What Is the Psychology of Music in 2016?
This is an article from Pigeons and Planes that might give you a more critical ear to how music is marketed to the masses.
When the music industry really wants you to hear a song, you will hear that song—over and over again. It’ll find your ears in pizzerias, at the pharmacy, ringing tinnily in gas station parking lots.
Hit songs have always been important for artists’ careers. But in today’s world of fractured revenue streams, they’ve become a golden ticket. A viral song or video can quickly turn an unknown artist into a celebrity, eliciting label deals and profitable tours alongside more established acts.
By the same token, a pop artist without a hit can hardly be called a pop artist at all. Once you’ve written a viral song, it’s all the crowds will want. There’s a huge incentive for artists to recreate the original magic and keep the (similar) hits coming.
For something so formulaic, you’d think anyone could write a catchy hook. But big radio is dominated by a small cabal of super-producers—these days it’s Max Martin, Dr. Luke, and Benny Blanco. They’re responsible for the lion’s share of today’s pop hits.
They work scientifically: the radio hits of the moment are carefully crafted concoctions, hook-filled earworms with chord progressions written to stick in your head and evoke a certain mood.
It wasn’t supposed to happen like this—Chris Anderson’s long tail theory predicted that the digital marketplace would create more space for alternative music to succeed commercially, alongside traditional hits.
But John Seabrook’s recently released book The Song Machine: Inside the Hit Factory has claimed the opposite is true. Seabrook claims 90% of all music industry revenue comes from just 10% of the songs, a disparity that has only increased since the dawn of the digital music era.
So what happened?
