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YMUSIC SEARCH ENGINE
Music is more than a casual leisure, an art or the new way to increase the benefits of a company. It is all of that and even more. The music industry is a rich ecosystem in which everyone and everything has a specific place. From the composer to the listener, from psychology to spirituality, from art to science, get insights on each field of music, learning about craft or history, about human behavior or consciousness. A place is also given to ethical questions.
MUSICAL CULTURE IN ITS VARIOUS ASPECTS
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Creating benefits in the online music world
Looking at the music industry in the context of other trades, it appears that, here as everywhere else, statistics must be taken into account to understand what is music production at the global level. What is the value of music, compared to other forms of entertainment? Now that music is often available for free on the internet, the concept of opportunity cost is important to understand music economics. Opportunity cost refers to the benefit that a company must forego, producing revenue in an alternative way. For example, in the music industry, music itself may be distributed for free and benefits will be made during touring and through merchandising. That introduces the concept of marginal cost: in such a framework, chief revenue officers, in corporations, may be attentive to marginal cost too, that factor indicating the change of expense in a production when additional pieces of an item are produced.
Understanding what opportunity and marginal costs are, it is easier to understand that, when labels are signing musicians, financial advances do not only cover the work that musicians have already done, but also goods and services that are supposed to generate benefits later. It is a real investment, whether it is at the national or at the global level. It requires that both musicians and labels know exactly the right audiences for a musician, because the music market is more fragmented now than) some decades ago: the number of music genres has increased.
The specific assets of classical pops in the global economy of music
Basic notions of music economics being acquired, it is less difficult to understand why musicians have a tendency to incorporate musical elements coming from music styles that are different from their main way to make music: their music can be perceived as being more original. For example, classical musicians may participate in the creation of works known as ‘classical pops’, which are covers of popular pieces of music that use classical instruments instead of those used to produce electronic music or world music, for instance.
Popular music attracting crowds, classical musicians may be attentive to it and include some components of it in their performance. Not necessarily in a conspicuous way: for example, they may feel rhythm in a slightly different way than the ordinary classical musician. Or they can modify the sound of their voice, to sound ‘more poppy’ and ‘less classical’ on higher notes. All listeners may become familiar with those phenomena by listening for example to the songs performed by Sarah Brightmann, who is specialized in classical crossover. In such works, the general timbre of a performance stays classical, because of the instruments, however it sounds somewhat divergent and that is what listeners used to listening to pop music may appreciate: they can discover sounds that are new without denying their cultural origins and interests.
Financial aspects of the music market: the case of classical pops
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Music industry corporations and creativity
Generally, creativity is associated with creation, originality and innovation. For that reason, it is generally not associated with the culture of musical corporations, at least not directly. Corporations may get benefits from musical innovation and integrate it, however not often in a direct way: they are more dedicated to the production of new pieces of music that sound familiar in a continual way. That operating mode explains why corporations build portfolios of music composers or rosters: they want to be sure that new materials will be delivered on a regular basis to satisfy the audiences.
In that context, music ‘genres’ are not defined only in relationship to musical criteria, but also according to the conventions and expectations that rule the music industry. So the music industry has an impact on the forms that musical creativity can take, trying to predict what kind of moves audiences will make across various media systems (music streaming services, online radio stations, etc.).
Communications between musicians and executives in the music industry
In ‘indie’ companies, owners communicate with musicians on a very regular basis, being present down corridors. In corporations, managers have less opportunities to share their daily questions with both their staff and musicians. They must spend quality time with musicians in order to develop artists and their production. In fact, developing artists means making their music known in live venues like concert halls, clubs, bars, theatres, and so on. So, the agenda of different musicians must be very organized.
Concerning the revenues of artists, transactions may be complicated due to partnerships between labels and various distribution channels such as, today, music streaming services and online radio but also touring and festivals organizers. Managers and accountants may feel pressure in a more or less vertical system, due to questions related to delays and sometimes to artistic portfolios. Executives must deal with objective criteria like statistics and facts, but also with more subjective ones, like intuition and belief in an artist. They must sometimes correct erroneous data or assumptions in order to get more nuanced pictures from statistics.
Who buys what, when, where, with what frequency? Where does their information come from? Why do people purchase or not? It is because they can answer these questions in an accurate way that major music companies attract small labels and touring organizers, not because they are artist-friendly or knowledgeable about music. Sometimes, some issues may arise and some researchers do not hesitate to write that music agencies have augmented their power over musicians, creating reserve of labour in order to decrease their fees. In that situation, technology may be incriminated, as platforms allow artists from various geographical areas to register. Musicians, like other types of professionals, have become in some ways victims of a certain sort of globalization. However, generally, they also get more exposure than some decades ago.
Musical creativity amongst corporations and small labels
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Music genres in the framework of corporate culture: what place is there for composers’ individual visions?
What do major music labels do?
Main music labels are corporations. What do they do? Everyone knows that they manage different staff, artists and genres. They value specific sound productions, wanting to direct both musicians and their audiences. First, they follow their intuition: they may feel that a song has promise, but that the vocals are weak. Yet they use systems of classification to shape the piece of music so that it may meet the needs and fit the frameworks of the entertainment industry, which is made of organizations that are actually very formal. Radio is one of these rigid structures: when music is not ‘radio friendly’, it has no chance of being broadcast, ‘radio friendly’ generally referring to songs that are short, danceable and easy to remember.
Emerging music groups, to get bookings, are generally asked questions about the type of music they play. They must also provide tapes so that a decision can be made. For labels as for tour organizers, one main target is often to reach the higher number of people with a minimum of effort. Rightly or wrongly, the music market is considered by some music industry agents as more niche than the cinematographic industry: people would like all sorts of movies and only one or two styles of music. Perhaps it is because of the music distribution system that music is niche, however it is not the time to analyse that situation in detail. Let us notice that, generally, it may be hard for musicians to think ‘out of the box’ while having a lot opportunities to get better known. Music corporations manage, that is all: they are committed to their own targets as companies.
How are music industry corporations different from ‘indie’ companies?
Sometimes, comparisons are made between music that is in the mainstream and ‘indie’ music. It is partly relevant: certainly, main music labels, also called ‘majors’, have very strict strategies to control the creative activities of musicians, across some main popular genres that include pop and rock music, with their different varieties: pop and rock evolve in different types of culture, and culture produces industries as much as industries produce culture. Industries produce culture: entertainment corporations create organizations and structures plus working practices, with the target of producing specific products as well as intellectual property. Culture produces industries: the musical production is made in relationship with cultural communities and habits.
These links between the music industry and musical cultures explains why music corporations may have a domestic department, an international department, a latin music department and a black music department. That is a first difference with ‘indie’ companies: smaller and more eclectic, they generally do not have either the necessity, or the means, to operate such distinctions. They cannot automate their marketing activities as much as labels. They also have less possibilities to establish interactions with music listeners in order to build up knowledge about their audiences, that is a second difference.
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Going beyond music classifications to give more freedom to music listeners
A lot of characteristics that have been chosen to classify music were first developed in the framework of speech processing. Is it annoying? In itself, no. Numerous researchers in the field of music, including music composers, conductors and performers, have drawn parallels between music and language, for instance music composer Leonard Bernstein. The target of these studies is not to to describe music in itself, but to create an affinity between musicians and listeners, using concepts coming from the fields anthropology and psychology, often in the perspective of evolution.
Now, some studies made in the field of human sciences go further. In Canada, some researchers showed that music in itself does not induce happy or sad feelings: they interviewed a tribe of Pygmies in Africa, members of that tribe listened to music generally associated to sadness, because they include minor chords, pieces like ‘Tristan und Isolde’ by Wagner, and the result was that the minor chords present in the piece of music were not said to be sad. Such studies show that ‘para musical’ criteria, including sociological and psychological ones, cannot explain totally what groups and individuals really feel when they listen to music. Their thoughts and feelings go beyond any classification of music. And it is the same for all types of music listeners all around the world.
Music appreciation beyond music genres
If we take one moment to discover the music written by Sting for ‘The Police’ during the 1970s and the 1980s, we notice that in the first albums, an important number of songs mix a genre ‘reggae rock’, another called ‘post punk’ and a third that is ‘new wave’ in such a way that it is clearly impossible not to stamp them with both labels. Except for one: ‘The Bed’s too big without you’, that is more a reggae rock song than a post punk one, musically speaking.
Why do some songs really overcome the notion of music genre? Perhaps we may find a clue by looking at the writing of ‘Strawberry Fields’ by The Beatles. First, John Lennon collected some ounds, and the song he wrote was less than a series of minor chords. Then he wrote just one line a day. For Lennon, all was about sharing a sound that was reflecting his sentiments about his childhood, his internal processes and Liverpool: Strawberry Fields was a house belonging to the Salvation Army, where Lennon and a friend used to go to play. It was not about creating a ‘psychedelic pop’ piece of music, as the song was labelled later.
Finally, let us notice that, as the idea of ‘music genre’ carries huge social and cultural connotations, it may prevent children and teenagers from further developing their music appreciation skills. In fact, some music genres could be said to be unsuitable for the classroom because of their reputation, a reputation that is not always justified. That is how heavy metal musicians are often labelled talentless and mentally unstable, even if a lot of them are highly educated people and simply enjoy different things from the mainstream. Yet metal music may sometimes present an interest at the musical level (and today, some metal formations are signed with majors).
What do music listeners feel faced with music genres?
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What are music genres?
Even if musicologists generally dislike talking about it, the notion of ‘music genre’ is very popular amongst music labels and music fans. Music researchers do not often express themselves on the subject because the notion of genre is not intrinsically musical: it contains ‘para musical’ elements related to global culture and various local traditions. For example, ‘salsa’ is a dance, besides and even before being a musical genre.
Actually ‘genre’ sounds like a buzzword in the musical and cultural debate that involves the different agents of the music market, especially as they may be fragmented at will in order to promote musical products whose primary function is to replenish the funds of the labels, as some music executives themselves admit it. It is not unethical in itself: the benefits sometimes help to fund more original creation, for which branding is more expensive than for standard products. However, it is artificial, as a music genre is produced within and for a community of music fans under strict rules that can drive out the creativity of music composers: to please the fans and sell more items, labels can ask composers to modify the content of their musical production in order to filter it of its most characteristic elements.
Improvisation and collaboration to keep music breathing
Today as yesterday, it is not so easy for emerging musicians to be considered as a full member of the music industry. They have to communicate a lot with their audiences, when they want to continue to produce music with integrity at the artistic level, especially when they try to overcome all classifications, including musical genres. Creating music that is alive and breathing, thinking out of the box, may be seen as a daily challenge.
What do independent music composers do to keep their originality? They may practice improvisation regularly, seeing it as a higher form of self-expression. An improvisation is generally unique in terms of place, time and audience. That practice has already existed before and is coming up again. When it becomes the main form of artistic expression for a group, it is somehow risky and it requires a high level of trust between performers. They feel more free to interpret music the way they feel.
Collaborations with other musicians may be another way that music composers use to follow their artistic vision without feeling forced to conform to the mold of musical globalization, with its branding, its intermediaries, its media, in one word, with its tyrannical advertising system, where music is promoting advertisement more than the other way around, where exposure is an expensive process that does not always lead to touring and where composers are often asked to sacrifice a part of their initial artistic vision to succeed at a higher level.
Can music composers transcend music genres in order to keep their ethical vision?
Do you want to know more about musical similarity, independently of music genres? Try the YMusic search engine, your free personal assistant (it includes musical criteria to select music), and find out why you love some sounds more than other ones!
How music composers can avoid limitations related to the notion of ‘music genre’ with the concept of ‘musical similarity’
Classification and similarity
The classification of music and the study of music based on similarities have one point in common: they want to know how a piece of music is related to another one or to other ones. However, their processes are different. Music genres are by nature a classification relying on a taxonomy upon which pieces of music are classified. The study of similarity between different pieces of music is does not function in the same way, because it does not refer to any prior categorization: pieces of music are comparated in function of their whole content.
Everyone knows that genre classification is useful to organize large databases automatically. However it is less easy to explain how music genres are defined and thus created. Also, how do they relate? It is evident that pieces of music written in different cultural contexts may influence each other more freely than in the framework of genres. That is why the study of pure similarity at the musical level is really valuable.
A valuable way to study similarity at the musical level: the YMusic search engine
YMusic, a search engine that can also be described as a free personal assistant dedicated to music listeners, includes musical criteria to select music: these criteria precisely relate to similarity, even if the music search engine gives access to more than 500 music genres. The search engine helps to quantify similarity between pieces of music and aims to eliminate useless value judgments: instead of saying which pieces of music listeners must or will like, YMusic helps them to search in its database music on the basis on very simple musical elements. Getting the music in a more precise and objective way, listeners may judge for themselves. They are better equipped to discern what they really love and do not feel forced to follow advice that may be relevant and friendly, but remain commercially driven most of the time and, especially, culturally bound.
Discerning what music to like is not so easy, musically speaking, and it is not about being musically trained: individuals from the same musical culture but with similar musical training backgrounds may share different considerations. Notably because ‘genres’ are sometimes so mixed that two listeners will classify a same piece of music differently. YMusic wants to overcome the disadvantages linked to the fact that most theoretical and practical research in the field of music has mainly focused on precise types of music: there is a scarcity of writings on characteristics that could be used to analyze music more systematically, in the framework of a unitary theory. Such a theory is necessary to help listeners to discern properties of music that they do not feel or understand immediately. It is not only about saying ‘I like, I love’ or ‘I do not like, I do not love’, but also about explaining ‘why I like, why I love’ or ‘why I do not like, why I do not love’ one piece of music or another. To reach such a target, a classification of music based on genres has very little interest for the listener.
How music composers can avoid limitations related to the notion of 'music genre' with the concept of 'musical similarity'
MUSIC COMPOSERS LEEWAYS WITHIN THE MUSIC INDUSTRY