Four people write all the songs you hear on radio

[IIOY]

Slight exaggeration in the title. This isn't really new information to anyone who pays any attention to pop music, but it's interesting nonetheless. From The Atlantic:

The biggest pop star in America today is a man named Karl Martin Sandberg. The lead singer of an obscure ’80s glam-metal band, Sandberg grew up in a remote suburb of Stockholm and is now 44. Sandberg is the George Lucas, the LeBron James, the Serena Williams of American pop. He is responsible for more hits than Phil Spector, Michael Jackson, or the Beatles.



After Sandberg come the bald Norwegians, Mikkel Eriksen and Tor Hermansen, 43 and 44; Lukasz Gottwald, 42, a Sandberg protégé and collaborator who spent a decade languishing in Saturday Night Live’s house band; and another Sandberg collaborator named Esther Dean, 33, a former nurse’s aide from Oklahoma who was discovered in the audience of a Gap Band concert, singing along to “Oops Upside Your Head.” They use pseudonyms professionally, but most Americans wouldn’t recognize those, either: Max Martin, Stargate, Dr. Luke, and Ester Dean.





Most Americans will recognize their songs, however. As I write this, at the height of summer, the No. 1 position on the Billboard pop chart is occupied by a Max Martin creation, “Bad Blood” (performed by Taylor Swift featuring Kendrick Lamar). No. 3, “Hey Mama” (David Guetta featuring Nicki Minaj), is an Ester Dean production; No. 5, “Worth It” (Fifth Harmony featuring Kid Ink), was written by Stargate; No. 7, “Can’t Feel My Face” (The Weeknd), is Martin again; No. 16, “The Night Is Still Young” (Minaj), is Dr. Luke and Ester Dean. And so on. If you flip on the radio, odds are that you will hear one of their songs. If you are reading this in an airport, a mall, a doctor’s office, or a hotel lobby, you are likely listening to one of their songs right now. This is not an aberration. The same would have been true at any time in the past decade. Before writing most of Taylor Swift’s newest album, Max Martin wrote No. 1 hits for Britney Spears, ’NSync, Pink, Kelly Clarkson, Maroon 5, and Katy Perry.



Millions of Swifties and KatyCats—as well as Beliebers, Barbz, and Selenators, and the Rihanna Navy—would be stunned by the revelation that a handful of people, a crazily high percentage of them middle-aged Scandinavian men, write most of America’s pop hits. It is an open yet closely guarded secret, protected jealously by the labels and the performers themselves, whose identities are as carefully constructed as their songs and dances. The illusion of creative control is maintained by the fig leaf of a songwriting credit. The performer’s name will often appear in the list of songwriters, even if his or her contribution is negligible. (There’s a saying for this in the music industry: “Change a word, get a third.”) But almost no pop celebrities write their own hits. Too much is on the line for that, and being a global celebrity is a full-time job. It would be like Will Smith writing the next Independence Day.





Impressionable young fans would therefore do well to avoid John Seabrook’s The Song Machine, an immersive, reflective, and utterly satisfying examination of the business of popular music. It is a business as old as Stephen Foster, but never before has it been run so efficiently or dominated by so few. We have come to expect this type of consolidation from our banking, oil-and-gas, and health-care industries. But the same practices they rely on—ruthless digitization, outsourcing, focus-group brand testing, brute-force marketing—have been applied with tremendous success in pop, creating such profitable multinationals as Rihanna, Katy Perry, and Taylor Swift.



The music has evolved in step with these changes. A short-attention-span culture demands short-attention-span songs. The writers of Tin Pan Alley and Motown had to write only one killer hook to get a hit. Now you need a new high every seven seconds—the average length of time a listener will give a radio station before changing the channel. “It’s not enough to have one hook anymore,” Jay Brown, a co-founder of Jay Z’s Roc Nation label, tells Seabrook. “You’ve got to have a hook in the intro, a hook in the pre, a hook in the chorus, and a hook in the bridge, too.”



Sonically, the template has remained remarkably consistent since the Backstreet Boys, whose sound was created by Max Martin and his mentor, Denniz PoP, at PoP’s Cheiron Studios, in Stockholm. It was at Cheiron in the late ’90s that they developed the modern hit formula, a formula nearly as valuable as Coca-Cola’s. But it’s not a secret formula. Seabrook describes the pop sound this way: “ABBA’s pop chords and textures, Denniz PoP’s song structure and dynamics, ’80s arena rock’s big choruses, and early ’90s American R&B grooves.” The production quality is crucial, too. The music is manufactured to fill not headphones and home stereo systems but malls and football stadiums. It is a synthetic, mechanical sound “more captivating than the virtuosity of the musicians.” This is a metaphor, of course—there are no musicians anymore, at least not human ones. Every instrument is automated. Session musicians have gone extinct, and studio mixing boards remain only as retro, semi-ironic furniture.





The songs are written industrially as well, often by committee and in bulk. Anything short of a likely hit is discarded. The constant iteration of tracks, all produced by the same formula, can result in accidental imitation—or, depending on the jury, purposeful replication. Seabrook recounts an early collaboration between Max Martin and Dr. Luke. They are listening, reportedly, to the Yeah Yeah Yeahs’ “Maps”—an infectious love song, at least by indie-rock standards. Martin is being driven crazy by the song’s chorus, however, which drops in intensity from the verse. Dr. Luke says, “Why don’t we do that, but put a big chorus on it?” He reworks a guitar riff from the song and creates Kelly Clarkson’s breakout hit, “Since U Been Gone.”


Pop hitmakers frequently flirt with plagiarism, with good reason: Audiences embrace familiar sounds. Sameness sells. Dr. Luke in particular has been accused repeatedly of copyright infringement. His defense: “You don’t get sued for being similar. It needs to be the same thing.” (Dr. Luke does get sued for being similar, and quite often; he has also countersued for defamation.) Complicating the question of originality is the fact that only melodies, not beats, can be copyrighted. This means a producer can sell one beat to multiple artists. The same beat, for instance, can be heard beneath Beyoncé’s “Halo” and Kelly Clarkson’s “Already Gone,” hits released within four months of each other in 2009. (The producer, in his defense, claimed they were “two entirely different songs conceptually.”) As Seabrook notes, although each song was played tens of millions of times on YouTube and other platforms, few fans seemed to notice, let alone care.





Once a hit is ready, a songwriter must find a singer to bring it to the masses. The more famous the performer, the wider the audience, and the greater the royalties for the writer. Hits are shopped like scripts in Hollywood, first to the A-list, then to the B-list, then to the aspirants. “… Baby One More Time,” the Max Martin song that made Britney Spears’s career, was declined by TLC. Spears’s team later passed on “Umbrella,” which made Rihanna a star. The most-successful songwriters, like Max Martin and Dr. Luke, occasionally employ a potentially more lucrative tactic: They prospect for unknowns whom they can turn into stars. This allows them to exert greater control over the recording of the songs and to take a bigger cut of royalties by securing production rights that a more established performer would not sign away.



But the masters of star creation remain the record-label executives. The greatest of them all, Clive Davis, whose career has run from Janis Joplin to Kelly Clarkson, is an avuncular, charming presence throughout The Song Machine. He tells Seabrook that the key to pop longevity is “a continuity of hits,” a phrase Davis imbues with the gravity of scripture, though it means only what it says: lots of hit songs. More telling is the record executive Jason Flom’s reaction to meeting a young Katy Perry: “Without having heard a note of music, I was sure that Katy was indeed destined for stardom”—a statement that says more about the nature of the industry than about Perry.


Most memorable—and instructive—is the story of the obese, oleaginous Orlando entrepreneur Louis Pearlman. A luxury-plane magnate, he met the New Kids on the Block in 1989 when they chartered one of his jets. Upon learning that they were earning more than Michael Jackson, Pearlman decided to cast his own boy group. After Pearlman hired Denniz PoP and Max Martin to write their songs, the Backstreet Boys went from playing in front of Shamu’s tank at SeaWorld to selling out world tours. Millennium, released in 1999, is one of the best-selling albums in American history. Pearlman then decided to start an identical boy band, performing songs by the same songwriters. “My feeling was, where there’s McDonald’s, there’s Burger King,” Pearlman tells Seabrook on the phone from the federal prison in Texarkana, where he is serving a 25-year sentence for defrauding banks and investors in Ponzi schemes. Pearlman was a poor businessman but a savvy promoter. ’NSync, led by Justin Timberlake, formerly of The Mickey Mouse Club, was even bigger than the Backstreet Boys. Next, seeking his own Debbie Gibson, Pearlman scouted another ex-Mouseketeer: Britney Spears.



Many of Pearlman’s strategies continue to dominate the construction and marketing of pop acts, particularly in the one pop market more delirious than the United States. Seabrook credits the Backstreet Boys’ 1996 Asian tour with helping to inspire a Korean former folk singer, Soo-Man Lee, to create K-pop, a phenomenon that gives new meaning to the term song machine. Lee codified Pearlman’s tactics in a step-by-step manual that guides the creation of Asian pop groups, dictating “when to import foreign composers, producers, and choreographers; what chord progressions to use in particular countries; the precise color of eye shadow a performer should wear in different Asian regions, as well as the hand gestures he or she should make.”





In K-pop there is no pretension to creative independence. Performers unabashedly embrace the corporate strategy that stars in the United States are at great pains to disguise. Recruits are trained in label-run pop academies for as long as seven years before debuting in a new girl or boy group—though only one in 10 trainees makes it that far. This level of control may seem eccentric to American readers, but Seabrook reveals that the careers of stars like Rihanna and Kelly Clarkson are almost as narrowly choreographed.



By the end of The Song Machine, readers will have command of such terms of art as melodic math, comping, career record, and track-and-hook (a Seabrookian neologism). One term remains evasive, however: artist. In the music industry, the performers are called artists, while the people who write the songs remain largely anonymous outside the pages of trade publications. But can a performer be said to have any artistry if, as in the case of Rihanna, her label convenes week-long “writer camps,” attended by dozens of producers and writers (but not necessarily Rihanna), to manufacture her next hit? Where is the artistry when a producer digitally stitches together a vocal track, syllable by syllable, from dozens of takes? Or modifies a bar and calls it a new song?



Hitmakers today don’t only create hits. They create “artists.” The trouble comes when successful performers believe their press and begin writing their own songs, or when songwriters try to become stars themselves. Taylor Dayne—who, against Clive Davis’s advice, demanded to write her own songs, and bombed—is a cautionary example of the former. Ester Dean, who has had mixed success as a solo act, is an example of the latter. “To be an artist, that’s another story,” says Mikkel Eriksen of Stargate. “You can be a great singer, but when you hear the record it’s missing something.” Esther Dean, a prolific writer of melodies and lyrics, is an artist, but Ester Dean is not making it as an “artist.”





What is that ineffable something that separates pop stars from the rest of us? What is the source of Rihanna’s magical powers? Eriksen, trying to pin it down, describes it as “a sparkle around the edges of the words.” A K-pop star proposes another theory: “Maybe it is because of our great good looks?” Seabrook lands on a more subtle quality: an “urgent need to escape”—escapism as a matter of life or death. Rihanna was desperate to escape an abusive father; for Katy Perry it was her family’s repressive evangelical faith; for the Backstreet Boys it was Orlando. The perfect pop star creates a desire loop between audience and performer. We abandon reality together, meeting in a synthetic pop fantasy of California Gurls and Teenage Dreams. Only they are not really our teenage dreams. They are Karl Martin Sandberg’s.

[Velar Fricative]

It's not surprising, but still really fascinating.

And here I was reciting "Halo" and "Already Gone" in my head and was like DAAAAAAAAAMMMMMMNNNNN! But I'm bad at this game. I'm still impressed at all the people who knew immediately that Sam Smith's "Stay With Me" was the same as Tom Petty's "Won't Back Down."

[IIOY]

Sept 15, 2015 12:49:11 GMT -5 Velar Fricative said:

It's not surprising, but still really fascinating.

And here I was reciting "Halo" and "Already Gone" in my head and was like DAAAAAAAAAMMMMMMNNNNN! But I'm bad at this game. I'm still impressed at all the people who knew immediately that Sam Smith's "Stay With Me" was the same as Tom Petty's "Won't Back Down."

I usually pick up on this stuff, but oddly this was one that I didn't.  I have no idea why.  Even my H, who doesn't listen to pop, picked this up immediately.  Stay With Me came on the radio when we were driving somewhere, and he asked if "this guy remade that one song." LOL

All of Taylor's Swift's songs follow exactly the same formula.  If you listen closely, you can hear it. She also references her lips a lot in her songs. /random observation

[Velar Fricative]

Also, I have noticed that collaborations are HUGE these days. It's no longer enough to have just one "artist" sing a song. You have to have a tag team (not these guys) to sing a whole song. Can Iggy Azalea ever get through a whole song by herself?

[Velar Fricative]

Sept 15, 2015 12:55:25 GMT -5 @mrsbecky said:

Wait, I feel really dumb now. I thought Taylor Swift wrote her own songs. I thought that was her big claim to fame and why she was so different from other artists.

Me too, but I'm guessing she co-writes then. I don't know what minimum is needed to call yourself a songwriter for a song. Did she just say, "I have bad blood" to Max Martin (or whichever Swede wrote her song for her) and then that got her songwriting credit? 

[Velar Fricative]

Also, who knew the Swedes just have a knack for everything? Meatballs, socialized medicine, DIY furnishings, and now pop music.

[lg28]

I think that Taylor swift wrote more of her own stuff when she was country. Now that she's more pop you can definitely tell her songs are all a variation of each other.

I think this is why a lot of bro-country all sounds the same.

[sushi]

Sept 15, 2015 12:57:58 GMT -5 Velar Fricative said:

Also, who knew the Swedes just have a knack for everything? Meatballs, socialized medicine, DIY furnishings, and now pop music.

ace of base

[zelda25]

Sept 15, 2015 13:42:10 GMT -5 sushi said:

Sept 15, 2015 12:57:58 GMT -5 Velar Fricative said:

Also, who knew the Swedes just have a knack for everything? Meatballs, socialized medicine, DIY furnishings, and now pop music.

ace of base

Abba 

[tacosforlife]

What's a radio?

xoxo,
Fucking Millennial

[mrsd2006]

This article is fascinating. I thought it was going to be about bro country music, not pop. 

Sept 15, 2015 12:53:01 GMT -5 IIOY said:

Sept 15, 2015 12:49:11 GMT -5 Velar Fricative said:

It's not surprising, but still really fascinating.

And here I was reciting "Halo" and "Already Gone" in my head and was like DAAAAAAAAAMMMMMMNNNNN! But I'm bad at this game. I'm still impressed at all the people who knew immediately that Sam Smith's "Stay With Me" was the same as Tom Petty's "Won't Back Down."

I usually pick up on this stuff, but oddly this was one that I didn't.  I have no idea why.  Even my H, who doesn't listen to pop, picked this up immediately.  Stay With Me came on the radio when we were driving somewhere, and he asked if "this guy remade that one song." LOL

All of Taylor's Swift's songs follow exactly the same formula.  If you listen closely, you can hear it. She also references her lips a lot in her songs. /random observation



I still don't hear the similarity. You're not alone. 

[Velar Fricative]

I don't listen to enough country to know what bro-country is (beyond being sung by young guys?).

[sugarglider]

Sept 15, 2015 13:48:23 GMT -5 Dig Ophelia said:

Sept 15, 2015 12:57:58 GMT -5 Velar Fricative said:

Also, who knew the Swedes just have a knack for everything? Meatballs, socialized medicine, DIY furnishings, and now pop music.

Swedish metal is some of my favorite.  They are some talented mofos, those Swedes.


And this is why I hate radio music and most American music.  There's no there, there.  It's all smoke and mirrors bullshit.  No real talent or passion needed.  

Theresa great big world of amazing American music outside of the Top 40. The record industry today is focused on the only demographic still buying music: 7-12 year-olds. Good music can be found through NPR and many independent radio stations.

[tacosforlife]

Sept 15, 2015 14:09:18 GMT -5 sugarglider said:

Sept 15, 2015 13:48:23 GMT -5 Dig Ophelia said:

Swedish metal is some of my favorite.  They are some talented mofos, those Swedes.


And this is why I hate radio music and most American music.  There's no there, there.  It's all smoke and mirrors bullshit.  No real talent or passion needed.  

Theresa great big world of amazing American music outside of the Top 40. The record industry today is focused on the only demographic still buying music: 7-12 year-olds. Good music can be found through NPR and many independent radio stations.

Seriously. If you have the interest and ability to seek out music from other countries (which is great - it's not like the U.S. is the only country producing music!), then surely you can find some American music that doesn't suck.

[lishie]

Sept 15, 2015 12:55:25 GMT -5 @mrsbecky said:

Wait, I feel really dumb now. I thought Taylor Swift wrote her own songs. I thought that was her big claim to fame and why she was so different from other artists.

She was sole writer on some of her early albums, but when she hit superstardom, she started cowriting with others for RED & 1989. But, unlike some big stars, she's does more than just change 3 words to get a writing credit. She actually collaborates with the other writers.

[MrsAxilla]

I heard a fascinating Howard interview with Pharrell Williams that touches this topic. He basically does this, too - shops around songs that he's written and (composed? Is that the word?). I was really surprised by some of the hits he's been behind over the years. It sounds like he is more of an "artist" rather than just simp,y following a formula, though.

[Velar Fricative]

Sept 15, 2015 14:17:13 GMT -5 tacosforlife said:

Sept 15, 2015 14:09:18 GMT -5 sugarglider said:

Theresa great big world of amazing American music outside of the Top 40. The record industry today is focused on the only demographic still buying music: 7-12 year-olds. Good music can be found through NPR and many independent radio stations.

Seriously. If you have the interest and ability to seek out music from other countries (which is great - it's not like the U.S. is the only country producing music!), then surely you can find some American music that doesn't suck.

This is my main problem. A lot of pop music today sucks (not all, I will admit I like listening to Top 40 when I feel like it), but I don't care to find better music even though obviously it's out there.

And now that I type that, I realize it's shitty because of all of the artists working hard to make great music but aren't getting the attention for it.

[sugarglider]

Sept 15, 2015 14:18:14 GMT -5 Dig Ophelia said:

Sept 15, 2015 14:09:18 GMT -5 sugarglider said:

Theresa great big world of amazing American music outside of the Top 40. The record industry today is focused on the only demographic still buying music: 7-12 year-olds. Good music can be found through NPR and many independent radio stations.

Oh, I know, but it's so frustrating when actual talented American musicians struggle to get a record deal because they aren't completely fake, plastic bullshit, so it "won't sell".  There are some American-based bands that I love and I buy their stuff from their Bandcamp pages because of that.  But I've found that the majority of the music I like comes from other countries and my entire musical world exploded when I discovered that.    

Since when are 7-12 year olds the only demographic still buying music?  I think this is where American music goes wrong.  If the output is shit, no one is going to buy it except for people who don't even care what they are listening to (which is, apparently, 7-12y/o).    

Since adults and older teens all stream their music. And it's fine. The landscape is changing.

Getting a record deal isn't necessarily an end goal for a lot of independent artists. They might end up entering them (particularly with independent labels, like Asthmatic Kitty), but artists are able to produce their own stuff now without the meddling of labels who want them to record mass produced crap written by four guys in Sweden. It's more about getting sponsorships and licensing songs. Honestly, it can be easier for an artist to license his stuff if he's not tangled up with a label. They then build an audience and try to make money with lives shows and merch sales.

It is hard for musicians, but it's always been hard.

[pescalita]

Sept 15, 2015 12:49:11 GMT -5 Velar Fricative said:

It's not surprising, but still really fascinating.

And here I was reciting "Halo" and "Already Gone" in my head and was like DAAAAAAAAAMMMMMMNNNNN! But I'm bad at this game. I'm still impressed at all the people who knew immediately that Sam Smith's "Stay With Me" was the same as Tom Petty's "Won't Back Down."

Well thanks, now I'm on a youtube stumble through Tom Petty's catalog.

[Deleted]

Sept 15, 2015 14:29:07 GMT -5 Velar Fricative said:

Sept 15, 2015 14:17:13 GMT -5 tacosforlife said:

Seriously. If you have the interest and ability to seek out music from other countries (which is great - it's not like the U.S. is the only country producing music!), then surely you can find some American music that doesn't suck.

This is my main problem. A lot of pop music today sucks (not all, I will admit I like listening to Top 40 when I feel like it), but I don't care to find better music even though obviously it's out there.

And now that I type that, I realize it's shitty because of all of the artists working hard to make great music but aren't getting the attention for it.

Yeah my boyfriend is a musician and producer and has opened my eyes to a whole new world of music. 

He used to work in pop music but absolutely hated it because there really is no talent these days and is now much happier back to his roots of playing and producing quality music. He recently had an opportunity to go back more in to pop music, but passed it up and at first I didn't really understand (hello more money!) but now I get it. I couldn't listen to Taylor Swift all day either 

I used to "put up" with shitty top 40 music because I was too lazy to find other stuff really, but now that I've stopped listening to it, I can't go back! There is so much wonderfully written and creative music out there that should get more recognition. (Although now that my eyes are open to a different side of music, I do realize that a lot of music gets recognition, but it's just not on the radio on repeat all day...which I think many creative musicians are ok with). If you look for it, it's out there!

ETA: Also, in regards to recognition...it seems like music gets different/more recognition overseas, especially in Europe. I was at one of my boyfriends shows in Paris last week and it was completely different than when they perform here in the states. I mentioned that to him that I was surprised that the show was sold out and they actually had a little fan club after the show...people that have been following them for 10+ years. That kind of thing just doesn't seem to happen here in the U.S. with less main stream music based on my observations and what my boyfriend said. It's very interesting. 

[Deleted]

Sept 15, 2015 14:17:13 GMT -5 tacosforlife said:

Sept 15, 2015 14:09:18 GMT -5 sugarglider said:

Theresa great big world of amazing American music outside of the Top 40. The record industry today is focused on the only demographic still buying music: 7-12 year-olds. Good music can be found through NPR and many independent radio stations.

Seriously. If you have the interest and ability to seek out music from other countries (which is great - it's not like the U.S. is the only country producing music!), then surely you can find some American music that doesn't suck.

I've been meaning to text you. You'd be proud of me. I'm becoming more of a music snob these days  

[IIOY]

One of the best ways I've managed to find new music is to select one of the already-created stations on something like Pandora or Songza. There will be artists you recognize but you will also hear new artists (pro tip: don't select "top 40" if you want this to work). Give the songs you like a thumbs up and the station will start feeding you all sorts of new stuff. I've discovered some really good indie and reggae music this way.

[Skyesthelimit1212]

Wait.a.minute, I thought Barry Manilow wrote the songs or does he only write the songs that make the young girls cry??

[IIOY]

Sept 15, 2015 16:01:34 GMT -5 Skyesthelimit1212 said:

Wait.a.minute, I thought Barry Manilow wrote the songs or does he only write the songs that make the young girls cry??

[tacosforlife]

Sept 15, 2015 15:33:13 GMT -5 Dig Ophelia said:

Sept 15, 2015 14:35:18 GMT -5 sugarglider said:

Since adults and older teens all stream their music. And it's fine. The landscape is changing.

Getting a record deal isn't necessarily an end goal for a lot of independent artists. They might end up entering them (particularly with independent labels, like Asthmatic Kitty), but artists are able to produce their own stuff now without the meddling of labels who want them to record mass produced crap written by four guys in Sweden. It's more about getting sponsorships and licensing songs. Honestly, it can be easier for an artist to license his stuff if he's not tangled up with a label. They then build an audience and try to make money with lives shows and merch sales.

It is hard for musicians, but it's always been hard.

No, not all do.  In fact, a lot of people who listen to metal and hard rock for instance, buy actual cds and many buy the vinyl editions.  It's really important to a lot of people to have a physical copy because music sounds different on the various mediums.  A lot of people care about quality, which doesn't seem to be a priority for most record labels.  

I'm not really talking about independent artists, who choose to be unsigned, because that's their choice and many are quite successful with it.  I mean more that the record industry doesn't want to sign artists that they cannot control and bend and shape to their whims and whose final product they cannot own outright because they created it.  People who write their own music and lyrics, play their own instruments, and sing their own songs using their own voices don't seem as appealing to them, which is a shame.  Record labels in other countries aren't immune to these issues, either, but it seems like a real problem with American music.  So, it's not that I don't think there isn't real talent here, but that those musicians are not being promoted and given the same opportunities.  There's also the issue of celebrity worship with popular but untalented musical performers which ties into all of it, imo.

For major record labels, sure. But a lot of smaller labels give artists significant to complete artistic control. Merge, Subpop, Lost Highway, Bloodshot, Saddle Creek, Suburban Home, New West, Lightning Rod - a lot of my favorite artists are on those labels.

I'm not saying there isn't tons of garbage in American music. There is. TONS of garbage. And if you only listen to conventional broadcast radio, which is dominated by Clear Channel, then no, you're not going to hear a lot of the truly excellent music being made. But especially with the Internet, there are so many places to find good music. It's not like much music from Europe is getting played on conventional broadcast radio in the States, so if you're seeking out European music, you could surely seek out American music as well.

I'm not even trying to tell you to stop listening to European music. If that's what you like, go on with your bad self. But between the artists I know and the people I know on the smaller label/promotion side of the industry, I will always stick up for the state of current American music. 2015's big stories (at least in the roots world) are Jason Isbell and Sturgill Simpson - neither has gotten significant radio play outside the occasional public radio story, but they've both been selling out shows like crazy. It's always been a grind out there for a talented touring musician, but modern methods of music consumption have actually made it easier than ever for people to branch out from what the major labels put on the radio. There is some great stuff out there. Just maybe not on KISS FM.

[jeaniebueller]

Sept 15, 2015 14:07:21 GMT -5 Velar Fricative said:

I don't listen to enough country to know what bro-country is (beyond being sung by young guys?).

Picture the sound of a pack of goats bleating about beer, fine looking women, pick up trucks, and hanging out and that sums up Florida georgia line, Jason Alden, Brantley Gilbert et al.

[waffletime]

Sept 15, 2015 12:57:58 GMT -5 Velar Fricative said:

Also, who knew the Swedes just have a knack for everything? Meatballs, socialized medicine, DIY furnishings, and now pop music.

[MrsAxilla]

Sept 15, 2015 15:33:13 GMT -5 Dig Ophelia said:

No, not all do.  In fact, a lot of people who listen to metal and hard rock for instance, buy actual cds and many buy the vinyl editions.  It's really important to a lot of people to have a physical copy because music sounds different on the various mediums.  A lot of people care about quality, which doesn't seem to be a priority for most record labels.  

Haha.  Yes.  DH and I are at this moment listening to three different mixes of the same Phish song to determine whether sound board, tapers, or a mix of both had the best sound.  Phish released a limited number of one of its albums on vinyl and the line was ridiculous!