Showing all posts about music
Bad news sells but negative lyrics also sell songs
24 October 2022
In a study published in 2019 by Cambridge University Press, researchers found the lyrics of pop songs have become increasingly negative in the last thirty years. They reached this conclusion after analysing the emotional content of more than 160,000 songs released between 1965 and 2015.
One major trend in popular music, as well as other cultural products such as literary fiction, is an increase over time in negatively valenced emotional content, and a decrease in positively valenced emotional content.
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A timeline of electric guitar invention and innovation
19 September 2022
A timeline of electric guitar invention and innovation, by Dutch guitarist and tutor Paul Davids. Starting from 1950, when the Fender Telecaster guitar arrived — originally called Broadcaster — followed soon after of course by the Gibson Les Paul, and then right on through.
Almost all guitars currently on the market are either a direct descendant of, or very similar to, a handful of instruments that came to life during the span of one decade: the fifties.
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Relive the good old days of Daft Punk at the Daft Punk cafe
14 September 2022
The Daft Punk cafe, by Ukrainian developer, and fan of the erstwhile French electronic music duo, Vadim Demedes.
With daftpunk.cafe, I wanted to create a fun corner on the internet for Daft Punk fans around the world. Listen to the radio, play some tetris or test your knowledge of track names and just have a good time!
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The ingenious sampling techniques of Daft Punk
3 September 2022
Fans of defunct French electronic music act Daft Punk will love this… Sample Breakdown, by Tracklib, shows how Thomas Bangalter and Guy-Manuel de Homem-Christo composed some of their signature tracks.
Oh to have a job that required listening to just about every recorded musical composition since the 1970s (it seems) in order to compose original material. And then to hone on just the right samples from a song, and create something else from it: amazing.
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Holiday new music from Australian band Crooked Colours
29 August 2022
Just what the doctor ordered on a Monday morning, Holiday, the new single from Perth, Australia, three-piece alternative dance act Crooked Colours.
Take me away…
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From woe to go Triple J ratings rebound in latest survey
26 August 2022
Last time I wrote about listener survey ratings for local and alternative music Australian radio station, Triple J, the news was not good for the broadcaster. Results of survey four for 2022, conducted between Sunday 22 May and Saturday 25 June, and released on Tuesday 5 July, showed a sharp fall in the number of people tuning in.
The findings of survey five though, where radio listeners were polled between Sunday 10 July and Saturday 13 August, revealed a jump in audience numbers, among Sydneysiders aged 18 to 24.
Australia’s national youth broadcaster Triple J has seen a noticeable bump in its key 18-24 demographic in the fifth radio survey of the year, after struggling with its core audience in Sydney for most of 2022. The latest survey has seen the broadcaster more than double its 18-24 audience share, leaping from 4.4 per cent to 9.6 per cent of all listeners in that age group.
Despite the overall increase of listeners in the 18-24 demographic, Triple J’s breakfast and morning shows saw a decrease in audience numbers.
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Jacoténe wins Triple J Unearthed High with I Need Therapy
12 August 2022
Talking of Triple J… Emerging Melbourne based Australian soul and pop singer Jacoténe has won the radio station’s Unearthed High for 2022, with her demo single I Need Therapy. Those vocals though…
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Triple J losing listeners to commercial radio, go figure
12 August 2022
Government funded, alternative music Australian radio station, Triple J has been losing listeners for sometime among their target demographic of 18 to 24 year olds, but recent surveys show the decline has picked up pace, as Tim Burrows at Unmade writes:
However, the fall for average listening to Triple J is much worse. Now, a much bigger proportion of that young listening audience is choosing commercial radio. In 2014, there were an average of 22,000 members of Triple J’s target audience listening at any given time. In the most recent survey in 2022, that had fallen to 10,000 – a fall of 55%.
What puzzles me is the migration to commercial radio though. Listeners haven’t gone to TikTok to discover and listen to music — at least not all of them — instead they’re tuning into commercial radio stations. Surely the ads that choke commercial radio broadcasts don’t have some sort of hitherto unrealised appeal to Generation Z?
I’m somewhat outside Triple J’s target audience, but one reason I still tune in (stream in) is precisely because there are no cheesy commercial jingles. There are ads of sorts on Triple J, but usually for other shows, and music related events and happenings. Certainly not the kind you encounter on commercial channels though.
And surely 18 to 24 year olds aren’t being turned off by Triple J’s focus on new Australian music? Interestingly, radio listenership in general is down some seventeen percent among those aged 18 to 24, so while the jays are losing audience share, they’re not the only ones.
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Vale Judith Durham, lead singer of the Seekers
8 August 2022
Judith Durham, lead singer of Australian folk/pop band the Seekers died last Friday, 5 August 2022, aged 79. Formed in 1962, the Seekers, along with Durham, who joined the group a year later, were among the first Australian music acts to achieve international success.
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Michael Spitzer: 40000 years of music history in 8 minutes
6 August 2022
Because music is so accessible today we’re drowning in it, says Michael Spitzer, professor of music at the University of Liverpool. That’s a far cry from a few hundred years ago when people attended, at best, two recitals in their lifetime, and music went unrecorded until 1877 when Thomas Edison invented the phonograph.
But the arrival of the phonograph is only a small part in the story of music. Changes in the way music was performed, and the instruments created to make that possible, evolved as we moved away from our hunter-gatherer roots, and eventually began living in towns. Spitzer’s recounting of forty-thousand years of musical development, in the space of eight minutes, is fascinating.
If you’re looking at the broad picture of the evolution of sapiens, then the epochs are hunter-gatherer, farming community, and then the founding of cities and city-states. Each of these epochs is associated with mentalities. So, hunter-gatherers tended to be nomadic. And if you’re essentially journeying through a landscape, what you don’t do is carry heavy instruments. Music has to be portable, ideally, just a voice or if not, a very light flute or a small percussive instrument. And if you look at the music that is played by the Cameroon Pygmies, every time they play a piece, it sounds different. It’s very much music of the moment.
Now, what changes when you invent farming? You settle down. And your whole mindset becomes fixed on the circle of the seasons, the circle of life. And you invent repeatable work. And the structure of the work becomes as cyclical as life itself. You invent a circle in music, invent musical rituals. And once music migrates from the farm to the town, certain changes happen. Instruments can become heavy because you start to set quite permanent roots into the town. You create heavy instruments like bells and gongs, but also very delicate ones like harps and lutes which would be damaged over a journey.
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