Kollector's Blog

30 Aug

The music is getting slower and sadder...

Published by jean-marc,

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hits, music, music history

Is pop music going slower and more sad by the minute ? Seems like it according to two behaviorists Phd from Canada !

Dr. Schellenberg and Dr von Scheve have analyzed more than a thousand US popular music hits from 1965 till 2009, looking at tempo and mode (major or minor, determined by the tonic/main chord of the song). Most of pop songs used to be in fast mode and major chord but there has been a steadily increase (they have doubled in fact) in hits being slow tempo with minor chord (usually a sad song). Plus there has been a strong increase in songs that are "emotionally ambiguous": fast tempo song in minor mode.

Not surprisingly, lyrics have taken the same way: there has been a decrease in references to social interactions and positive emotions and an increase on angry and antisocial wording! I guess, if you start scanning songs in the sixties, you'll have a good quota of social references and even politically charged songs and going thru the seventies lyrics start to be more centered on mindless fun; the eighties are quite a sad era lyric wise, the Nineties is a hymn to hedonism and since the 2000 lyrics are most often than not repeated sentences hammered...

29 Aug

It's all about expanding from your...

Published by jean-marc,

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hits, music business, music industry

Well, it used to be quite simple: the ones with the big bucks could easily plan out who will have a hit during the summer, put together a well-crafted media plan showing to all involved how much the Mega Company believes in the artist and the specific song and, after many, many remixes to be sure the song is no turkey, that the video was appealing and radio programmers reacted well to the song, there were little doubts the artist could indeed have a hit. That, of course, depending on how the other bands and labels would do (better songs, better media plans and partners, better videos, higher ranking radio programmers, etc...).

Now ? Damn, the internet has again change all the rules :)

Take three of the latest big hits: Fun's We Are Young, Gotye's Somebody To Know and Carla Rae Jepsen's Call Me Maybe didn't started that way at all: it was more like a gigantic rumble, growing and growing that went viral on Twitter and Youtube and everybody got to send that link over and over again. There, no carefully media plan, just a good song, a good video and that magical ingredient no one knows which makes a hit or a miss...But basically, it's all about expanding from your...

27 Jul

It's now scientifically proven:...

Published by jean-marc,

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General

hits, music history, songwriters

It's now official altho most of the people involved in the musical community and with a few hours of flight suspected it for years but spanish scientists have analysed the data from popular music from 1955 to 2010 and yes, the verdict is without any doubts: modern popular music is just getting dumber and louder...

Laurie Tuffrey, from the excellent The Quietus, reports that spanish scientists have analysed more than 450.000 songs from popular genres (rock, pop, hip hop, metal, electronic) and they looked deeply in three main points: loudness (volume), pitch (harmonics, chords, melodies, tonal arrangements), and timbre (sound color, texture, tone).

They have come up to some interesting conclusions and can pinpoint it to three main changes if we want to look at how popular music has eveolved along the years:

- pitch sequences get narrower (there is definitively less variety in pitch progression)
- homogenization of the aural palettes ( frequent tones get more...frequent, less inventivity in the sound palette)
- loudness gets louder and louder (killling most of the dynamics in songs)

The very sad thing is that, yes, modern popular music...