The Turntable - The Modern Music Formula: Flawed & Broken

The Turntable - The Modern Music Formula: Flawed & Broken

The modern music formula is flawed and broken. Present day society, technological advancements in the musical marketplace, and a growing demand of one hit wonders adds to the disaster that is the current musical standard. With this column, I’ll take a look at why this is, what causes it, and what the inevitable outcome will be. 

While it pioneered the modern way we buy and listen to music, iTunes has destroyed the need and expectation of a decent album. In the 60’s and 70’s, an artist had to take great care in writing and designing the best tracks possible, because on LP, you had to buy and listen to it all! You couldn’t pick what track you wanted, and you couldn’t really skip to one with ease, either. That’s why artists had to care about each song on the album. For a wonderful example of this, see my Classic Album Review of Born to Run to be posted later this week. 

Fun: A Band That Embodies Everything Wrong. 

When iTunes came along, artists could decide to not give a flying crap, as long as their title track was half-way decent. Let’s face it, do you honestly know, or like, any of the other songs from Some Nights aside from the title track and We Are Young? 

When you love a band of whom you only actually know one song from, an issue arises: It creates a musically shallow society with lack of diverse taste — or good taste — and it also creates an opportunity for bands to create a formula that they know you’ll keep buying. Take Mumford & Sons for example, a rare band in today’s music, considering they are creating a mainstream folk sound, and are legitimately talented. Even they have created a formula that they know you will keep buying over and over, so they really don’t have to do much work from album to album. (Will upload my Mumford & Sons Song Formula this week as well)

Finally, the latter creates one giant issue. If bands are allowed to create crappy albums with one or two good songs, and they are allowed to make each of those albums sound basically the same as the last... then where does our generation create musical legacies? Do you really think AWOL NATION is going to be our generation’s Beatles, Bob Dylan, or Bruce Springsteen? Do we really have any bands or artists that hold longevity? Every great artist who has stood the test of time hasn’t used this formula. They created masterpiece albums over a massive musical career spanning decades and generations because they were constantly updating their sound and changing their music. I suppose we’ll have to wait and see, but something tells me that when we play music for our kids, we’ll be playing them our parent’s music, not ours, because ours won’t hold the legacy or stand the time.

- Brett Stewart - Editor & Publisher of Strike - Columnist for the Turntable.