The Internet is Bad for Music
But maybe not for the reasons you think
I write songs and record original music in a home studio using Apple Logic Pro software. The possibilities of the program are endless. If I want a vocal part sung by one person to sound like a ten-member gospel choir, I can do that. If I want the distorted lead guitar solo I just recorded to sound like an oboe instead, I can make that happen in seconds. There’s a learning curve involved in navigating the software, but all the information is out there if you’re willing to put in the time. I learned most of what I know about audio production from an eighteen-year-old kid on YouTube. It’s fun playing with sounds. Anything you can imagine is possible, and the number of tracks you can add to a song is virtually unlimited (tracks, in this case, being just another word for different recorded musical parts, e.g., the lead vocal part, the lead guitar part, the cowbell part). But when it comes to producing interesting music, the lack of limitation can be problematic.
Pop Overload
I’m not a snob about pop music. I’ve never considered it inferior to music that’s labeled alternative or underground, even as my listening tastes have trended more in the direction of lesser-known artists over time. I grew up on—and still love—pop music of the 1980s. It would be hypocritical of me to write off current pop music entirely without giving it a chance. Besides, I like discovering and being surprised by new music, so I use my three young adult stepchildren as a conduit to what’s happening.
There are flashes of interest in what they play for me. Olivia Rodrigo and Billie Eilish, for example, are both talented songwriters with undeniable gifts for melody and surprisingly sophisticated lyrics (considering their ages). I like some of their songs. Unfortunately though, most of what I hear leaves me cold. Sometimes, it’s because the songs are too obviously derivative or just plain poorly constructed, but just as often, I’ve found it difficult to say exactly what it is I don’t like. All I can come up with sometimes is that it’s just… bad. For a while, I chalked my criticism up to age. I figured I must simply be yet another out-of-touch old guy, grumbling about how much better music used to be. But lately, I’ve been thinking it has a lot to do with the way modern pop music is recorded, which brings me back to my first paragraph.
There is a major trend in popular music recording of overloading songs with too many ideas. Because technology has made it so quick and easy for artists to add every fleeting idea to a song, as it occurs to them, in the form of unlimited track space, that’s exactly what is happening. The result is music that is packed—and packed tightly (using an audio effect called compression)—with countless mediocre ideas. I’ll spare you a detailed explanation of compression because I barely understand it myself, but in essence, compression evens out the volume of a song, making the loud parts quieter and the quiet parts louder, thereby making it possible to hear all of the parts in a dense song mix with more clarity. Sounds good, right? And it is, until you take it too far and heavily compress a song consisting of over a hundred tracks. The human ear can only take in so many sounds at once. That is the problem I encounter with a lot of modern pop music. There is no breathing space in the recordings. They are too densely packed with sound.
Negative = Positive
In visual art, the term negative space is used to define the parts of an image that surround the primary subject(s). It’s the blue sky that surrounds the cloud, the white background that defines the black silhouette of a face in profile. Without negative space, there are no outlines, no borders, nothing to offer the eye focus and rest, and ultimately, there is no meaning. The same is true for music. In music the negative space is silence. It’s the quiet spaces that give a song structure. Without silence there is no balance. Without a little space between the notes, there is no harmony.
New ideas pop into musician’s heads constantly in the process of recording songs. That’s always been the case. The trick is in the editing, in taking the time to choose the best ideas, the ideas that truly enhance a song. It takes trial and error, repeated listening, and ideally, interaction with other musicians to determine what those best ideas are, and to put aside the ideas that, while they might sound promising at first, actually detract from what makes a song work.
Which brings me to my final point. Producing good music demands taking your time. Dreaming up melodies, writing intelligent, moving lyrics, these things require time spent with your instrument, time spent living a life of observation and introspection, so you have something meaningful to write about when the time comes, something that resonates with other humans. Not to mention the time spent arranging the instrumental parts of a song, and the labor of recording and mixing. But the internet, where most music lives these days, thrives on speed. It demands to be fed content, relentlessly. If you want the algorithm to move you up the list of who gets noticed, you’d better produce more songs, faster. It’s a factory mentality. Quantity over quality. More songs jammed with more and more tracks. More data for the machine.
Despite the trends, it is sort of incredible (if not a little sad), that there is still plenty of good music out there on the internet, waiting to be heard. It won’t come to you; you have to be willing to look for it, and I suppose therein lies the problem. You have to want it enough to look past what the algorithm serves you. I don’t think that’s a step most people are motivated to take right now, but I’m hoping for a change.