[ExI] music survey

[Dan TheBookMan]

On Jan 17, 2022, at 5:04 PM, spike jones via extropy-chat <extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org> wrote:  
> From: extropy-chat <extropy-chat-bounces at lists.extropy.org> On Behalf Of Dan TheBookMan via extropy-chat
>  
> >…A friend of mine even said he classifies his music more by decade than genre because there are too many overlaps between the genres and sub genres. So he thinks it’s easier to go by decade, despite that being arbitrary in many respects. It’s more a pragmatic decision: how can I find stuff easily….
>  
> Regards,  Dan
>  
>  
> Dan after I read your commentary, it occurred to me why that decade business stopped working.  If you get subscription satellite radio, genres have decades, or some of them do: 40s thru 90s, but somewhere in the 90s, digital tuning made possible jillions of radio stations, unlike the old FM dial where you really only had a few stations.  With only a few stations, there was a definite mainstream sound which defined the decade, even if there were subcategories, such as traditional rock-n-roll, American Top 40, Punk, Motown sounds and so on.
>  
> But once satellite radio came along… there are too many radio stations to even have a distinctive sound associated with a decade.

My friend was just using that for his listening purposes. He also told me he has categories — I’m guessing this is Apple Music — like demo, live performance, and (shudders!) Christmas music. But your point is interesting. I wonder if there is nonetheless a 2000s or 2010s sound. Definitely, autotune has become ever more used and how pop music is made today is very different from how it was made decades ago. I mean the composition and production process today tends to be much more controlled and monitored. So maybe if we revisit this fifty years from now it’ll be easier to determine what sort of divisions work.

That said, even listening to music of previous decades there are oddballs and outliers and it’s not like in 1970, the Sixties sound ended abruptly to be replaced by the Seventies sound, right? (I’m always surprised when people play certain pieces that to my ear don’t sound like they’re Sixties ones and they are. For instance, I thought Gerry and the Pacemakers came way before the 1960s. Of course, I wasn’t around then, so maybe this has more to do with my idiosyncratic sampling of the decades.)

Regards,

Dan  
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://lists.extropy.org/pipermail/extropy-chat/attachments/20220117/4f6c41ff/attachment.htm>