On The Future of Popular Music

The Future Sound of Nothing-Nowhere

The future of popular music probably isn't too good. This isn't one of those music was better in my youth kind of rants because frankly even if that were true, it's not a point I exactly want to litigate here. While it might be seen as taking that same line, I would posit that there are far more technically accomplished musicians working in popular music than at any time in history. Even allowing for that, popular music's future is very bleak. 

The historical trend on artistic complexity seems to be that over time, complexity is reduced as the form of the music gets reified. In once sense, music is moving towards fewer players per ensemble - from orchestra to Big Band to quintets and quarts and then trios, and duos. The ultimate is the solo artist who accompanies themselves with a computer or karaoke device or looper pedal. As more contributing players are shed, the simpler the music becomes in structure. While there are plenty of jaw-dropping players working in this kind of format, it is still a lot simpler than music played in larger groups. 

Songwriters themselves have reduced the range of harmonic content in their songs. They are structured more simply than any time before. The proliferation of songs with just one chord progression with no variation has overtaken all the other kinds of songwriting. In that instance it is hard to tell if it is the retreat of complexity or the advance of simplicity. There is the information theory whereby if you want to reach more people, you have to reduce the complexity of your message, so it stands to reason songwriters have taken an axe to such concepts as a verse being different to a chorus, or that there might be a middle 8 in-between the verse and chorus. After all they are playing to a generation that fast-forwards through the guitar solo. 

And yes, there is the crux of the biscuit right there. What kind of hare-brained asshole fast forwards through the guitar solo? What kind of absence of mind does that? It is not a matter of taste - it's a matter of failing to understand what a guitar solo is. Yes, there are some terrible solos out there - some of them played by your truly right here - but you can't be fast forwarding through all guitar solos on principle without incurring the observation that it's not guitar solos that are the problem, but the people who can't appreciate them who are the problem. 

Contrary to all the amazing guitar players plying their trade on Youtube, guitar solos have been phased out of popular music. All these new songs without a change in chord progression from verse to chorus, also seem to come absent the guitar solo. 

Now don't get me wrong. It's not all about the guitar solo. It's that fact that there's a young audience out there that doesn't connect to guitar solos. Surprisingly there's a whole generation or two of kids who just don't view music the way the previous generations did, and this has turned into time bomb. As Rick Beato rightly points out, kids today have a whole eco-system of stuff to indulge themselves. Music simply sin't enough. So while there are some amazing players doing their thing on instagram and TikTok and Youtube, the general population is pulling away from music as fast as the Baby Boomers and Gen-Xers ran towards music. If music itself is losing value in the discourse as we go forwards, then you can't expect it to be in better shape in the future. 

This Does Need A Bit More Explaining For Future Generations

Skip this bit if you're an old fart like me - older readers know what the hell it used to be like before the internet. The people in the future will have no idea. Hence my need to write it down here.  

So this is a sketch of the old world before the internet: Before the internet, information used to be hard to come by and when we got it, it wasn't cheap or free. And we accepted this condition as capitalism. So we paid for newspapers and we paid for books and subscriptions to magazines. We paid to find stuff out in most part. You would be lucky to find stuff in libraries. If you were looking for granular information on something of a minor field, your school library or council library was not going to cut it.  

It so happens music was one of those information formats. It wasn't clear to us growing up, but music was in of itself a kind of information - we only found that out when things went digital with compact discs. In one sense, we had to put our money down to obtain the information that was music, just as we did with everything else. The record store then, was sort of an information exchange, and you can see that in the loving portrayal in the movie version of 'High Fidelity'. In turn, music, was the communal space that connected a global audience. World tours by big bands, whether that be The Police or Dire Straits  were culturally significant moments.

As the format of the information evolved the vendors of the information saw fit to raise the prices on the information. Thus, in Sydney in the mid 1980s, LPs and Cassette tapes were priced around $10 but Compact Discs were $30. As a student working late night shopping and weekend jobs, you were making $12-15 and hour at best. The calculations would then go, do you exchange roughly an hour of your worked time with 1 album on LP or do you instead swap three of those for something with higher fidelity. Kids who were in to music were exchanging their blood sweat and tears into their music collections. 

And there was a cohort who grumbled loudly about the prices of Compact Discs all the time. 

Then the internet came along together with compressed data. Suddenly people were 'ripping' CDs and file sharing them in .mp3 format. Naturally this got record companies very upset and the rest of it is history. The internet devalued the entire music industry and denuded it of profits. A lot has happened since that moment in history but essentially there is music everywhere for free, if you just choose to look. Kids today don't have to necessarily exchange their blood sweat and tears for mere music.  In turn the monetisation of music has changed radically in response to the internet. 

The point of all this is that the music listener of the Boomer and Gen-X vintage had skin in the game. This is why they have the wrong opinions they have, and in turn this is why there's a lot of judgemental put downs by these people towards Millennials and Gen-Z. Is this fair? No - but you should know why this happens. The judgement is coming from a place of heavy emotional investiture. This is not to say Millennials and Gen-Z don't have heavy investment in music themselves. It's just that in the scheme of things, it most likely won't be their main emotional investiture simply because of where they are in history (and to be totally frank I don't judge the younger generation harshly for that fact).

The bad news for music and those with heavy emotional investment in music, is that the Boomers are finally dying out in droves. Even Gen-Xers are starting to pop off, kick the bucket and fall off their perches. This means that in the future, there are fewer people invested in all of this than there are going to be more. As the demographic changes, it is evident that things that hold meaning are changing hands. With the dead, goes the past. As ever, the living inherit a world they cannot fathom. 

Just what can be done about this for music?

Meaning As Social Construct

Back in my own formative years, something that got pounded into me by a philosophy major (read, Mr. Pharmakeus) was that a great man called Ludwig Wittgenstein said that 'meaning' is 'socially determined'. There are a lot of ways to come at this statement but one of the ways is that the more people who engage with a subject matter provides more meaning to the subject. 

This is evidenced by say, Wikipedia, where ever more people have come to add ever more knowledge and opinions across so many topics. You can probably rely on an article that has passed through the oversight of thousands of people, more than something with a short entry that was agreed upon by 5 people, but in most part Wikipedia represents the sum total of volunteered knowledge and opinions of internet denizens. While Wikipedia probably won't match the kind of epistemological reliability of a peer-reviewed study, it can get close in some matters. In turn, it has raised the curtain on the process whereby we can ask whether peer-reviewed studies are exactly what they're cracked up to be, and whether Encyclopaedias like the Britannica and Americana ever could have matched the breadth and scope of of Wikipedia. 

The point of the above paragraph is that the more people you have participating in a field, you have a way of achieving more and deeper meaning. The more people working a field and contributing to it, the more likely you are to achieve a higher granularity of knowledge as well as a greater pile of it. This in turn means the more people there are playing rock guitar, then, the better the chances are of rock guitar continuing into the future in a meaningful manner. Ultimately, an artist is not some point that exists in a sea of meaninglessness but a representative of a demographic of people working in an area. This is how you get not just The Beatles, but also The Rolling Stones and the entire British Invasion in the 1960s; and a generation later, not just Nirvana and Pearl Jam, but the entire Grunge movement. 

In once sense, if there isn't a critical mass of a critical, mass listenership, popular music is not going to gain the kind of meaning it once possessed. With the advent of the internet, it may never again reach the height of importance it once held. 

So What Happens Now?

Without the critical mass of the critical masses, popular music will fail to form the kind of meaningfulness it once possessed. In a sense, it is going to be more meaningless than meaningful - and there's going to be a lot of the meaningless stuff over the meaningful stuff. It's not exactly a joyous future, but there is an upside. Thanks to the same technology that destroyed social meaning, it is also now dead easy to make your own music. In as much as there will be people making their own music for their own meaningful experience, music will not die out. There will be meaningful music in a sea of meaningless music. People are just going to work very hard to find it and get to it. 

If you want meaningful music to exist in the future, then you'd better start participating in it.