Quote:
Originally Posted by Hasbinbad
[You must be logged in to view images. Log in or Register.]
However, musicians mostly make music as a job, and as most consumers are 12 year old girls, the evolution of pop. It's kind of like artistic Idiocracy.
|
I could start writing a tome in response to this having been engaged academically/personally/socially with the topic, though not so appropriate here. I'll do my best to simply and briefly disagree (hah).
Here:
"Music as career" has indeed, loosely and generally speaking, always been the case historically, though along with the other arts it was pretty much a practice driven by more primary factors, say, you were
born into it (gypsies, castes, etc). Performance is tied to social role, spirituality, etc. Accumulated wealth was consequential. That dynamic still exists in some respects, most akin to forms of folk music.
This, however, is where it gets more complicated. Folk music in that sense cannot be consumed (key word of yours btw) by an audience of any considerable size, so... yep, you have to
record it. The paradox: accessibility, variety, exposure and the like increase; while the ability to package and distribute (and we all know that commodification leads to alienation!) goes up as well.
Now your evolution of pop
takes the stage (lawl). Without audio recording and the creation/marketing of genres, pop music doesn't exist. A few things first though - Most consumers are definitely not 12 year old girls, BUT kids ARE the most impressionable audience. The receipt from each box of Fruit Loops and Jonas Brothers album is nestled inside a parent's wallet, so yeah there is a special focus on them. That's kind of beside the point though, as marketers have crafted oodles of terms and price-tags for EVERYONE and EVERYTHING imaginable. Chalking up the creation of popular music to teenagers driving tendentiously paycheck-seeking musicians is a bit of a dead end, especially given that "teenagers" didn't even exist until marketing execs created them. It also ignores cases like the inception of punk, or even the entire underground music scene of a nation like China, where seeking wide distribution (or "selling out") is not only faux pas, it's not even a viable job option because the "market hasn't yet matured." There is no paycheck to seek.
There's that saying, "You can't call yourself a musician/actor/artist until you get PAID to do it." I can't prove it, but I'd bet all of my jaw harps on the argument that this gained currency *after* the marketing of recorded media.
Quote:
|
Originally Posted by Hasbinbad
Most people listen to music for entertainment. Musical appreciation is what you're talking about, and that is generally reserved for musicians themselves or people who give a shit.
|
Absolutely, but the whole radical and disproportionate division between populations of appreciators and entertainment-seekers came about for the reasons mentioned above. Reifying a dichotomy that registers as flaming BS to us is counterintuitive!