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Why popular music is shit, and why shit music is so popular.

(or, Advertising is the Enemy of Art)

Music can send shivers down your spine, make your hair stand on end, break your heart or warm it, make you dance, laugh, cry. It can be wistful, scary, or fun, it can be mind-boggling, it can be transcendental. Imagine for a moment that all the emotional/intellectual/sexual/etc effects that music can have on a person are due to a special ingredient that can be found in varying concentrations in different pieces of music. The more of this ingredient there is, the more stimulation a piece of music provides. Some music catches your heart and makes your jaw drop in amazement, and therefore could be said to contain lots of the special ingredient, other music evokes very mild feelings, if any, and so could be said to contain very little. For the sake of argument, let's call the special ingredient 'E999'.

Now, consider the commercial music media - radio stations, music television, the music press. In the western world most people receive a very large proportion of their exposure to music through this industry, which makes money (and therefore enables itself to exist), by using music to get people to listen to ads. Where does MTV get its money? Advertising. Where does FM104 get its money? Advertising. Where does Smash Hits get (most of) its money? Advertising.

Obviously, the point of advertising is to get people to buy stuff. In order to get value for money, organisations paying for advertising try to make sure their ads are exposed to people who will respond to them (by buying the stuff that's being advertised). Whether an individual responds to a particular ad campaign depends on many things - their age, their background, whether they can afford the product on offer. Also, some people are more easily persuaded, more susceptible to advertising, than others, and are more likely to respond to advertising than other people of similar age, and with similar backgrounds and incomes.

It is relatively straightforward for an advertiser to target people of a certain age, or with a certain income, but how is it possible to identify people who are susceptible to advertising? Imagine for a moment that taste-free chocolate, or odour-free perfume, existed. These products are missing the qualities that people actually buy them for, so if someone did buy them it would be a clear indication of two things - firstly that the agency hired to promote the products was very good at its job, and secondly that the consumer had bought the products purely on account of the promotional campaign. The latter is a pretty emphatic demonstration of that particular consumer's susceptibility to marketing.

Any mainstream music industry hack will tell you that music is a product like any other, and the techniques used to promote music are similar to those used to sell other products - placement in the media (radio, TV, films, print), ads in hip magazines, endorsements from well-regarded public figures, association with particular lifestyles and personal qualities (what do your listening preferences say about YOU?). E999 is, by definition, the special thing people listen to music for (equivalent to the fragrance of perfume or the taste of chocolate) so if E999-free music existed, any time that people spent listening to it would be purely on account of the marketing campaign promoting it. Listeners would, by listening, be highlighting their susceptibility to marketing.

Now, imagine two competing radio stations with similar listener profiles. The first plays music containing very little E999 and the second plays music with lots. Organisations who advertise on the first are getting their adverts listened to by an audience which is highly susceptible to marketing (because only people susceptible to marketing will have a reason to listen to low-E999 music), and therefore will sell more of their products than competitors who advertise on the second station. Because of its advertisers' success, the first station will have more advertising revenue available to it, and will make more money. The second station will find its competitive position weakening relative to the first. This may made worse by advertisers noticing the difference in the success of their ads and switching to the first station in order to boost sales. In any case, the only way the second station can maintain its competitiveness with the first is to increase the proportion of its listeners who are advertising-susceptible - by changing its music policy.

This is what biologists call a selection pressure - advertiser-funded music outlets are under pressure to feature music with less E999, because those that do so will be more successful than those that do not. The pressure to lower E999 content feeds back to the organisations that supply the music media with music, the record companies. As placement in the media (airplay, reviews, etc.) is one of the most important tools record companies use to sell their records, so those among them which supply music with less E999, and thus get more exposure, will be more successful (sell more records).

So, because of the selection pressure against E999-rich music caused by advertising, we can expect the majority of music produced by the record companies (especially the wealthiest) and presented to us through the advertiser-funded music media (especially the most successful) to have a low E999 content.

How does this match up to music and the media as we know them? Objective measurement of the E999 content of music is obviously not possible. However, we can look for evidence of the predominance of low-E999 music by examining the attitudes to commercial music found among different groups of listeners. As E999 is the thing that stimulates strong feelings in the listener, people who regularly listen to music with a high E999 content could be expected to regard low-E999 music, by contrast, as bland. So, if commercial music is dominated by low-E999 music, people who regularly hear music from outside the regular commercial channels - people who listen to non-commercial radio stations, who buy records that don't get played on MTV, who use the internet to find music, and who therefore have a chance to hear more E999-rich music - should be found to regard most of the music which can be heard/read about in the most successful music media as bland.