david bammer Member since Jun 20th 2010 4467 posts
Wed Feb-29-12 11:21 PM
"most indie music of the late 00's-present is just unpopular pop. music." Wed Feb-29-12 11:22 PM by david bammer
i have a theory on how the monetary landscape of the contemporary music industry is becoming more like other facets of our society with a monopoly emerging. where only a small % of acts have all of the market share and everybody else is basically dead in the water. i would project that there are probably <10 major mainstream acts nowadays in america and these <10 acts probably account for more than 80% of all records sold in a year. a la the vanishing middle class, 99%, etc. but in music industry terms it's like the college radio-ification of everybody not in that <10 elite "plutonomy".
most of the music that gets a lot of praise on "indie" blogs isn't "challenging" or "iconoclastic" at it's core. it's just unpublicized pop. music. that is unless you are one of these people who swallowed the pill that the internet was "leveling the playing field" despite the embarrassing yields it's acts produce on soundscan/venue gates.
something like lykke li's "little bit" would have been a moderately successful top 40 record in 1997. something like camera obscura's "lloyd, im ready to be heartbroken" would have been a moderately successful top 10 international record in 1995-2000. i'm cherry picking the best examples, but the same goes for all these records. azaelia bank's "212" is a top 40 record without coverage. white denim's "street joy" could have easily been a pop. rock record by mid-late 90's standards. 95% of these so-called indie/underground/alternative acts are undeniably pop. imo. i guess it's not just rap that has had it's influence via mainstream exposure whittled down to only a few controllable acts. things are just rough all over.
1. "the top has shrunk and the bottom has expanded" In response to Reply # 0
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2. "before I'd be willing to buy into this, you'd have to show me" In response to Reply # 0
how diverse Top 40 lists were in these years you're talking about. I agree that there is a lot of indie music that's undeniably pop, but that's always been true (see: Magnetic Fields, Gorky's Zygotic Mincy, Super Furry Animals, so on so on).
If you're not accounting for the sounds of the times, then you're leaving something pretty essential to the Top 40 conversation out of the conversation.
First and foremost seems to be a bad assumption about what constitutes "most" indie music. Hard to even have this discussion without getting into that extreme generalization. Suffice to say I don't think cherry-picking a few examples makes your case.
Second, I may be extrapolating something you don't really believe, but you seem to be focusing on how challenging indie music is (or isn't). There's a wide gap between pop and the avant garde, and in the middle is all kinds of stuff that isn't especially experimental but also isn't at all commercial. That to me is where a lot of current indie music resides. Some of it even has the general trappings of pop music (song lengths, harmonies, beats, meter, sometimes even production style) while still being off in key ways that makes it simply impossible to sell to more than 50,000 people.
Third, I think pop's bar is constantly moving and in a lot of respects it's not fair to say "indie music is basically pop music" without acknowledging the alternative (and later indie) acts that got successful enough to subtly shift what is and isn't sellable. "Float On" wouldn't have been a potential hit song in 1980 (despite its overt melodicism, fun beat and general cheeriness). By the 2000s it was. Though maybe you feel indie artists should be moving forward and away from whatever is popular, regardless... I dunno. I'm not sure how I feel about this point, might want to revisit after I think about it more.
8. "must be why indie rock bores the shit outta me these days" In response to Reply # 0
hip-hop was pretty damn lame till about 2009, but in the past few years it's blew right past indie rock as far as being interesting, fun, and unpredictable.
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10. "RE: most indie music of the late 00's-present is just unpopular pop. mus..." In response to Reply # 0
>i would project that there are probably <10 major mainstream >acts nowadays in america and these <10 acts probably account >for more than 80% of all records sold in a year.
No.
There are a handful of acts who go platinum, yes, but there are so many acts that don't go platinum that comprise a wide bottom of the pyramid, so that the top sellers in no way, shape or form hold anywhere near 80% of the sales. A guy like Rick Ross is a top seller in rap and he barely made it to gold. Just because Roc Marciano is nowhere near him saleswise doesn't mean, for example, that Rick + Jay + Kanye + Wayne + Nicki + Drake = 80% of rap sales. And that's just in rap. In markets like rock, an incredible number of acts come out below the radar.
I think what's happening is, only a fraction of acts will make it past a certain sales amount: 350K appears to be the barrier for a lot of acts.
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