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Points: 9869 		Direct Link To This Post Posted: June 05 2012 at 09:17
Originally posted by Ambient Hurricanes Ambient Hurricanes wrote:

 I don't care whether something was recorded live or laid down track by track.  We live in a day and age where the industry is obsessed with perfection, and our recording methods reflect that.  In the end, there's two things that matter; the end result of the studio record, and the band's ability to perform it live.  

That Peter Gabriel struggles to hit his high notes live has rarely come in the way of appreciating Genesis concerts, especially because he does all those theatrics to compensate for it.  Mercury was the same, not the most convincing live singer but flamboyant and charismatic in terms of presence.  And yet, the masses liking Lady Gaga is somehow supposed to be such a big deal.  Strange are the ways of progland.  I am in complete agreement with Dean.  Artistic integrity is overrated.  Further, we are frequently not really in the best position to judge the extent of integrity.  We judge pop artists too harshly and cut our prog idols too much slack when they were not above writing pop to cash in on their popularity.  John Wetton has stated on record that commercial success was always his ultimate aim and that is why he joined first UK and then Asia.  He loved being part of King Crimson but it didn't enrich him all that much at the end of the day. 
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Points: 37575 		Direct Link To This Post Posted: June 05 2012 at 08:15
Originally posted by dtguitarfan dtguitarfan wrote:

I don't have much to say as Jacob made a lot of the points I was trying to make much more eloquently than I could. But I will say this: Jacob touched on the idea of artistic integrity. And that phrase resonates with me. As a father, I hope my kids pick heroes that are good examples. I hope the heroes they pick are ones I can point to when they are trying to get away with not giving a task their best and say: "you want to be like that? Well the only way that person got to where they are is through a lot of hard work." Unfortunately, it seems like a lot of times the most successful people are not the hardest working. In fact, it often seems like the hardest working people don't get rewarded for their work. Often the richest, most successful people didn't get to where they are through hard work - maybe they were born rich and just got richer, maybe they were born good looking and got rich off of that. Whatever the case, I hope my kids pick heroes that exemplify good principles.
My daughter saw Courtney Love on TV when she was 6 years old and became an instant fan, she later picked-up on the Spice Girls, then Nightwish and Within Temptation, then Emilie Autumn and more recently Flourence and the Machine and Lana Del Ray, she may have discarded The Spice Girls in the intervening sixteen years but she is still a firm fan of Courtney Love... Whether you (or I) judge any of them to be ideal role models or positive or negative influences is irrelevant  - I don't think she wanted to be like them (though having heard her sing along to 'Doll Parts', 'Wishmaster' and 'Thank God I'm Pretty' for many years you can never be absolutely sure Wink) - what she sees is strong independant women doing things their way and her chosen career was certainly shaped by the fashions those performers sported (she is currently studying to be a fashion designer). Whatever choices and heroes our children pick-up you have to be very careful how you react to them, I certainly never lectured my daughter using her heroes as examples, that would have been a folly and counter-productive just as it would have been counter-productive for my father to lecture me using my heroes as examples. But maybe that's just me - I'm an old gothic hippy who sees encouragement and support as better motivators. Sure we can stress that there are no easy paths to fame and fortune, but that lesson is one they learn soon enough and my daughter knows well enough that she has to work hard to get anywhere now she is an adult, especially in her chosen profession, (and believe me I've never seen anyone work as hard as she has over the past three years) - but would I have shattered the dreams of a six year old posing in front of her bedroom mirror with a tennis racket for a guitar wanting to be a pop princess - hell no.
 
The Artistic Integrity card is over-played, there are thousands of artists out there who can be used as illustrations of any point you care to make - there are more failures on the zero artistic integrity side than there are successes just as there are talentless people who have become rich and famous through sheer hard work. Success in the music business is a lottery, sure some impresarios/producers can stack the deck in their favour a little, but even they can have abject failures.
 


Edited by Dean - June 05 2012 at 08:15
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Points: 29630 		Direct Link To This Post Posted: June 05 2012 at 07:51
Dumb luck, but you can't dismiss hard work and ambition.  Being worthy doesn't really enter into the equation.
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Points: 32524 		Direct Link To This Post Posted: June 05 2012 at 07:12
Originally posted by dtguitarfan dtguitarfan wrote:

I don't have much to say as Jacob made a lot of the points I was trying to make much more eloquently than I could. But I will say this: Jacob touched on the idea of artistic integrity. And that phrase resonates with me. As a father, I hope my kids pick heroes that are good examples. I hope the heroes they pick are ones I can point to when they are trying to get away with not giving a task their best and say: "you want to be like that? Well the only way that person got to where they are is through a lot of hard work." Unfortunately, it seems like a lot of times the most successful people are not the hardest working. In fact, it often seems like the hardest working people don't get rewarded for their work. Often the richest, most successful people didn't get to where they are through hard work - maybe they were born rich and just got richer, maybe they were born good looking and got rich off of that. Whatever the case, I hope my kids pick heroes that exemplify good principles.


Much of commercial success boils down to luck- being at the right place at the right time, knowing the right people at the right time, etc.
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Points: 1708 		Direct Link To This Post Posted: June 05 2012 at 07:00
I don't have much to say as Jacob made a lot of the points I was trying to make much more eloquently than I could. But I will say this: Jacob touched on the idea of artistic integrity. And that phrase resonates with me. As a father, I hope my kids pick heroes that are good examples. I hope the heroes they pick are ones I can point to when they are trying to get away with not giving a task their best and say: "you want to be like that? Well the only way that person got to where they are is through a lot of hard work." Unfortunately, it seems like a lot of times the most successful people are not the hardest working. In fact, it often seems like the hardest working people don't get rewarded for their work. Often the richest, most successful people didn't get to where they are through hard work - maybe they were born rich and just got richer, maybe they were born good looking and got rich off of that. Whatever the case, I hope my kids pick heroes that exemplify good principles.

Edited by dtguitarfan - June 05 2012 at 07:00
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Points: 37575 		Direct Link To This Post Posted: June 05 2012 at 05:28
Originally posted by Ambient Hurricanes Ambient Hurricanes wrote:

Originally posted by stonebeard stonebeard wrote:

In the end music is music and not all music is the same. Do you think the music you love so much has no studio alternation? Get real. I put it to anyone to tell me why it actually matters in this day and age if music has been hand-crafted into perfection by the artist and then just laid to tape*, or if it has been crafted and polished from the ground-up in the studio. The truth is, all great albums have professionals working on them, and most of them have extensive studio alteration. And sorry to break it to you, but all your favorite bands sound like sh*t, when they don't have good mixers, recording engineers, and producers telling them why they need to put a chorus right there. Oh and guess what? Your favorite drummers f**ks up the timing  A LOT and it's edited in Pro Tools before it gets pressed. Deal with it. You probably don't even want to know how many records have sh*t drums when they get to the mixer, then amazing drums after it's mixed. Know why? They were enhanced with samples from Drumagog.

It's time for prog fans to get of the high horse and look at reality. 

*By the way, for great albums, this never, ever, ever, ever happens. 

I'd love to know where you got all this information.  There are very many good albums that have been created by artists with little professional help.  There are great albums that have been recorded live without much alteration; that's how they had to record before today's technology was available, and that's how many of the jazz greats recorded.  Any good drummer can lay down a good drum track and only have to fix a few stray mistakes and apply some tasteful effects in the mix.  If what you are saying was true and every band sounded terrible before their music was altered in-studio, then there would be no good live bands.  
As an audience we are generally far more forgiving of a few fluffs and mistakes on stage than we are on studio recordings and, for example, if a drummer can't quite manage the tripplet fills on stage we aren't really going to notice but when he does that on album he will know, and that's when a bit of ProTools tweekings comes to his rescue. I've sat in on studio sessions where a very good drummer has spent hours doing multiple takes to get a drum line to meet his own high standards (something he can replicate time after time in rehearsal but under presure in a studio with the money-clock ticking away it's much harder) - as the budget was limited we finally had to use his best take of the day and just tweek one kick beat a few milliseconds to make him happy (not very happy mind, just happy, he still wanted just one more go to get it right).
 
Originally posted by Ambient Hurricanes Ambient Hurricanes wrote:


I have no problem with studio alteration, as long as it's being used to perfect the music, not to try and make it something it's not.  I don't care if they auto-tuned James Labrie's vocals because they were just a tad bit pitchy, or if Alex Lifeson patched his solo together from various takes, or if someone hit a bum note and they erased and fixed the mistake.  I don't care whether something was recorded live or laid down track by track.  We live in a day and age where the industry is obsessed with perfection, and our recording methods reflect that.  In the end, there's two things that matter; the end result of the studio record, and the band's ability to perform it live.  Though I say that it's the end result that matters, the way in which the band and producers go about recording is going to affect the end result.  If something sounds bad in-studio, you can fix it all you want and make all the notes sound perfect, but it's never going to be a great album.  All great albums have meat to them; they have talent, hard work, and musical value behind them, and the studio techniques are used to perfect and refine that.  The band's ability to perform live is the big test: after recording the album, the band has to show that there was talent and good performing and writing by reproducing live what they created and perfected in-studio.
Yet so few of them really do manage to reproduce that studio perfection on stage, and we love them for it. On this forum we have had people criticising Pink Floyd for being studio-perfect on stage (even though they are not). No one is ever happy in Progland.
Originally posted by Ambient Hurricanes Ambient Hurricanes wrote:

It's not just prog musicians, either, who can record like this.  There are plenty of musicians in other genres of music who have created excellent music, recorded it in the studio, perfected and enhanced the recording with effects and mastering, and then managed to reproduce it live at a high quality. 
I don't think they do, and more importantly, I don't think they can without filling the stage with dozens of extra musicans. It is impossible to replicate multitracked keys, guitars and vocals in a live setting yet they are an integral part of practically every studio recording, especially in "our game" of Progressive Rock. Some bands play to a backing track on stage to fill-in those missing studio layers (even Rush - how else are they going to replicate any of their songs live without one?) - they still play "their bits" live but all the extras that make up the studio version of the song are midi-sync'd.
 
I think I may have heard one live version of Savatage doing their trademark counterpoint vocals (not something that is easily reproduced using a backing-track), but on most live recordings they do not (The Japan Live '94 version of 'Chance' for example ends before the multi-part vocal section).
 
/edit: another unnecessary anecdote: back in the 70s one band strived to recreate studio perfection on stage, that band was The Enid - the fruits of that can be heard on the 1979 release "Live at Hammersmith"  yet in every performance I can remember from that time Robert John Godfrey would always appologise for the missing trumpet during their set.


Edited by Dean - June 05 2012 at 06:07
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Points: 37575 		Direct Link To This Post Posted: June 05 2012 at 04:28
Originally posted by Ambient Hurricanes Ambient Hurricanes wrote:

Originally posted by Dean Dean wrote:


You are never going to "get" this, but still I try. The market for the music you like is limited, this is not through the music industry choking the market with music you don't like, it is simply that the total number of people in the world who can ever like what you like is very small - marketing and promotion and education will never change that, the music you like simply does not have mass appeal, it never has and it never will. You just have to accept that the people who like Justin Beiber will never like Dream Theatre and the people who like Black Eyed Peas will never like Symphony X - marketing has absolutely nothing to do with that, education has absolutely nothing to do with that and the music industry has nothing to do with that. All the music industry does is create product for specific markets and by far the biggest market is the mainstream pop market.

Insofar as music is entertainment, this is a completely sensible view of the music industry.  The point of entertainment is to put out material that people will like, and like immediately.  If the music industry finds the cheapest and most loophole-filled ways to do this as possible, who cares?  There's no real integrity to entertainment (unless you're talking about moral integrity with regard to lyrical content and such), because there's no such thing as objective value to entertainment.  The only thing objective about entertainment is the amount of people who like it, and the music industry is trying to make that objective number as large as possible with the lowest possible cost.

Insofar as music is art, however, the modern industry is the worst thing that could ever have happened.  There is an integrity to art; art takes skill and discipline and effort and pain and hard work, not merely from businessmen but from the artists themselves.  Above all, art must move the soul and influence the mind; it's not just for entertainment, it's for catharsis, not just to momentarily distract you from your troubles but to lift you out of them, to lift you out of yourself to experience the world through someone else's eyes, to identify with his emotions and to share in them.  Whether it's music, painting, drama, or sculpture, art has the power to change people, and the power to make them feel things they could never feel otherwise.

Don't misunderstand me; there's nothing intrinsically wrong or evil about the music out there that exists soley for entertainment, but there is something wrong when, as a society, that's all we see in music.  You're not hurting yourself by listening to Justin Beiber, but you could be doing so much better for yourself if you listened to Bach and Mozart as well.  That isn't to say that music meant for entertainment cannot be good art as well; Rush see themselves as entertainers as do many other prog bands, and much of the music we consider "classical" "art" music today was originally intended for mere entertainment.  There are some very good pop bands; I think that Coldplay is one of the best groups in music today, and I find real value in One Republic as well, not to mention many of the "classic" pop groups.  But I think that Geoff is correct in saying that the modern method of producing pop music is not conducive to artistic value.  If you took his original post and specified that we were talking about most (not all) of modern top 40 pop music, and specified that we were talking about artistic value, then I'd basically agree with what he said.


All music is produced for entertainment of some kind, whether that is to entertain the feet or the mind, it is still entertainment - musicians are entertainers and performances are shows. Entertain is derived from inter - 'in ones self' and tenir - 'to hold' - when you have been entertained it means 'to hold in your mind' - you take something of that performance into yourself - it means you have been diverted or engaged, or by your own words: "it's for catharsis, not just to momentarily distract you from your troubles but to lift you out of them, to lift you out of yourself to experience the world through someone else's eyes, to identify with his emotions and to share in them" ... that is essentially the definition of 'entertainment'.
 
Classical music more than any other has been about the performance, the entertainment, whether that was Bach or Mozart, Paganini or Straus, Stravinsky or Cage - the academic high-brow analysis of that is a seperate diversion but it is still a form of entertainment through distraction and engagement, they dress it up but it's still entertainment. For many Classical music is a crashing bore, yet they are happy for it to entertain them as a soundtrack to something else, whether a film or a firework pagent - the music itself has not changed, the difference is context and context defines perception.
 
So up to a point Jacob I do understand you and I do agree with what some of you have said, however I do not agree on "artistc value" or that "you could be doing so much better for yourself if you listened to Bach" - that to me does not compute because you are making distinctions based upon intent.
 
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56 years ago Hollywood made a film of the music business, intended as a satire on the emergent Rock'n'Roll it concerns a mobster getting his talentless and tone-deaf girlfriend promoted as a singing star. Today this film is lauded as a celebration of 50s rock'n'roll and back in 1956 it was inspirational to many wannabe pop stars at the time, including The Beatles and countless other bands that emerged in the late 50s/early 60s. 
 
[For Geoff's entertainment, the actress playing the talentless girlfriend in question lipsyncs her singing parts in this film as she really could not sing.]
 
 
...the point being - manufactured Pop is nothing new - it has always been a part of the music industry, long before 1956 when that film was made. When King Crimson was recording "In The Court" and The Beatles were recording "Sgt Pepper" a manufactured pop group was recording "The Birds, The Bees and The Monkees" - as the late Davy Jones said in an NME interview at the time: "I can only speak for myself. I am an actor and I have never pretended to be anything else. The public have made me into a rock n' roll singer. No one is trying to fool anyone!"
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Originally posted by Ambient Hurricanes Ambient Hurricanes wrote:

In a live setting, you can apply effects to enhance the sound but all you can do is enhance; you can make a good band sound better, but you can't make a bad band sound good.  In the studio, you can fix mistakes, add samples, and make a terrible vocal sound good, but you can't do that live.  I also dispute that there would be very few good live bands if live effects were taken away; I've heard local bands play with minimal engineering and still sound amazing.

It's not that there wouldn't be any good bands, it's that any unedited/enhanced recordings of live bands would fail to live up to their potential in the studio. Which is not to say live recordings aren't better (re: every Police live album), but only the most solid of bands can come through with a product that stands together with the studio polished stuff. Which would have been fin in the old days when there was the filter of record companies keeping crap bands from releasing things widespread, but now any person with dedication and some spare income can make good sounding records. The fact that it can't be reproduced live shouldn't be a big issue.

It really boils down to how good the artist playing is, obviously. And I've heard a lot of stuff live that, if recorded and listened to not at 120 db and half-drunk, I would probably recoil in horror. This is typically not jazz played by 60 year old guys.
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In a live setting, you can apply effects to enhance the sound but all you can do is enhance; you can make a good band sound better, but you can't make a bad band sound good.  In the studio, you can fix mistakes, add samples, and make a terrible vocal sound good, but you can't do that live.  I also dispute that there would be very few good live bands if live effects were taken away; I've heard local bands play with minimal engineering and still sound amazing.

I understand what you're saying about home recording and trying to work around your weaknesses using technology.  I would contend that it takes some of the soul out of the music when much of it is artificial, but I think that in my previous post I forgot to take into account the most important thing (how intelligent of me): the quality of the composition.  You're right, in that it's true that you can create some really good music even if much of the performance has been "fixed" as long as the composition is of good quality.  
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Points: 28057 		Direct Link To This Post Posted: June 04 2012 at 23:48
Originally posted by Ambient Hurricanes Ambient Hurricanes wrote:

Originally posted by stonebeard stonebeard wrote:

In the end music is music and not all music is the same. Do you think the music you love so much has no studio alternation? Get real. I put it to anyone to tell me why it actually matters in this day and age if music has been hand-crafted into perfection by the artist and then just laid to tape*, or if it has been crafted and polished from the ground-up in the studio. The truth is, all great albums have professionals working on them, and most of them have extensive studio alteration. And sorry to break it to you, but all your favorite bands sound like sh*t, when they don't have good mixers, recording engineers, and producers telling them why they need to put a chorus right there. Oh and guess what? Your favorite drummers f**ks up the timing  A LOT and it's edited in Pro Tools before it gets pressed. Deal with it. You probably don't even want to know how many records have sh*t drums when they get to the mixer, then amazing drums after it's mixed. Know why? They were enhanced with samples from Drumagog.

It's time for prog fans to get of the high horse and look at reality. 

*By the way, for great albums, this never, ever, ever, ever happens. 

I'd love to know where you got all this information.  There are very many good albums that have been created by artists with little professional help.  There are great albums that have been recorded live without much alteration; that's how they had to record before today's technology was available, and that's how many of the jazz greats recorded.  Any good drummer can lay down a good drum track and only have to fix a few stray mistakes and apply some tasteful effects in the mix.  If what you are saying was true and every band sounded terrible before their music was altered in-studio, then there would be no good live bands.
 

If you take away EQ, compression, reverb, delay, the acoustics of the venue, and the mixing engineer, there might be very very few good live bands. And it's especially evident when considering the amount of acts that are out there, not just A-list pros who've been together for 20 years. It's studio trickery done on the fly, and it's more impressive, but you're not just hearing 3 guys jamming when you're listening to a Rush live album.

Originally posted by Ambient Hurricanes Ambient Hurricanes wrote:

I have no problem with studio alteration, as long as it's being used to perfect the music, not to try and make it something it's not.  I don't care if they auto-tuned James Labrie's vocals because they were just a tad bit pitchy, or if Alex Lifeson patched his solo together from various takes, or if someone hit a bum note and they erased and fixed the mistake.  I don't care whether something was recorded live or laid down track by track.  We live in a day and age where the industry is obsessed with perfection, and our recording methods reflect that.  In the end, there's two things that matter; the end result of the studio record, and the band's ability to perform it live.  Though I say that it's the end result that matters, the way in which the band and producers go about recording is going to affect the end result.  If something sounds bad in-studio, you can fix it all you want and make all the notes sound perfect, but it's never going to be a great album.  All great albums have meat to them; they have talent, hard work, and musical value behind them, and the studio techniques are used to perfect and refine that.  The band's ability to perform live is the big test: after recording the album, the band has to show that there was talent and good performing and writing by reproducing live what they created and perfected in-studio.

It's not just prog musicians, either, who can record like this.  There are plenty of musicians in other genres of music who have created excellent music, recorded it in the studio, perfected and enhanced the recording with effects and mastering, and then managed to reproduce it live at a high quality. 

The overall point is that you can make something artificially and have is sound almost exactly as it would if you had pros recording. It just depends how much time and money you want to put into it. I think the technology has advanced far enough that, if you dedicate your time to learning how to mix and use the software, hardware, and recording tools, then you can make professional sounding records in the bedroom. And it was all quantized, then humanized, and altered digitally until it sounds human again. Sure it takes time to learn everything but all the tools are there.

Live music is cool and all, but I rarely like to see live acts. I often like to hear music alone. It would just be ridiculous to think good music becomes less good knowing it was one dude in the bedroom recording everything and fixing it later on. And I say that as a dude who records everything and fixes it with MIDI. it's good to have strengths, and I'll take being able to play some amount of guitar, keyboards, drums, and bass as well as having to recording knowledge to make it sound good after the fact rather than just being pretty awesome at one thing. Other people might think differently.


Edited by stonebeard - June 04 2012 at 23:49
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Originally posted by stonebeard stonebeard wrote:

In the end music is music and not all music is the same. Do you think the music you love so much has no studio alternation? Get real. I put it to anyone to tell me why it actually matters in this day and age if music has been hand-crafted into perfection by the artist and then just laid to tape*, or if it has been crafted and polished from the ground-up in the studio. The truth is, all great albums have professionals working on them, and most of them have extensive studio alteration. And sorry to break it to you, but all your favorite bands sound like sh*t, when they don't have good mixers, recording engineers, and producers telling them why they need to put a chorus right there. Oh and guess what? Your favorite drummers f**ks up the timing  A LOT and it's edited in Pro Tools before it gets pressed. Deal with it. You probably don't even want to know how many records have sh*t drums when they get to the mixer, then amazing drums after it's mixed. Know why? They were enhanced with samples from Drumagog.

It's time for prog fans to get of the high horse and look at reality. 

*By the way, for great albums, this never, ever, ever, ever happens. 

I'd love to know where you got all this information.  There are very many good albums that have been created by artists with little professional help.  There are great albums that have been recorded live without much alteration; that's how they had to record before today's technology was available, and that's how many of the jazz greats recorded.  Any good drummer can lay down a good drum track and only have to fix a few stray mistakes and apply some tasteful effects in the mix.  If what you are saying was true and every band sounded terrible before their music was altered in-studio, then there would be no good live bands.  

I have no problem with studio alteration, as long as it's being used to perfect the music, not to try and make it something it's not.  I don't care if they auto-tuned James Labrie's vocals because they were just a tad bit pitchy, or if Alex Lifeson patched his solo together from various takes, or if someone hit a bum note and they erased and fixed the mistake.  I don't care whether something was recorded live or laid down track by track.  We live in a day and age where the industry is obsessed with perfection, and our recording methods reflect that.  In the end, there's two things that matter; the end result of the studio record, and the band's ability to perform it live.  Though I say that it's the end result that matters, the way in which the band and producers go about recording is going to affect the end result.  If something sounds bad in-studio, you can fix it all you want and make all the notes sound perfect, but it's never going to be a great album.  All great albums have meat to them; they have talent, hard work, and musical value behind them, and the studio techniques are used to perfect and refine that.  The band's ability to perform live is the big test: after recording the album, the band has to show that there was talent and good performing and writing by reproducing live what they created and perfected in-studio.

It's not just prog musicians, either, who can record like this.  There are plenty of musicians in other genres of music who have created excellent music, recorded it in the studio, perfected and enhanced the recording with effects and mastering, and then managed to reproduce it live at a high quality. 
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Points: 28057 		Direct Link To This Post Posted: June 04 2012 at 22:47
In the end music is music and not all music is the same. Do you think the music you love so much has no studio alternation? Get real. I put it to anyone to tell me why it actually matters in this day and age if music has been hand-crafted into perfection by the artist and then just laid to tape*, or if it has been crafted and polished from the ground-up in the studio. The truth is, all great albums have professionals working on them, and most of them have extensive studio alteration. And sorry to break it to you, but all your favorite bands sound like sh*t, when they don't have good mixers, recording engineers, and producers telling them why they need to put a chorus right there. Oh and guess what? Your favorite drummers f**ks up the timing  A LOT and it's edited in Pro Tools before it gets pressed. Deal with it. You probably don't even want to know how many records have sh*t drums when they get to the mixer, then amazing drums after it's mixed. Know why? They were enhanced with samples from Drumagog.

It's time for prog fans to get of the high horse and look at reality. 

*By the way, for great albums, this never, ever, ever, ever happens. 


Edited by stonebeard - June 04 2012 at 22:48
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Points: 2549 		Direct Link To This Post Posted: June 04 2012 at 22:19
Originally posted by Dean Dean wrote:


You are never going to "get" this, but still I try. The market for the music you like is limited, this is not through the music industry choking the market with music you don't like, it is simply that the total number of people in the world who can ever like what you like is very small - marketing and promotion and education will never change that, the music you like simply does not have mass appeal, it never has and it never will. You just have to accept that the people who like Justin Beiber will never like Dream Theatre and the people who like Black Eyed Peas will never like Symphony X - marketing has absolutely nothing to do with that, education has absolutely nothing to do with that and the music industry has nothing to do with that. All the music industry does is create product for specific markets and by far the biggest market is the mainstream pop market.

Insofar as music is entertainment, this is a completely sensible view of the music industry.  The point of entertainment is to put out material that people will like, and like immediately.  If the music industry finds the cheapest and most loophole-filled ways to do this as possible, who cares?  There's no real integrity to entertainment (unless you're talking about moral integrity with regard to lyrical content and such), because there's no such thing as objective value to entertainment.  The only thing objective about entertainment is the amount of people who like it, and the music industry is trying to make that objective number as large as possible with the lowest possible cost.

Insofar as music is art, however, the modern industry is the worst thing that could ever have happened.  There is an integrity to art; art takes skill and discipline and effort and pain and hard work, not merely from businessmen but from the artists themselves.  Above all, art must move the soul and influence the mind; it's not just for entertainment, it's for catharsis, not just to momentarily distract you from your troubles but to lift you out of them, to lift you out of yourself to experience the world through someone else's eyes, to identify with his emotions and to share in them.  Whether it's music, painting, drama, or sculpture, art has the power to change people, and the power to make them feel things they could never feel otherwise.

Don't misunderstand me; there's nothing intrinsically wrong or evil about the music out there that exists soley for entertainment, but there is something wrong when, as a society, that's all we see in music.  You're not hurting yourself by listening to Justin Beiber, but you could be doing so much better for yourself if you listened to Bach and Mozart as well.  That isn't to say that music meant for entertainment cannot be good art as well; Rush see themselves as entertainers as do many other prog bands, and much of the music we consider "classical" "art" music today was originally intended for mere entertainment.  There are some very good pop bands; I think that Coldplay is one of the best groups in music today, and I find real value in One Republic as well, not to mention many of the "classic" pop groups.  But I think that Geoff is correct in saying that the modern method of producing pop music is not conducive to artistic value.  If you took his original post and specified that we were talking about most (not all) of modern top 40 pop music, and specified that we were talking about artistic value, then I'd basically agree with what he said.
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Points: 22774 		Direct Link To This Post Posted: June 04 2012 at 19:40
Originally posted by Dean Dean wrote:


You are never going to "get" this, but still I try. The market for the music you like is limited, this is not through the music industry choking the market with music you don't like, it is simply that the total number of people in the world who can ever like what you like is very small - marketing and promotion and education will never change that, the music you like simply does not have mass appeal, it never has and it never will. You just have to accept that the people who like Justin Beiber will never like Dream Theatre and the people who like Black Eyed Peas will never like Symphony X - marketing has absolutely nothing to do with that, education has absolutely nothing to do with that and the music industry has nothing to do with that. All the music industry does is create product for specific markets and by far the biggest market is the mainstream pop market.

This is put so clearly that I'm excited about what the rebuttal will be.
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Points: 37575 		Direct Link To This Post Posted: June 04 2012 at 19:19
Originally posted by dtguitarfan dtguitarfan wrote:

Oh no, don't even. I discovered Dream Theater because a friend handed me a cd and said "listen to this." A live cd. And most if the artists I love are because I went looking for them.
Oh dear. Wake up Geoff - all the bands that sell millions of albums do so through marketing. Practically every band you have ever heard of has been marketed. If living in Tennessee you have heard of a band from Gothenburg then that was marketing - you didn't travel to the west coast of Sweden to go looking for them. You heard Dream Theatre from a friends CD - you'd never heard of them before that moment and you'd never listened to a metal CD before them or read a metal music magazine? So before that moment you knew absolutely nothing about Dream Theatre and this was a completely random chance that you listened to that CD. Cool - you are probably 1 in a million. Back in the early 90s (remember this is before the internet) most of us heard of Dream Theatre from adverts and articles in the music press... i.e. through promotion and marketing. Do you really think Electra/Atlantic are going to release an album with zero marketing?
Originally posted by dtguitarfan dtguitarfan wrote:

I WISH these artists were marketed. They DESERVE to be.
Deserve? How do you apportion that may I ask?
Originally posted by dtguitarfan dtguitarfan wrote:

 
That's the point - people who are TONE DEAF are being mass marketed while people with real talent can't make a living from it because the industry has choked the market with music pollution. And that's quite sad. I find solace in enjoying the act of poking fun at the horrible "artists" who are making millions. But I wish I were in a position to change this sad state of affairs.
You are never going to "get" this, but still I try. The market for the music you like is limited, this is not through the music industry choking the market with music you don't like, it is simply that the total number of people in the world who can ever like what you like is very small - marketing and promotion and education will never change that, the music you like simply does not have mass appeal, it never has and it never will. You just have to accept that the people who like Justin Beiber will never like Dream Theatre and the people who like Black Eyed Peas will never like Symphony X - marketing has absolutely nothing to do with that, education has absolutely nothing to do with that and the music industry has nothing to do with that. All the music industry does is create product for specific markets and by far the biggest market is the mainstream pop market.
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Points: 4625 		Direct Link To This Post Posted: June 04 2012 at 17:32
Originally posted by darkshade darkshade wrote:

Originally posted by colorofmoney91 colorofmoney91 wrote:

Originally posted by Failcore Failcore wrote:

That being said, I can't stand DT because of the vocals and showoffsmanship.

Ya dun goofed. dtguitarfan is backtracing you with the cyberpolice.




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Points: 10964 		Direct Link To This Post Posted: June 04 2012 at 12:03
Originally posted by colorofmoney91 colorofmoney91 wrote:

Originally posted by Failcore Failcore wrote:

That being said, I can't stand DT because of the vocals and showoffsmanship.

Ya dun goofed. dtguitarfan is backtracing you with the cyberpolice.
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Points: 26138 		Direct Link To This Post Posted: June 04 2012 at 11:42
Originally posted by akamaisondufromage akamaisondufromage wrote:

I have this feeling that Robert Wyatt said something about the Soft Machine wanted to be pop stars but they were no good at it or they thought they were pop and weren't any good.
 
 
Phil Collins said something similar about Genesis.  Saying that they had always tried to write 3 minute pop songs (e.g. Harold the Barrel) but just didn't get very good at it until later (e.g. Invisible Touch).  Controversial idea, but it does illustrate that our PURE PROG heroes of yesteryear were often just bands trying to be popular, but trying to do it while making the music interesting to whatever extent their abilities and creative juices allowed.  Nowadays, of course, bands form with the intention of being a "prog band", but back then pop music was more wide open - if the Beatles could make adventurous music popular, why not Genesis?
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Points: 22774 		Direct Link To This Post Posted: June 04 2012 at 11:36
Originally posted by Failcore Failcore wrote:

That being said, I can't stand DT because of the vocals and showoffsmanship.

Ya dun goofed. dtguitarfan is backtracing you with the cyberpolice.
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Points: 4625 		Direct Link To This Post Posted: June 04 2012 at 11:25
Originally posted by dtguitarfan dtguitarfan wrote:

Originally posted by Dean Dean wrote:

The music business or the music industry - both names are fitting - it is a business and it is an industry - it is not a cosy little musicians collective with a nice well-written manifesto to create the most artistic music ever produced. It is there to entertain and to make money doing it. If that offends you then look away, but it is doing what it has always done - manufacturing product to sell in a market place - the whole ethos of Tin Pan Alley is no different to the manufactured Pop of today - sell the product by whatever means necessary.



They are not trying to sell manufactured pop to you, so why get upset about it? They target you with other product from the music factory cleverly positioned to make it look like it was your choice and your discovery, but it is the same soft-sell and the self-same slick marketing. Do you seriously believe that Dream Theatre sold 12 million albums just because they were good? Of course not - it was marketting, damn good A&R and the wealth and expertise of the Atlantic Records industriual machine churning away. And the people who buy Justine Beiber or Balck Eye Pees or Ashlee Simpson are never going to buy Dream Theater so seriously what is the problem here?

Oh no, don't even. I discovered Dream Theater because a friend handed me a cd and said "listen to this." A live cd. And most if the artists I love are because I went looking for them. I WISH these artists were marketed. They DESERVE to be. That's the point - people who are TONE DEAF are being mass marketed while people with real talent can't make a living from it because the industry has choked the market with music pollution. And that's quite sad. I find solace in enjoying the act of poking fun at the horrible "artists" who are making millions. But I wish I were in a position to change this sad state of affairs.
There were a lot of teeny-boppers on campus wearing Systematic Chaos shirts. Dream Theater is probably one of the most commercial prog bands of our time. Just because something is popular doesn't mean it's bad. The masses may be fairly ignorant, but even a blind squireel will find an acorn now and again. That being said, I can't stand DT because of the vocals and showoffsmanship.
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