In music today everything revolves around money. All the artists that are on the radio are not true to themselves and are powered by huge corporations. Even though there are multiple labels promoting artists, these companies are just subsidiaries of major labels. In reality, there are just three major record labels. All the others actually live under their corporate umbrellas. These three major labels are Sony BMG, Universal Music Group, and Warner Music Group. So what does that mean? It means that three huge labels are controlling what gets put out there in the music industry and what gets played on the radio. There is even a formula to create the perfect pop song which is having a repeating chorus played two to four times, including the title sung at least three times, and feature short melodic fragments that repeat a lot to help everyone to remember them. It seems like this is the skeleton that almost every artist is working off of today. Just look at the songs that have been popular recently.
Listen to hear their similarities:
Now that you have heard all of these songs, one will notice the blatant copying of the same structure. The worst part is that no one questions it, and these songs turn out to be incredibly popular because it does in fact sell. But we don’t listen to it because of the artistry, we listen because it is catchy. It seems like no one in the music business has originality anymore and the ones who do have been around for a long time and are big enough to get away from their record label’s image. For example, Lady Gaga put out her album Joanne which was released October 21, 2016, and it showed her true talents and didn’t follow the basic format of popular music. She even came out with a documentary entitled, “Five Foot Two” which shows how much strain the industry has put on her. She also has been known to speak publicly about this issue in the past.
So when did this turn happen? Well, I believe that 2009 was the end of the era of a pop star. Lady Gaga embodied the ideal image of the pop star. The definition of real pop is a white-hot blank. James Parker from the Atlantic states, “It sizzles into materiality in the form of this body or that body, this voice or that voice; it drapes itself in allusions, symbols, trinkets, scraps of dazzlement.” Gaga was the perfect pop star and early on in her career she stated, “The music is intended to inspire people to feel a certain way about themselves,” she told MTV, “so they’ll be able to encompass, in their own lives, a sense of inner fame that they can project to the world.” Pop in 2010 was thoroughly pornographized and extremely creative which made the mainstream not mainstream. Lady Gaga had paradoxical elegance with a mysterious feel for just how much of her freakery we are prepared to take in. When was the last time Ariana Grande made you feel that?
Now there is no Illusion. Everyone in music makes it quite obvious that they are there for the money since they almost have no originality. Rap is making a come back and yes those artists do have a level of talent that isn’t so controlled by the record company, but they still have A LOT of control. When was the last time you heard a new record from a pop artist that was original? You probably haven’t. Now we basically see robots of the machine producing the same song over and over again. I miss artists like Madonna, Michael Jackson, Elton John and David Bowie. These artists had real substance and an image that intrigued every listener to not only be a fan of the music but paired it with the illusion of the artist. There is no illusion anymore and I don’t think we will ever see it happen again in our lifetime unless someone wants to change the game like Lady GaGa did, but that would be a lot to hope for.
