The Swedish DJ Who Invented Industrially-Manufactured Pop Music (bbc.com) 110
"BBC Culture reports on DJ Denniz Pop (born Dagge Volle), who couldn't sing, play an instrument, or write a song but could mathematically craft a song from stitching together electronically programmed sounds and beats," writes Slashdot reader dryriver. "Pop was the musical brains behind acts ranging from the Backstreet Boys, *NSYNC, Ace Of Base to Britney Spears, and trained Max Martin who wrote 22 Billbooard #1 hits for the likes of Taylor Swift, The Weeknd, Katy Perry, P!nk, Justin Timberlake, Ariana Grande and Maroon 5 using a technique called 'Melodic Math.'" From the report: In a basement in Stockholm's suburbs, Pop brought together an elite team of eight songwriters and producers for a new venture -- Cheiron Studios -- in 1992. Over the next eight years they would go on to sell hundreds of millions of records through the likes of Ace of Base, 5ive, Robyn, Boyzone, Backstreet Boys, Westlife, *NSYNC and Britney Spears. The secret of their songwriting success was to marry the melody to the beat, not work against it, and to have a big chorus. The team at Cheiron followed Pop's example, experimenting in clubs across the capital with up to a hundred different versions of each new track -- meticulously documenting the combinations of beats and melodies that made the club crowds go wild. Through these experiments, an entirely new genre of music blossomed, one that seemed tailor-made for the age of manufactured boybands and girl groups. Having grown up in socialist Sweden, Pop's approach to writing music was almost utilitarian. Like so many Swedish success stories -- IKEA, H&M, Volvo and Spotify -- the Cheiron team wanted their product to appeal to the maximum amount of people, which in a country with a population of only nine million meant focusing outside the nation's borders. Pop designed his music to reflect the lives of the people who bought more music than anyone else -- American teenagers -- at least as far as he understood them from his basement in faraway Stockholm.
Confusion (Score:2, Funny)
Having grown up in socialist Sweden, Pop's approach to writing music was almost utilitarian.
I didn't know our neighboring country did Cuba and Soviet Union right next to us. Might have made us rethink that Northern dimension, or NATO membership. Thanks Slashdot for these educational moments of clarity.
Re:Confusion (Score:5, Insightful)
socialist Sweden
Not confusing at all. It was a mathematically crafted summary to generate two threads for the price of one.
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Perfect.
There are a lot of people here who consider themselves smart while simultaneously always feeding the trolls (with pageviews/ad impressions).
Eurotrash music (Score:2)
Nothing new.
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In a word: Jazz. Learn some history.
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Jazz and blues are the same thing. Country and rock & roll are the same thing. R&B, funk and hip hop are the same thing. All of them are garbage intended for simplistic, uncultured mooks who don't understand a thing about music theory.
Also, what do you think those styles were influenced by in their creations? That's right, superior music from Europe. We were making music millennia before your country even existed. In fact, everything America has was lifted from Europe or Asia.
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Rap doesn't classify as music.
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You have poor taste in music. Your opinion is invalid.
Also, I like how you totally just ignore the OP which ragged on European music by calling it "Eurotrash", yet when someone points out American music is 99.99% shit, you get all butthurt and whiny.
More details here (Score:1)
Two links to manufactured music from NPR:
https://www.npr.org/sections/money/2015/07/10/421874671/episode-288-manufacturing-the-song-of-the-summer
https://www.npr.org/sections/money/2011/07/05/137530847/how-much-does-it-cost-to-make-a-hit-song
1. Start with a beat track
2. Hum, mumble sounds to the beat track
4. Start filling in words to the mumbles
5. Tweak the words, fill in gaps to make a half intelligible song
6. Add a chorus
7. Re-sample, sprinkle with samples to fill out the music
8. Polish, give to some artis
Top target . . . (Score:1)
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I've long heard that music tastes are formed during adolescence and kept for life, but after a few years and you listen back to this, there's no way you won't say "how did I ever listened to this ga
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Then there was autotune.
I don't understand he hate (Score:2)
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He is the quintessential hacker, albeit in the aureal sense rather than computer sense.
Yeah, I respect music nerds. Try watching some of 12tone's videos on YouTube, and you finally know what it feels like for an IT semi-illiterate to listen to IT nerds talk shop :D
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Sure, total respect, now can we invent a time machine and assassinate the fucker before he unleashes the atrocious noises upon us all, it's like the who's who of dreadful manufactured music.
Yeah, it's crap too. (Score:1, Funny)
Bach is just mathematics. Not music. And its fans are merely snobs. The same kind who say they "like" "modern art" and the most bitter (aka disgusting) coffee, chocolate, beer, etc.
The kind that buys $400 wooden volume knobs to make the sound of their $20000-per-speaker tube-based pre-amps that play ancient recordings from their laser-based balanced vacuum chamber vinyl player sound "warmer". (Aka low-passed.)
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So basically Stock Aitken Waterman (Score:1)
Company B's Fascination
Yup (Score:2)
Except 5 years later. I'm failing to stop what exactly is new about this guys approach - people have been knocking out stitched together low quality (in the sense of the music, not reproduction) music since at least the times of the great composers. I've lost count of the number of times I've heard a classic piece and thought "But that sounds similar too..."
Short term gains, long term losses (Score:3)
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If that were true, then one could stand out by producing variety and get bigly rich.
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If that were true, then one could stand out by producing variety and get bigly rich.
You can, but only in some countries, and mostly in Europe. At the moment there is a bit of strangle hold on getting exposure in the US (and a handfull of other countries), you need the right contacts or lots of money to even get played in the radio or in the big club, and shit music do pay to be played which is why pop music is much worse in the US. The shit is actually forced on consumer regardless of whether they like it or not.
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If that were true, then one could stand out by producing variety and get bigly rich.
There is a lot of variety out there, the question you need to ask yourself is why it doesn't get on the radio, on the TV, in shopping centres, in CD stores, doesn't get into the Spotify recommendations or advertised highly on the Apple store.
"producing variety" is the cheapest and easiest step in the incredibly complicated and highly expensive process of getting "bigly rich" in the industry. That is one of the main drivers of the lack of variety in the first place: playing it safe with music by formula as i
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There's 5 decades of pop music if one really wants variety for variety's sake. Most new music is purchased for status reasons (to be "in"), and thus variety is a secondary issue.
If you don't care about "new" or fashion, there are tens of millions of older tracks to select from. Current music producers can't compete with the existing library on variety and quality, but they can compete on trends and fashion, since it's the only weak point of the vast current catalog.
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Pop music is pretty close to dead due to lack of variety
Heh. Pop music is by the most varried of ALL genres. Other genres limit themselves to certain structures, where pop music just needs to be popular, and can take crossovers from any other genre if it is widely accessible enough.
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Heh. Pop music is by the most varried of ALL genres. Other genres limit themselves to certain structures, where pop music just needs to be popular, and can take crossovers from any other genre if it is widely accessible enough.
I don't think "pop music" is a genre, I think it encompasses multiple genres. So on the one hand, by virtue of being a catch-all term, pop is varied. On the other hand, mainstream popular music must now grab the listener as quickly as possible on the first listen. To achieve this new songs must have a lot of familiar content and they must be simple. This pushes mainstream popular music towards less variety and less depth. Thus I don't think pop music is the most varied of all genres: it's mostly recycled c
My take on mathematically generated music: (Score:2)
A bit sad but no great surprise (Score:2)
Re:A bit sad but no great surprise (Score:4, Insightful)
They still like pop music but they're starting grow out of it as they discover intellectual pursuits and need their music to deliver something with some substance or give them something to think about, not just mindless pap about boy-meets-girl.
You sound like teenaged me. I DIDN'T LIKE pop music when I was a teenager because I was astonishingly pretentious and believed that NOT LIKING it made me superior to all the mindless masses who did like it.
90% of everything is crap and pop music being a strict subset of "everything" is no exception. But sometimes a catchy tune is good and you're not somehow less good because lots of other people like it too.
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But sometimes a catchy tune is good and you're not somehow less good because lots of other people like it too.
This is definitely true and I also agree that one shouldn't be snobbish about popular culture. That said, it's also true that you can have your cake and eat it: there's plenty of good music that also has good tunes.
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I have to admit I do find many of the hits from the mentioned Swedish team "catchy". Whatever the heck they did, it friggen worked. Kudos.
How to do modern music (Score:1)
2. Test all musicians to ensure they can perform, are photogenic. Can give an interview on music, their music and the meaning of their lyrics.
3. Select the best skilled and most talented who can work well under interview conditions.
4. When putting groups together to "play", "create", "compose", "write" music and lyrics make sure they h
Sheeesh BBC (Score:1)
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I'm a fan of the BBC, but this is hardly "news" when there's whole book on it circa 2015... https://www.amazon.com/Song-Ma... [amazon.com]
Sure - I've known for a long time that most pop music is written by a few folks in Sweden, and is just a collection of hooks without actual meaning, and lots of autotune and fake emoting.
But let's not make the mistake of expecting that a news story not be made because we've personally already heard it before. Some folks haven't.
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Sure - I've known for a long time that most pop music is written by a few folks in Sweden, and is just a collection of hooks without actual meaning, and lots of autotune and fake emoting.
I don't like most of that stuff either but I don't think what you say about hooks is fair. One could make the same criticism of Mozart also. Mozart was a tunesmith and mostly wrote totally abstract music with no meaning. That doesn't stop him being widely considered a genius.
Just what we needed (Score:1)
Just what we needed, a clear, scientific explanation of why pop sucks so much.
crimes against music (Score:2)
The evidence before the court is Incontrovertible!
There's no need for the jury to retire.
In all my years of judging,
I have never heard before
Of someone more deserving
Of the full penalty of law
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Hehehehehe...good one!!
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I don't know about golf, but I like them little meatballs.
One problem (Score:2, Offtopic)
We can argue that it's not possible to have true socialism since the people will never be able to claim ownership of the means of production from a ruling elite, but we're not arguing if socialism is _possible_, we're arguing over the definition.
As for possible, sur
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Your Venezuela statistic is flawed by the fact that as more businesses and industries in Venezuela were nationalized, they each began shrinking in size over time. So if you're just measuring as a percentage of GDP, it looks like over time as more were taken over (and then shrank in output), their % of the total gets smaller. In 2010 the "private" part was considered to be 2/3 of the economy and much more has been nationalized and put under government control since then.
Tl;DR version: Your stat is mostly ref
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Eh, who cares? It's just a bunch of monkey chatter anyway...
I kinda wonder if mathematics isn't expressed better through music than all those number and stuff. Sometimes an error is easier to hear than it is to see.
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He had his fricken honeymoon in Moscow during the height of the Cold War? When Russia was 1000x the threat it is today?
What would we say to any modern politician who took his honeymoon in Russia? It would firmly place him outside the mainstream as an extremist.
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So capitalism is great at fostering individual musical expressions, but socialism helps foster lowest-common-denominator musical pablum. Got it.
(Of course the tiny problem with this theory is that Sweden isn't really socialist. "Sweden is not socialist -- because the government doesn't own the means of production. To see that, you have to go to Venezuela or Cuba or North Korea.")
The other tiny problem is that manufactured music is very popular in capitalist countries.
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Yes, but I doubt it is because of its intrinsic music quality. Real musicians are expensive and they like paying. So if you are basically a guy or gal with a music idea, you can (1) form a band, practice your ass off, and shove the result in front of some clueless music exec., or (2) Buy a computer, some software, lay down some electonic tracks, and shove the result in front of some music exec.
If you are a clueless music exec., you get two submissions, one from an entire band who wants paying, or one from a