Musically Obsolete

I recently read an article about the death of rock music. Sure, many people may have said that over the years, but the numbers quoted in the article seemed pretty compelling - rock music is rapidly disappearing from the charts. Maybe there's only so many new ways you can use a drum kit, a bass, one or two guitars and a vocalist. After hearing a thousand songs, there aren't many fundamentally different chord progressions or rhythms or drum sounds.

The same would be true for most genres. After the pioneers have come in and created a fresh sound, and the second wave of artists have pushed the boundaries and made the style as popular as it's ever going to be (I'm simplifying and generalizing here), there isn't that much further for the style to go. Every style eventually makes way for the next.

How we approach change is for each of us to decide. If we've built up a lot of experience in a particular style, we may be loath to move on to something new (though hopefully most of our experience can be readily adapted to the new sounds we're working with). A lot of people will say that we should make the music we love, and not worry about genre definitions. There is some truth to that, and hopefully most of the time we're working on music we enjoy. But, as in other areas of life, it's good to be flexible about the genres we work in. How much we want to specialize and excel in one particular style is up to each of us. Maybe the audience size is of little importance to us. In any case, the internet makes it easier to reach a widely scattered niche audience. Or maybe audience size is very important, and we'd like to have a lot of people enjoying our work, meaning we invest a lot of time in listening to what's popular and seek inspiration there. This isn't necessarily selling out - at any point in time there are several popular genres, and it'd be unfortunate if none of them appealed to us.

It can be disheartening to realize that we're working in a style which is on the way down (if not yet out). One way to combat this, even if there's not much room to push the genre on a production level, is to write great songs. A really catchy melody or hook over a strong, effective chord progression will connect with people (and may lead to the song being covered in more popular styles in the decades to come). A great melody doesn't seem to go out of style. So, a good question for those of us working in more marginal styles would be "is this a really good song I'm working on? If I strip away all the production and it was played by someone on a piano or a guitar or some other instrument, is it a really good song?" If not, maybe we're creating fantastically produced filler, destined to sink without a trace.

Keep making great music!
Fabian