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Bobby Read's avatar

Thanks Tom Moon for such a great verbalization of the circumstances, as we’ve come to expect from you. Here’s my long wind.

Like any working musician I’ve been thinking about this stuff a lot. We’re in a situation in which the chances of paying back recording costs for most artists has become near impossible when they have to rely on streaming royalties. I as a producer/studio owner can’t honesty encourage anyone to spend money making a recording unless they know it won’t get paid back.

So in this environment how does music keep evolving? Perhaps as ‘anonymous’ observed, through live music. But I think recorded music is huge in people’s lives.

I’ve got a teenage daughter and so I’ve listened a lot to pop radio. With a few exceptions (once last year a song had a 3 dominant chord I.e. E7 in key of C to move to F), every song is some order combination of I, IV, VII, V (in C major this would be the C, F, Aminor, and G chords), always in 4/8 bars phrases. The V dominant chord isn’t often used to resolve to 1, more often used as a axis to VII or IV.

Choruses and bridges have pretty much disappeared.

And every melody is V, III, II, I maybe VII (in C - G, E, D, C, maybe A).

So I think, why? It’s definitely a chicken and egg situation, musicians being the chickens I guess.

I think a simple major key melody is a very instinctive human preference. If you’re walking down the road and humming a tune, it won’t be 12 tone music. Musicians certainly will hum more complex tunes, but that’s because we know them and love them, not because that’s the natural thing to come out of our mouths.

On the simplest level, it’s harmonic or emotional gravity (and I mean weight, shifting). It’s like breathing - sing C, D, E, G and come back down again. Just feels good. The G always wants to come home to C in the end.

So all these endless empty songs use that premise for a melody, over top of another thing people like - periodicity. Repeating symmetrical shapes/phrases, the combinations of I, IV, VII, and V.

And that’s truly enough for some people, unfortunately for all of us who want to hear more. I’m just saying there are reasons for it.

This didn’t start recently. Most Dylan songs use that same melody, certainly most folkloric music does. Mozart and Beethoven could beat a major key melody on the head quite well, especially those endless V to I ‘last’ chords of Beethoven’s that would last 30 seconds, a minute? Shoot me please.

As a tangent, what happened between Bach and Mozart? Bach, whose understanding of the beauty of the diatonic melody is for me peerless, but who could pivot on a dime with his deep understanding of the diminished chord as a pivot hub and move seamlessly between keys, dominant chords as springboards, not reduced to mere stooges for the almighty 1 chord. Alright, a bit thick I know.

I’m someone who gets bored easily in music. My ears crave new sounds and constructions. Recently I’ve been doing a lot of electronic music, playing a lot with a module called a “Benjolin”. It uses a bit shift register to create somewhat controllable random, never repeating electronic music. I love it. Never gets boring to me, because it’s like nature - it’s so complex in it’s minutia. Have listened to it for hours.

I love lots of ‘new’ music, and there’s lots of it.

But the fact is there is no business for it. I understand that and why other people don’t like it (new sounds and structures, things out of the ordinary) - what I said above. New music is either done out of love by professionals, or by amateurs, skilled or otherwise.

I don’t think there’s any way around the basic fact that, if artists and composers can’t afford to do their work, they will at some point stop. There will always be people putting stuff out cause that’s the way of the world now. But excuse me if I sound elitist, the net result of this will be, already is, a decline in the quality of what’s out there.

DIY is great, but there’s a reason great records sounds like they do. A huge numbers of great studios have gone under because of all this, so it’s not just music, but the huge body of knowledge amassed in audio that is now being replaced by everyone who can do it in their living room but don’t know how a compressor works.

All of this is a very long way around to Tom’s question and his statistics. I’m not surprised catalog is such a high percentage for all the reasons we’re all talking about. I’m glad it’s all there. I listen to a lot of it. A huge amount of quality music. We’re so fortunate that it exists and we have such great archeologists as Tom Moon shining his flashlight around. Maybe when the electric grid finally goes out, we start again with sticks and logs.

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@suzannecloud's avatar

Nice essay, Tom. It's something I've thought for a long time. Record companies stopped being visionary a long, long time ago. But relying on public performance now to pull musicians and audiences out of the musical doldrums is a bit too cheerful in our present pandemic situation. Oh, I know, I know, people say, the pandemic will end and we'll be back playing live again all the time. Nope. With the world not addressing climate change, the novel viruses will continue to buffet the population and keep listeners home enjoying music made in earlier times. The musicians I've talked to are afraid it's not just the death of their recording careers, but the death of new music itself.

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