Thursday, October 19, 2006
music industry, persistence, and self-fulfilling prophecies
continuing in similar vein to the earlier post on music vs books vs movies -- it appears that the appreciation or acceptance of a piece of music often has to do with repeated listening. the more often you listen to something, you invariably end up subconsciously starting to hear it in your head, humming it, "liking" it etc. this has pretty positive implications for big-label music records and popular musicians -- by definition they have more resources at their disposal to ensure that they are very visible (or should i say audible) on radio shows, music channels etc, and thus perpetuating the popularity further .. how do the smaller bands ever manage to break up the monopoly?
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3 comments:
I think once you have gathered all you can from a piece of music you won't be so eager to hear it anymore. Just that "gathering all you can" takes more time with music - on one hand it is not too simple to immediately remember; and on the other hand unlike visuals it is sequential and hence not as strenuous to improve the information density/accuracy; but only until it reaches your saturation point with respect to perceiving musical signals. In other words, I think the preferences people have for bands could be due to :
1. Increased familiarity with some general patterns shared by various albums of a specific band - which means the intial mental recording ( and the chunk of patterns retrieved ) itself is of a quality good enough to motivate further refinement by repeated listening.
2. An irrational liking which is developed for the band.
Point #2 is of course not specific to music. As for #1 - there still is a chance for other bands whose style of music isn't significantly different from that of the big bands. But if the new band produces substantially different music it doesn't have much hope of breaking in - which is why carnatic music hasn't broken into US, for instance.
"just that "gathering all you can" takes more time with music " -- i beg to differ here -- while this is true for classical music where the appreciation arises from understanding the nuances, for a lot of popular music appreciation comes from simple, repetitive patterns which are easy to follow and "sing-along" with
Perhaps ( while I usually see imperfections when people repeat popular lines they might still have gathered all they would ). Still there is some phenomenon of saturation that happens; because nobody can keep on listening to the same song for ever. Why would that be the case?
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