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