JPF Home Page Forums General Messages General Message Forum Pop: Sells Because of What?

Ben,

They said the music of the 80's was vapid crap that would be totally forgotten in the future. In Europe, 80's music is the most popular genre format for radio in nearly every country. It is also reflected in a lot of pop music coming out today. As much as you may dislike what is popular today, folks will LOVE it who are 12-25 in 40 years just as people who are 50-70 love what came 40 years ago. You usually love what you grew up with, period. It was the soundtrack of your life, for better or worse. It has less to do with songwriting or production and more to do with nostalgia.

There are a lot of excellent young bands out there today and a lot of manufactured pre fab commercial stuff. But looking back you had the Monkees, a fake band and the Archies, a fake CARTOON band etc. The more things change the more they stay the same.

For me, the 80's had a signature sound because of the mass development of the Synthesizers. The 90's-00's used a lot of Sampler technology (actually I had several in the 80s) and the 00's-current use a lot of vocal technology along with a mixture of styles such as Rap, R&B and Pop which have produced plenty of songs which 50-60 year olds in the future will fondly remember.

We have a brand new phenomena going on which never existed in music before as well. Kids today will have ALL genres in much greater depth to choose their favorites because more than any other generation, kids mix extremely different genres from Death Metal to Country to Rap to Classical Guitar to Celtic to Techno to (name it). It won't just be "pop" music because that's only a tiny sliver of what they have to choose from and since they all have unlimited access to more music than any previous generation, they will more than fondly look back at today's music to mark the greatest times of their lives.

Brian