Trends in Music in the Next Decade

That curious quality is referred to as compression, a modification that is applied in the final stages of the production of a song… one that brings the levels of the drums, bass, vocals, and anything else in the song to the same ear-shattering point. This makes the song sound clear, strong, and more than anything else, loud. Some tracks that are anticipated by record labels to be hit singles are compressed even further beyond album levels so that they can be broadcast in full color on the radio, where audio fidelity is typically lost between the station and your antenna. That’s all fine and dandy, but what does this do to our perception of the music? What do we get when the quiet parts of a ballad are louder than they would be live, the bass rattles our license plate off of our bumper, and two measly guitars sound like a rod of solid steel assaulting your ear drums? Listening to top-forty radio has become a tiring experience, solely due to the fact that the songs are playing AT you, and not for you.

In the coming decade, there are three foreseeable outcomes. One, compression continues to polish and sheen popular music until listeners begin to think of these songs as a sort of musical fast food: empty calories, little nutritional value, and no nuances of taste. This could drive them to seek more refined and ‘gourmet’ lower fidelity music, songs that would be more palatable and easy on their ears. Or, the second option, compression is phased out due to the growing spectrum of listening options, such as satellite radio, which is clearer and more diverse than local radio broadcasts, or technologies with Pandora or iTrip-like functionality, which allows users to define and play their choice of music over a small area. Both of these future landscapes render radio and ‘radio rock’ passé and troglodytic, but are, unfortunately, unlikely. ‘The Man’ behind media conglomerates supports compression, or rather, doesn’t give a damn if you don’t, and artists with limited exposure and minimal compression are certainly finding niches without threatening the venerable bastion of corporation-supported broadcasts. In fact, independent artists seem to be finding their own response to compression: intentionally copious reverb. Reverb is now applied so liberally it has practically become a watermark of hipster approval.

The third foreseeable outcome would be the option of purchasing remastered, or rather, unmastered albums that are more true to the original sound of recording. Over 21,000 Metallica fans signed a petition to remix their recent release Death Magnetic, simply because the entire thing sounded like a jet taking off. Could this be the first wave of rebellion against the over-compressed nature of modern music?

Basement recordings of a woman playing the ukulele and singing songs influenced by the music of Mozambique (see photo: Tune Yards). Total fucking weirdos banging on toy guitars and trash can lids (see: Micachu and the Shapes). Polyrhythmic synthesizer beats with bone-crunching guitar laid over it (see: Battles). Anything is the new punk. What’s been defined up until now as ‘punk’ still has rote chord structures, obvious timbres, and desperately potent lyrical approaches. This can be seen across all of punk’s widely splintered sub-genres… the term punk gets thrown around without abandon, from bands like Wavves to Motorhead. Just because something is loud, fast, or fuzzed out does not drop it into a specific category… remember kids, correlation does not imply causation. Perhaps in a few years we will have a better word than ‘punk’ to describe the erratic tangent of honest music.

Categorizing music has become not only an art, but mastery. Is this acid or grime? Dream Pop or Shoegaze? Miscategorization is almost an inevitability. The fragmentation of core musical ambition through 2010 has been tremendous, and we can expect that to continue into the new decade. Expect new Joanna Newsoms to build enormous followings on Youtube, or bands like the Fuck Buttons to embark upon huge national tours. To hell with classification, to hell with anything typical, the new punk is doing whatever the fuck you want and putting it online in hopes that an art student from Portugal will make a video out of it for you and you’ll be able to tour with the Dirty Projectors.

The music industry is already referred to as ‘the lottery’ by many downtrodden musical acts. And it certainly seems that way. Was Fall Out Boy truly fresh and new when they came out with Grand Theft Autumn, or did they get a huge leg up from their record label? Music is a business, first and foremost. Record companies are most likely to put out albums that test well with their target demographics: namely, 12-16 year old girls. To quote Paul Simon, “I’ve had the pleasure of working with some of the best musicians in the world, and most of them are guys no one has ever heard of.”

It’s an old story that pirating music is illegal and blah blah blah. Nothing is going to change the proliferation of music sharing, because, fundamentally, music is intended for the listener, and is thus democratized on an unprosecutable scale. This puts some musicians in a hard financial spot, but with today’s technology, albums recorded in a basement in Minnesota can sound more amazing than something concocted in a West Hollywood mega-studio. This ability frees up the thousands of dollars it would take to record an album with a major record label and puts it to use in more ingenious and useful ways.

Radiohead rocked the boat with their 2007 online release of ‘In Rainbows’, and most music pundits claimed that this was the first nail in the coffin of corporate controlled music distribution. But the corporations are hedging their bets behind some key concepts: that people prefer something tangible when they purchase music, that not only do people still have working cd players, but vehicles, where a large portion of music is listened to, come suspiciously equipped with CD players, and that CDs are still cheap enough to produce to remain profitable. But some groups are getting creative with the switch to digital. Danger Mouse and Sparklehorse teamed up with director David Lynch to create a book of photos that comes with a virgin CD-R that is implied to burn anything you would like onto (preferentially the album (Dark Night of the Soul) that DM and SH created but was not physically released), this being due in some large part to legal issues with EMI. Some artists are opting to send tote bags or stickers to fans that download their album from iTunes. Incentivizing a due media change with more practical goods than would be received with a CD purchase is so 2010.

Perhaps there will be a revival of classical music, which relies heavily on virtuous yet mechanistic performance styles suited to the acquired insanity of playing the Super Mario Brother’s theme at 320 bpm. Maybe metal will see face-melting on levels that make DragonForce sound like Brahm’s lullaby. Even more likely is that virtuosos in any specific style or instrument will utilize the increasingly amazing studio production software currently available to create new sounds and styles that have never been heard before. Creativity is hardly even the term to describe some of the unique soundscapes that can be crafted with just a few hundred dollars worth of equipment and a few drug-fueled nights at home. These programs are becoming more versatile and user-friendly, and the mixing and mastering aspects rival any fifteen-foot long board of old.

We have already seen dozens of young talents drop a big bomb of awesomeness on us recently (Nosaj Thing, Owl City, etc.) and I can see this trend continuing. New genres have become wildly popular through nothing but web 2.0 and tube sites, for example, fingerstyle, propagated by the uncanny success of videos by Andy Mckee and Marnie Stern. Whether it be tube sensations or all out albums, the kids are going to be making the rest of us 20 and 30 somethings feel like we have done nothing with our lives.

There are as many ways to go about this as there are bands. Caribou chooses to play in front of a large projected image of psychedelia, resulting in the entire band being bathed in bizarre patterns and images, and Radiohead employs long strands of specially controlled LEDs that create shifting columns of different colors of light that can represent anything from lightning to snowfall. In 2006 Death Cab for Cutie released an entire DVD of short films to accompany their album Plans, films which did not feature members of the band or performance footage, but rather were simply inspired by the music of the album. Perhaps cheapest of all is using ‘found art’ to highlight the music, in other words, photos or videos discovered on the Internet or otherwise, taken with questionable license, for use in performance or production.

But moreso than using found art to spice up a performance, we can expect to see fans lending a hand to create dozens of versions of music videos or still art to accompany the music that has touched them, and the artists to embrace this. Perhaps most importantly, this is not likely to have a major impact on ticket prices in the way that a huge extravaganza a la Kiss or (gulp) Great White would. The walls of inspiration and distribution will continue to get shorter.