I get the joke, but Enrico Caruso was orders of magnitude bigger than Jolson in the first quarter of the 20th century. I think you can make a case that Vernon Dalhart was bigger than Jolson by 1925, but we all know how the industry didn’t want people to notice their hillbilly and blues artists during that era.
I suspect another reason that radio was able to not pay artists was that it could argue that just playing the song provided value to the artists. If a song didn't get played on the radio, no one would hear it and want to go buy the album. The more a song was played, the better it was for sales (unless the song was overplayed and everyone got sick of it). That's not true anymore.
There was a point in the early 2010s where portions of track guy-created demos wound up on the radio. Blake Shelton's song 'Boys Round Here' was probably the most famous example, where they took some of the original demo Dallas Davidson and his cowriters recorded, added some parts and Shelton's & Pistol Annies' voices on top of it, and put it out there. So I wouldn't be surprised if we end up getting country songs with AI generated instrumentals because "studio musicians just can't replicate the vibe of this Suno demo" and because it helps the labels' bottom lines not to have to pay humans to record the parts of a song they don't think anyone cares about and won't notice if they're generated.
I think you’re right. But what fascinated me is that country is always held up as the pure genre that you would least expect that from. Never heard that Blake Shelton story
This is the original demo: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x9X4EyfTnLI&t=42 Compare it to the single and you'll hear what I mean. It's interesting that they chose to go that route and I think it works for the song but I remember Shelton getting some flak about it at the time.
I feel like "country is pure" is part of the marketing, much like food that uses adjectives like "simple, honest, natural" etc. Country has been just as trend chasing as pop for a long time (usually just 20 years behind the times) and while it's an industry ruled by suits who make decisions about who cuts which songs, etc, a lot of the "Nashville sound" is guided by the tastes of the artists and producers. Nashville became a refuge for hairband guys after grunge and so a lot of their tastes found their way into the songwriting and production process and you'll notice some of the especially 2000s mainstream country has a lot in common with 80s rock. But now that you have a lot of younger people reared on pop and hip hop coming up adopting those attitudes and sounds in their writing and production, there's a lot of letting go of past mores and attitudes. And given that songwriting is a field with increasingly meager returns, it makes sense that they'd start going the AI demo route sadly.
Anna’sArchive’s justification is the same kind of ideals that Spotify started with— democratizing music. It’s incredible how easily fooled humans can be by their own superior ethical point of view when given power. “What starts out as a cause, turns into a movement and ends up as a racket.”
I get the joke, but Enrico Caruso was orders of magnitude bigger than Jolson in the first quarter of the 20th century. I think you can make a case that Vernon Dalhart was bigger than Jolson by 1925, but we all know how the industry didn’t want people to notice their hillbilly and blues artists during that era.
I suspect another reason that radio was able to not pay artists was that it could argue that just playing the song provided value to the artists. If a song didn't get played on the radio, no one would hear it and want to go buy the album. The more a song was played, the better it was for sales (unless the song was overplayed and everyone got sick of it). That's not true anymore.
There was a point in the early 2010s where portions of track guy-created demos wound up on the radio. Blake Shelton's song 'Boys Round Here' was probably the most famous example, where they took some of the original demo Dallas Davidson and his cowriters recorded, added some parts and Shelton's & Pistol Annies' voices on top of it, and put it out there. So I wouldn't be surprised if we end up getting country songs with AI generated instrumentals because "studio musicians just can't replicate the vibe of this Suno demo" and because it helps the labels' bottom lines not to have to pay humans to record the parts of a song they don't think anyone cares about and won't notice if they're generated.
I think you’re right. But what fascinated me is that country is always held up as the pure genre that you would least expect that from. Never heard that Blake Shelton story
This is the original demo: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x9X4EyfTnLI&t=42 Compare it to the single and you'll hear what I mean. It's interesting that they chose to go that route and I think it works for the song but I remember Shelton getting some flak about it at the time.
I feel like "country is pure" is part of the marketing, much like food that uses adjectives like "simple, honest, natural" etc. Country has been just as trend chasing as pop for a long time (usually just 20 years behind the times) and while it's an industry ruled by suits who make decisions about who cuts which songs, etc, a lot of the "Nashville sound" is guided by the tastes of the artists and producers. Nashville became a refuge for hairband guys after grunge and so a lot of their tastes found their way into the songwriting and production process and you'll notice some of the especially 2000s mainstream country has a lot in common with 80s rock. But now that you have a lot of younger people reared on pop and hip hop coming up adopting those attitudes and sounds in their writing and production, there's a lot of letting go of past mores and attitudes. And given that songwriting is a field with increasingly meager returns, it makes sense that they'd start going the AI demo route sadly.
Anna’sArchive’s justification is the same kind of ideals that Spotify started with— democratizing music. It’s incredible how easily fooled humans can be by their own superior ethical point of view when given power. “What starts out as a cause, turns into a movement and ends up as a racket.”