This week, I chose to respond to an article by Pitchfork, an online music magazine that is known for its coverage and reviews of new releases of popular and independent music. Many music fans, and many I know here at Stevens, have a complicated relationship with Pitchfork — its editors over-hype some artists, are negatively biased towards others, and, by writing in a verbose style, can appear as snobs who favor difficult music over the enjoyable and easy to listen to. With this complicated view in mind, I wanted to tackle an article posted by Pitchfork recently that was interesting but missed key factors in trends that I’ve seen from a music listener’s perspective.
The article I’d like to focus on was released on Thursday, October 17, and was written by Jayson Greene as a part of a Pitchfork series of longform articles wrapping up the 2010 decade. This article, titled “How Indie Went Pop—and Pop Went Indie—in the 2010s,” describes how an “industry collapse” in the late 2000s led to collaboration between pop and independent artists. The result is the modern state of music: James Blake is collaborating with Travis Scott and popular music is a complete free-for-all (see my Charli XCX review). While this article mentions events that exemplify the results of the trend that Greene observed, it doesn’t devote enough time to correctly identifying and discussing the mechanism which caused this trend, namely, file sharing and streaming. Without a longer discussion of the impact these factors have had on the music industry, readers are missing a key piece of the formula that has changed music over the decade.
First, the title of the article begs a question that will serve as a good starting point. How is Pitchfork defining “pop” and “indie”? Does this distinction lie across genre and sound, or association with major labels? An intriguing way Pitchfork defines the difference is by mentioning “financial and ideological barriers” which separated the worlds of pop and indie at the beginning of the decade. Pop belongs to artists like Taylor Swift, but not just because they have the financial backing to do anything conceivable by imagination. Pop artists also align with an ideology, particularly one of pandering or inoffensiveness, i.e. seeking universality over making bold social statements. Indie, on the other hand, denotes not just artists who have less disposable income, but also those with disruptive and insurgent ideologies. (The two often go hand in hand.)
When considering both the financial and ideological aspects of what separates pop and indie, the dissolution of this barrier, which is a central idea of Greene’s article, is easy to recognize, especially with the plethora of examples supplied. The barrier disappearing due to the chaos caused by decreasing album sales, which impacted the music industry greatly starting around 10 years ago, led to collaborations between artists from completely different spheres and the changing definition of who should win awards like Grammys (for instance, Arctic Monkeys, Bon Iver, and Beck). It has also allowed established pop artists, like Carly Rae Jepsen and Charli XCX, to continue their careers after a meteoric hit and be edgier, campier, or more experimental.
While these observations were brilliantly written, the causes of the changes (file sharing and streaming) were vastly understated. The article made it seem like Jay Z and Beyoncé noticed the change in the music industry and started a trend by going to Beach House concerts — like artists were calculated and poised in expanding out of their genres, rather than influenced by trends out of their control and completely reactionary. The Internet allowed music to be distributed widely for free. As a result, Spotify and similar streaming sources became massively popular at the same time album sales began to tank. As a Billboard-obsessed middle schooler, I watched in awe as average album sales for the Billboard 200 #1 album dropped from hundreds of thousands per week to under 10,000 over just a few years. Music’s popularity is now almost entirely demonstrated through streaming, and this can account for many of the observations listed in Greene’s article.
Nowadays, musicians don’t have to be on a major label to have their albums on shelves nationwide; they can simply upload their music to streaming services and anyone, anywhere, can listen to it to their heart’s content. Pop artists no longer feel the pressure to make music that will bring in contracts and money from labels, and indie musicians can reach a wider audience. Beyoncé’s 2013 eponymous album felt like an artist being liberated, more than anything — it was experimental and shockingly different from her previous sound. Meanwhile, artists like Arctic Monkeys and Bon Iver were able to expand their audiences and win big at the Grammys as a result. Streaming allowed pop artists to be freer ideologically, while indie artists could gain financially, reaching new audiences and being recognized by other artists.
I hope that in their series of decade-wrapping articles, Pitchfork includes one that discusses the centrality of streaming and the Internet in changing the music industry in the 2010s. In 2019, music begins and ends at streaming on countless platforms. Although Pitchfork has been sure to reference it in the past, this element was certainly understated in this article.
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