#128: Teenage Spirit
My wonderful wife wrote this week’s main topic, about one of her favorite topics: music, and how it changes over the years. There’s the usual assortment of links from yours truly after the main feature, as usual.
Pop music is changing. This isn’t something new: like in any other part of our culture, trends come and go, musical genres are getting popular and are forgotten again. There have been great eras of pop, rock, punk, hip hop, R’n’B and many more.
No matter if you are a Beatles-fan, an Indie-girl or adore Billie Eilish these days, one thing we all seem to have in common: almost every one of us tends to like the music we were listening to when we were teenagers. (That’s why in my opinion, Conor Oberst will always be the greatest songwriter. I won’t argue about that.) New songs tend to feel like rubbish to us; they are never as deep, danceable or melodical as the songs we used to play in our bedrooms while going through heartaches and school problems. When we listen to the Charts on the radio, we may find the tracks okay and quite nice. But when we find an old mixtape from when we were 15 or when an Indie Song comes up on the radio, we get happy, begin to dance and are overwhelmed with feelings. This doesn’t only mean that we are getting old and ignorant, but is actually a neuro-scientific phenomenon: „Our brains bind us to the music we heard as teenagers more tightly than anything we’ll hear as adults—a connection that doesn’t weaken as we age.“
When it comes to the change in music, there something that has a huge impact on our listening habits, our taste in music and even the music itself: And that’s streaming services such as Spotify or Apple Music.
How Spotify changed the way we listen to music
Thanks to streaming services, it has become very easy to find and get access to new music. No need for buying albums or even singles (yes, that actually was a thing not that long ago!), no need to keep track of release dates. Spotify has it all, informs you and gives you the playlists, suggestions that fit perfectly to your taste. Thanks, machine learning! New genres are also discovered more often since users don’t have to extra-pay for anything and the popular playlists are usually not genre-bound but rather emotion-based. They try to fit to a feeling like „Sunday morning mood,” „heartbreak,“ or „feelgood pop,“ an approach that mixes several genres that usually don’t seem to get together well. We seem to get more flexible when it comes to our listening habits.
How Spotify changed music itself
As we’ve seen, Spotify playlists are powerful: They can catapult unknown artist to the top of the pop olymp (Did anyone in 2018 know who Lil Nas X is?). The album seems to have lost its importance. Songs need the appearance on playlists (comparable to radio rotation 20 years ago) and artists have figured that out, so they adapt their songwriting and producing:
- Songs are getting shorter: Songs have decreased in length by over 30 seconds over the last 18 years.
- Intros are gone: People are skipping songs when they don’t immediately like it or don’t seem to fit in the mood the playlist promised. In the 80ies, long Intros where common; since the streaming era, something called the pop overture has taken its place: a very short intro that plays the melody of the refrain, so the listeners immediately recognize the song.
- Numerous versions of songs: Since the appearance on playlists is the key to success, remixes and various versions of songs are released to please as many users as possible. This has another reason, of course: The calculation for some Music Charts combines the different versions of a song. So when the original version of your song doesn’t have good streaming numbers any more, it may be wise to release a new version of the song — a dance version, a collaboration with another musician — and your chart position may go up again. That’s actually the reason why Lil Nas X’s „Old Town Road“ broke a record with 19 weeks as Number 1 on the Billboard Charts in 2019. (There are 4 official versions of the song.) Singer Billie Eilish knows how to play the game, too: the singer collaborated with Justin Bieber for a remix of „bad guy“ to stay at a top position in the Charts as well.
How Spotify changed musicians
Obviously, the way Spotify’s Algorithms and the habits of the audience put a lot of pressure on musicians: They used to get paid for every physical sale of their album or single, so for every actual CD that the audience bought. On streaming services, musicians get paid for every stream - and it only counts as a stream when someone listens to it for 30 seconds or more. This explains of course why there is no time for long intros and no need for long-enduring songs.
Knowing all of this may help us, the audience, to understand why nowadays’ music sounds like it does. It also gives us a chance to evaluate and maybe modify our own listening habits. But of course, we always can go back to Conor Oberst and his meaningful lyrics. Because that’s the only good music anyway, right?
Golden Boy turned Icarus
Boeing’s airplane department has well-documented troubles that show no real sign of abating. But now it’s space department is also joining the fray. After a “high visibility close call” test mission for NASA’s commercial crew program in December, the company recently lost out to SpaceX for a lunar cargo contract. And now Ars Technica details how a new document reveals just how NASA’s fed up with Boing.
It’s Puzzling
Now that lots of people are at home with lots of time on their hands, certain industries are facing unprecedented demand. One of them are jigsaw producers, who can’t produce them fast enough. The New York Times takes a look at how jigsaw puzzles are made.
Stranger than Fiction
Disaster movies are a staple of Hollywood. Think of a disaster, and Hollywood has made a movie with it. Except, as it turns out, the one we’re currently living through. We’re learning the big difference between disasters and disaster movies.
Paper Beats Rock
Which would win in a fight, a cruise ship, or a war ship? The answer is easy and obvious, so imagine the surprise of a Venezuelan captain and crew when they went up against a cruise ship — and lost: Venezuelan warship shoots, rams into German cruise vessel before sinking.
📖 Weekly Longread 📚
“French mathematician Évariste Galois lived a full life. When he wasn’t trying to overthrow the government, he was reinventing algebra.” Radical Solutions