WHY THE MUSIC INDUSTRY STILL NEEDS TASTE MAKERS

Why the Music Industry Still Needs Taste Makers

Posted on 26. May, 2009 by refe in MUSIC INDUSTRY

It used to be the record label’s jobs to tell us who to listen to. A&R would scour the earth looking talent, groom them, coach them and surround them with people who could get them where they wanted to go. If the label caught the scout’s vision they would sign the act and fund a record or two. There was a process. It wasn’t perfect, but a process nonetheless. Label’s stopped doing this years ago. Maybe it was MTV that started the decline of artist and repertoire. Label’s saw the money that could be made off a pretty face and their priorities began to change. Before you knew it Britney Spears was at the top of the charts. Once the majors began to consolidate and were gobbled up by companies run by executives who hadn’t played a record since the Carpenters, the role of Taste-maker belonged to fewer and fewer entities who cared less and less about the art of music.

As listeners began realizing that they were being fed a diet of insubstantial junk, it was the beginning of the end for the industry. You can blame Napster all you want, but what made Napster so appealing was that it exposed fans to music they had never had access to when the major labels were running the show. It was like one massive, world-wide mix tape that anyone with a broadband connection could tap into. Independent bands started to realize that people in places they had never even toured were not only listening to their music, but were sharing it with their friends.

Now new tracks are pouring onto the Internet like auto workers into a state unemployment office. Except there’s no line, and nobody working behind the counter. Armed with a free copy of Garageband and the vague hope that someone, somewhere might listen, scores of nameless musicians are doing their best to take advantage of the new digital frontier. It’s largely the same situation for listeners. A music fan who logs onto MySpace looking for fresh tracks could spend endless hours scrolling through band profiles, probably finding more misses than hits. It might take weeks before they uncover something that really gets inside them.

The major labels dropped the ball. The world needs taste-makers. People want help discovering new music. When the labels couldn’t be trusted, at least the world always had independent record stores. The fact that music lovers were willing to weather the elitist condescension of record store employees is proof of this – people want someone to tell them what they should like! Of course, record stores were a casualty of the digital revolution, too. An unintended and unfortunate casualty, but I’m not sure any amount of wistful nostalgia can bring them back now (though there are many who still try - and God bless them.)

This is why services like Last.fm make such big deal about their ‘recommendation engines.’ They’ve created a system built on crowd-sourcing and meta-tags in order to fill the taste-maker void. It works ok – I have found a few artists through Last.fm that I’ve now added to my regular rotation. But crowds are stupid. The individual members of a crowd might by intelligent and capable, but put them together – stupid. Read Malcom Gladwell’s Blink if you don’t believe me, he’ll convince you. 75% of the songs that end up on my Last.fm station are either mediocre or downright terrible.

I know there is more good music out there - but where is it? We need people and services to step up and tell us where to find the good stuff so that we don’t have to waste so much time on the filler. Technology can help but real people need to be involved, too. Pandora has a good start, using over 50 actual humans to analyze a host of criteria when making recommendations. Mufin is brand new, and looks like it may be the most comprehensive recommendation engine to date. But even these options don’t feel human, so they don’t carry much weight. People don’t want recommendation engines, they want to hear someone they trust raving about an artist they love. Maybe it will be bloggers, maybe indie labels will step up to the plate, or maybe someone will create an engine that really does the trick. Either way, in our post record industry world, the sooner the new taste-makers emerge the sooner the real talent will have a chance to rise more quickly to the top. That’s good for everybody – except maybe the filler.

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Tags: bands, business models, INNOVATION, MUSIC INDUSTRY, music streaming

16 Responses to “Why the Music Industry Still Needs Taste Makers”

Music Discovery - Hot Or Not? | Snowcrashing

30. May, 2009

[...] Why The Music Industry Still Needs Taste-Makers – Creative Deconstruction – On the need (especially for the average user) to have human/human-like taste-makers who tell you what’s worth listening to [...]

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Ta4ka

11. Jun, 2009

This is a greath post right on the mark. I have created a website http://www.ilovethismusic.com just for this purpose: To help people(including me) find new music. I think I will sit down really carefully this summer and think about ways I can make a better engine for music recommendation.

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Chris Cruz

11. Jun, 2009

HypeM.com is a good solution if you’re into indie/rock/blog house. But when I look for new music to fill up my ipod I dont trust robotic music recomendation algorithyms. Pandora or Last.fm can’t tell me what a good album cut from a shitty album filler. To me pandora is just good to play continuous music close to your taste while you’re at work.

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refe

11. Jun, 2009

I think most people share your opinion about the reccommendation engines. None of them have really been successful enough often enough for people to really rely on them. Besides – a human voice will always carry more wait than ones and zeros when it comes to music.

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Dtwalsh

15. Jun, 2009

Personally, I love the fact that music isn’t really a “curated” world in the way it used to be when labels and radio were the only ways to hear new music handpicked by suits at the majors. I mean, look at what we’re being spoon-fed on commercial radio nowadays….that’s the “human factor” picking your music for you.

But there are great new sources for finding great new music on your own. What about Other Music? Daytrotter? Fingertips? You just have to commit the time and energy to digging for it, or add these feeds to your regular reading.

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refe

15. Jun, 2009

What we’re being spoon-fed on commercial radio has nothing to do with taste. And trolling the net endlessly to find a few good tracks may be fun for some, but others want to spend more time hearing good music and less time looking for it.

The sites you mentioned are great – especially Daytrotter. Again, it’s about the human element. Read their bios – there’s nothing fancy about the way they pick who they feature. They simply bring out what they like and that’s what makes it work.

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Andrew McMillen

29. Jun, 2009

A good read, but you completely neglected to mention the role of music critics. Do you perceive that professional music writers and reviewers are without value? Their absence in this article seems to indicate that outcome.

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- refe
  
  29. Jun, 2009
  
  Your right – I didn’t mention music critics. Not intentionally, but it’s a good observation.
  
  Critics didn’t play a very direct role in shaping my early musical tastes, to be honest. I guess growing up the local scene that I was a part of always had a bit of a distrust toward them.
  
  This isn’t something I’ve thought a lot about, so take it for what it’s worth, but I think that for a music critic to be relevant in the social media world they’d have to be more than a critic – they would have to be a personality themselves. To effectively shape the way people look at music they have to have some level of trust or respect for you, and for that they have to feel like they know you. Thankfully, that type of relationship has been made pretty accessible through social media.
  
  I took the liberty of checking out your site (enjoyed it quite a bit, actually) and couldn’t help but notice that you yourself are a music critic. I’d be interested to hear your thoughts. Do you feel like you and your ilk have been successful or effective as tastemakers?
  
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Andrew McMillen

30. Jun, 2009

I’d be a complete liar if I said I’d never listened to a band based on a positive review of their disc or live show. I’m a heavy reader, so the people who write for print/web have more traction as tastemakers in my life than radio, or the recommendation engines you mentioned.

I’m largely a live music critic, which means that I’m aware of most bands that I’m to review before seeing them. So there’s that exploration phase that every music fan goes through when finding new artists, and deciding on who’s worth their time. My role as a live critic has shifted since I began two years ago, as I’m now much more focused on the performances on the night, instead of wasting words on periphery events. If you’re interested, you can view my reviews at http://last.fm/user/NiteShok/journal

Like you said, there’s more music being uploaded each day than you could ever hope to keep up with. And much of it will be outside your tastes. Which is where the role of the tastemaker comes in: to wade through the shit and find the gold.

A side note – are you aware of http://wearehunted.com? It’s an aggregator that charts the most talked-about tracks online each day.

I believe that there’ll always be an interest in reading critical appraisal of musicians’ works. Perhaps the hardest part for someone who sets out to fulfill the tastemaker role is to choose their medium: blog, Twitter, mailing list, all of the above, or am I missing something?

Cheers Refe.

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Darragh

30. Jun, 2009

Hrm, a thought-provoking post. However, I’m often troubled by the concept of ‘taste making critics’, indeed by the title. It infers that some people know what they are talking about and some don’t, and I think that is an unfair distinction. I really hate the prefix ‘taste maker’, it is inaccurate and ambiguous.

From what I read here, what differentiates ‘hits’ from ‘filler’ is what the taste-maker critic tells me. Just like the ‘gate-keeping’ editor in news journalism – what makes the paper is what the editor likes – but, as we’ve seen many a time, this isn’t often the full story.

Don’t get me wrong, I’m respectful of those who take the time and effort to blog about the music they love, but I’m conscious that what taste-makers choose to write about is based purely on subjectivity. Sometimes I like music that certain taste-makers might not, should I feel guilty about that?

Sometimes, It almost seems that taste-makers need people to think they require people to tell them what are hits and what ain’t to justify their own occupation or hobby or what not. Do people really want to be told what to like or not? Well, some people will do, others won’t.

I think a great philosophy towards critical music writing is to be honest but never disguise for a second that the perspective one takes is purely their own. I also think it is a waste of time and words to write about stuff you don’t like. I don’t see how that is constructive at all. I realise that if someone was in the music magazine business that you are forced to attempt to take an objective standpoint, but since musical taste seems impossible to measure, it therefore is impossible to be objective.

Anyway, good article, made me think, made me write these fairly jumbled up thoughts!

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- refe
  
  30. Jun, 2009
  
  I don’t think it’s supposed to be objective at all – it’s 100% subjective and that’s the point. Being a taste maker isn’t about convincing people that they should like this band or that, nor is it about factually proving the quality of a piece of music. And of course there will be people who disagree with the taste makers – I don’t think a blogger, critic, or DJ could have any credibility otherwise.
  
  As I said before, it’s really about trust and respect. I imagine that it would be very difficult to set a goal and say, “I will become an international taste maker.” It’s much more organic that that. The trust, respect and relationship that are necessary for a person’s opinion to matter take time to develop.
  
  You’re right though, not everyone wants to have their tastes influenced. (Of course, they are being influenced whether they like it or not!) But I think the majority of people appreciate having a trustworthy voice to tell them what to listen to and what to like.
  
  Reply to this comment
  - Darragh
    
    30. Jun, 2009
    
    Totally agree with the trustworthy voice approach. I guess I’m more just annoyed at the taste-making approach that Pitchfork and the like seem to promote – one that often seems to try make different sets of music fans feel inadequate simply for liking a band or a certain record, often posting articles that not only seem to attack certain bands and records but also the reader as well.
    
    Reply to this comment
Why the Music Industry Still Needs Taste Makers | State of Mind of The Arts

01. Jul, 2009

[...] Syndicated from: Creative Deconstruction [...]

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karl

18. Jul, 2009

the record companies are only half the problem. Most people discovered new music via radio stations- this has always been a problem-their Narrow focus & attitude of ‘Music fills the gaps between commercials’ has always made it hard to get anything new played! I’ve spent years in the music industry & am investing heavily in my website http://www.whotune.com for Unsigned/indie artists. It VERY new but already the quality of music is astounding! it has a 24/7 radio station playing music from the site- top 20 voted for by listeners, ‘ya gotta hear this’ songs we like ourselves or think you will like Plus you can search the entire database VERY easily. Its a social network site for the music industry & fans of new music. Im adding new features & have a great ‘Live’ option coming soon (2 wweks!) im very excited about this feature! plus instant messaging & a shopping carte coming. check it out- register- its all FREE to use. Cheers everyone! http://www.whotune.com/karl_-_whotune

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31. Aug, 2009

[...] WHY THE MUSIC INDUSTRY STILL NEEDS TASTE MAKERS | creative deconstruction http://www.creativedeconstruction.com/2009/05/why-the-music-industry-still-needs-taste-makers – view page – cached The sooner new taste-makers emerge, the sooner the real talent will have be ableto rise more quickly to the top. That's good for everybody – except the filler. — From the page [...]

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Fritz Gerlich

15. Oct, 2009

Although it’s something I never do, a friend told me the best way to discover new music is to find a nice private torrent tracker, and overtime identify uploaders whose taste you trust and download whatever they upload. If someone takes the time to rip and scan an album, they probably like it. This won’t work as well on big giant trackers (especially those that treat ratio like some kind thing to be rationed like silk in WWII). But on a small to medium sized site, you can connect with real music fans and share in their tastes.

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