the credits for particular famous songs. Unfortunatly this proved difficult - so i picked up the last Mainstream cd I own, and looked at the credits. By the way its a 1997 "Aqua" album. So lets look at who wrote the very famous "Barbie Girl" song.

So, according to this it is "Produced Arranged and Mixed" by 4 people.None of them are the band members by the way. Turning to the back page credits we have the 4 member band. That's 8 so far. "All tracks mastered by..." is another person. There are 7 backing vocals and 3 "Guitar" (not the band members either). If we also add the "Styling", "Hair and Makeup" to the group - that gives us the grant total of... 20 people. There is also a page of "Thanks and Special Thanks". I didn't count Management either. Lets compare this to the very famous "Beethoven Symphony No 6." which is a 4 hour symphony written by 1 person. See what I mean?

What an artist adds to the whole thing is simply the "Image". Its the friendly face in front of the mechanical process. There aren't too many things this person must have, since autotune and editing has removed most prerequisites. They simply need to look attractive or attempt to put a sensual touch into things. An alternative (especially for males) is to be eccentric or otherwise infamous - such as taking microphones off people who have won an award. Note that this is mostly relevant for 'pop' music.


Lets look at the top 10 songs at this present moment. The Source is this site here, and its for the week ending 26th March.

So lets gauge the appearance of this people in the charts shall we?


1. Lady Gaga
2. Cee Lo Green - Exception?
3. Katy Perry , Kayne West
4. Rihanna
5. Jennifer Lopez
6. P!nk
7. Bruno Mars
8. Enrique Iglesias
9. Britney Spears
10. Ke-dollar-ha


Theres an image of each in the link, which can help to clarify and prove my hypothesis.


In conclusion - music isn't a creative process, or an art anymore. It is simply an Assembly Line kind of thing, where the product itself is a mixture of the talents of many people who you probably never heard of, and the packaging is the artist itself.


Money is the goal, it is both the sinews, the means and the end.


The Llama

I Predict....

A few days ago I was checking the maltese Times website for updates to the war in Libya. As always, the most entertaining part is the comments, which triggered off this blogpost.

For those who aren't familiar with the quality of the comments on that website, imagine this - You put 1000 monkeys with typewriters in a room, however 33% of the monkeys are political zealots, 33% of them are religious xor anti-religious zealots, and 33% are uninformed or just plain stupid. The rest are normal. Note that these sets are not disjoint.

Anyhoo, on an article about the War in Libya, two different people posted two different Nostradamus prophecies which appeared to predict what would happen. Now this gave me some thought, why are there still people around that believe him?

This raises a number of problems with believing predictions or prophesies -

1. You are assuming that the predictor has enough cosmic knowledge to simulate/model the cosmos enough to make the prediction
1b. You are asserting a fatalist universe and denying the existance of free will
2. You don't know anything about probabilities
3. Prophesies can be interpreted in different ways generally - this adds onto 2.

So, I'm not going to go into 1 and 1b too much, I will leave that for a future blogpost.

2 is quite the kicker really. I did some wikipedia research on Nostradamus. Apparently he died in 1556, and predicted what I understand to be around 950 units. So you would assume the probability that he was right in at least 1 of them over the past 450 years should surprise no-one. Even if there was only one way of interpreting each prophecy, the probability of a particular event happening is very large, especially over 450 years.

Now 3 I decided to show using a slightly humorous method. I thought of some text I could bring up which is written in a 'prophetic' style and which has no predictions or nothing to do with current events. After some thought I decided upon the Book of Mozilla. For those who don't know what that is, its a humorous long-term joke which the firefox developers put quotes from in their software (about:mozilla), it details events about Firefox in an elaborate manner.

Anyhow, I chose this interesting quote:

"Mammon slept. And the beast reborn spread over the earth and its numbers grew legion. And they proclaimed the times and sacrificed crops unto the fire, with the cunning of foxes. And they built a new world in their own image as promised by the sacred words, and spoke of the beast with their children"

I will now proceed to interpret this piece as having to do with the current Libyan civil war.

Mammon is personification for Greed. Being a dictator for 40 years in an oil rich country is greedy. Since the libyan people were using the old flag which gaddafi had removed, its 'the beast reborn'. Its spreading over the Earth through the UN resolution, and the numbers are large enough. They cunningly took over half of Libya. The rest of the prediction is the future, where the 'sacred words' are the promises of freedom.

See? And you throught that that piece was about Netscape, IE6 and Microsoft. Foolish Mortals.

Llama

Bloaty Software

So, was updating my Yahoo messenger just today (yes I still use it). So I downloaded the installation file and ran it. Now, just to be clear - the installation file is just for the messenger, and not like the Windows Live Essentials one which has a bunch of stuff you can install. So anyway. Here's the first page.

Yes, I just want to install the IM client. So, lets see what happens if I choose "Next". I get an add-on to my browser, my homepage changes, my default search engine changes and.. oh look, there's actually some Search Protection which will stop me from changing the search back to what it was before.


Woah. Oh look, hidden behind there is another link - "Custom". Lets see what happens when I click it.

Oh look, Yahoo Toolbar was going to be installed as well. I didn't want that either. Good thing I spotted the custom link at the top, because even if I was careful enough to uncheck all the junk, I'd still the Toolbar.


So, what do we learn from this, aside from Yahoo trying to sneak a ton of rubbish on my PC? If you're installing something, DON'T press NEXT, NEXT NEXT. Lots of idiots people do this, and this is the reason why a company tries to sneak in as much rubbish as possible when you want something else.


Now certain companies do this because they get sponsored - but Yahoo doesn't need a sponsor, I wonder why its doing it. Maybe it likes splashing itself over your PC.

Llama

First!

Was going to write a blog on the evils or DRM software, but while thinking about it in me head, I reached an interesting, separate state conclusion, so I'm going to blog about this instead.

Namely - what's all this fuss about being the first to own the latest technological device or software?

This happens frequently when something is truly hyped up. There were people standing outside for hours to get themselves an iPhone 4, and the same thing happened with the latest iProducts.


The problem with this, is that you could just be buying yourself something less than perfect. Shouldn't you at least wait until reviews come out which properly describe the product you're buying?


You could be disappointed, even if the earlier products were great. Lets take a proper example - DragonAge 2 came out last week.


Metacritic gives it an 84, with a 4.1 User Score
Its the top selling game in the UK at the moment, no doubt bolstered by pre-orders or people who lined up early. (To compare, Dragon Age Origins had a 91/8.3 score).


This sort of 'everyone buying at the beginning' is the norm in software (Hi there Zipf). However if you rush out and buy it before everyone else, there are additional problems with software:


1. Software has a tendancy to become cheaper as time goes by, so you're paying extra for nothing
2. The thing you rushed out and bought could be a load of crap, or less good than you would have expected from the trailer which had 0 gameplay in it.
3. The thing you bought could be buggy as 'ell. Yes this happens. Isn't that right Rockstar?
4. There is no real 'bonus' for you having played the game earlier. Sure you get some extra trigger-time if you're going to play online I guess.

(Added:) Just remembered something else. Some games are now even offering to give you the ability to beta test them if you pre-order or buy another game (DoW2:R and DNF respectively did that recently). This especially highlights the concerns up there. We are now so directed to wanting to play the game as soon as it comes out (or even earlier as is this case) - that we are offering to beta test the game for free (or rather you pay for that). Forget wanting stability, latest patches or whatever. Alright granted, in Beta most bugs would already have been cleared out - but really... Of course you will pay a price larger than those who buy it after a few weeks, so you don't get any discounts for helping them do their job.

Feel sort of silly now don't you? I'm only recently playing the Half-Life series because one of them was on sale a while ago. I didn't have to pay 60 euros to be one of the first to have this experience - because its still a fun experience now - and at least if it had any bugs in it, they're all patched by now.


The Llama