Originally Posted by
Baribrotzer
Consider how much Big Time Music Business Pop has become entirely a formula, with the rise of Max Martin & Co., "top-liners", "song doctors", beat programmers, remixers, Autotuned vocals and the like. Where making a hit has become a matter of how many people put their Golden Touch fingerprints on it. Where half of those hit songs, at least, have the Magic Hit-Making Chord Progression: I-V-vi-IV, or exactly the same thing in minor: i-VI-III-VII. Where Toto spend most of their time on the road, because the studio work has dried up. Where even Bernard Purdie, for God's sake, has to play live jazz-funk nightclub gigs to make a living, because no one needs a human being to play drums any more.
It'll only be a couple of years until those accumulated rules-of-thumb get turned into reliable, comprehensive A.I. programs. And those will be where the hits come from, because no single human can have musical taste so perfectly aligned with the statistical average of every pop music consumer. That's the point of writing by committee, as is done in Big Time Music Business Pop, and has been done in Nashville for years - it irons out the variations in style and taste of individual songwriters, and leaves only the average, which, if those songwriters are successful, will also be the average of the public. But a computer can easily be programmed to have no individuality, and get that perfect average.
I suspect it will be a secret at first. But eventually someone will spill the beans, and guess what: The public won't care at all. It's a nice soundtrack for their lives, and that's all they want.
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