Dylan Fields

Beethoven. Bach. What if these legendary musicians were put into today’s era? Would they be better? Would they be worse? I would argue they would be better at what they do today than they were in their day. They might not be as popular today simply because orchestral music is not popular today, but they would have more tools and more feedback than they had in their day. With the amount of technology they would be able to access today, the quality of sound these musical geniuses would be able to create would be absolutely incredible. Being able to write your music down and hear it as soon as you write it is a tool we have today. If these composers had this tool at their fingertips, they could produce more music and better music as they could fix any and every flaw. With this we would now have more music to enjoy from these great composers today.

Music has been changing for centuries: for better or worse is the issue. Before I explain my thesis I need to define a key term. The phrase “musical experience” means anything directly pertaining to music, such as buying and selling, listening, and the making of it. Music started all the way back in Bible times as we can see from King David being a skilled harp player. Now with more recent advances of music such as the birth of iTunes in April of 2003, we play music out of a speaker.  Music has developed into a predominately but not exclusively electronic base as opposed to the acoustic installments that have been used for centuries before us. This change is important because it is going to change the way music will be made and how we will listen to music for years to come.

My thesis states the experience of music is at its all-time high. I will confirm three reasons why this is true: listening to music has never been easier, music is more diverse than ever; and the recording process is better than ever. I will also refute two counterarguments: first, digital music has decreased revenue for musicians, and, second, music is too perfect.

My first argument to prove the musical experience is at an all-time high is listening to music has never been easier. In the 1950s if you wanted to listen to a certain song you would have to buy the entire album on vinyl, unless of course it was a single. In order to listen to the song you want to hear, you would have to look for and change the record to what you wanted to hear next. Now let’s say after you listened to the song you wanted to hear, you want to listen to a song from a completely different album. You would need to take that record off, put it into its case or sleeve, and then put the other record onto the record player. You would start it and find the right song. The whole music listening experience was just a hassle compared to nowadays, when I can have ten songs from ten different albums on one playlist and not have a single second of downtime in-between each song. Now, all we have to do is click what song we want to listen to and our phones, laptops, iPods or mp3s will play the song for us. We can create playlists with songs from any album from any band or artist we choose and can listen to the songs as many times as we want without having to touch the vinyl player at all. For example, if I was doing my homework, and I wanted a compilation of my favorite Rolling Stones and Beatles hits, then I would have to frequently stop my homework and change the song. This is not as convenient as if I could make a playlist or even just click a button and change it in a matter of a couple of seconds.

Another reason listening to music has improved is the means by which we actually listen to it. The first pair of headphones were released in 1881, long before Sony Walkmans or iPods. Although they were revolutionary for their time, they weighed over ten pounds. That is ten times the weight of Dr. Dre’s Beats headphones today,as some editions of beats weigh less than a pound. Another invention that changed how we listen to music today is the wireless power of Bluetooth. Bluetooth gives us the ability to listen to music not only without cords hanging out of headphones but away from the source of the music. I had used headphones with cords my whole life until recently. My first iPod cracked because I forgot it was hooked into my headphones, and I walked away from it, pulling the iPod and sending it crashing to the ground. Bluetooth eliminates that threat altogether, because we all make careless mistakes like that. Also, I can stand all the way across a room and be playing my music on a speaker or headphones on the other side of the room. For example, when I am working out, I use my Beats headphones that are Bluetooth. I set my phone down on the table across the room and have my headphones on. Working out with a cord hanging out of your pocket is extremely difficult because many times you will get caught on the cord and your phone will rip out of your pocket or your headphones will fall off your head. Another example is when I am training for baseball. I can hit in a batting cage with my phone twenty feet away from me while I have my headphones on. Hitting a baseball with headphones with a cord connecting to a phone would be nearly impossible. This is why Bluetooth is so great. This Bluetooth feature also comes in handy when your device needs to be charged. You can charge your device on one side of the room while wearing your headphones on the other side of the room, or even in a completely different room.

Listening to CDs and radios in cars were both huge steps in the past, but now the next big step is listening to our phone, iPod, or mp3 on Bluetooth or an auxiliary cord. This is better for multiple reasons. Now we can go from what we were listening to before we got into our cars, plug our phone or mp3 in, and continue listening. In addition, we do not have to keep a thousand different CDs in our cars. This feature also gives us the ability to listen to whatever we want while in the car, even beyond music with things like podcasts or sermons. For example, in my morning routine I listen to music all morning. When I’m ready to leave my house, I get into my car and, with the Bluetooth system I have installed, my music automatically goes from playing on my phone to playing on the speaker system in my car.

My second argument is music is more diverse than it has ever been before. There are more types of music, more genres, and more branches of each genres. For example, country in American music was created in the late 1920s. It was more of an Appalachian folk-type music or blues, which featured instruments much more string-based such as the banjo, American fiddle, fretted dulcimer, and guitar. Today’s country music still includes the original Appalachian folk music, but now bands such as Florida Georgia Line or Sam Hunt are the top-selling country artists today. They incorporate a type of hip hop or pop element into their country music. We see this hip hop element in songs including artists in the hip hop genre such a Nelly or The Chainsmokers. This is noteworthy because this new movement of combining genres has been so successful it has become a new genre altogether. Nelly even went on tour with Florida Georgia Line as their opener on their Smooth World Tour. So now there is traditional country music and modernized country music. This sort of change of genres is nothing new, though. We have seen this in the past and it was successful as it created the types of music we listen to now. Rap has changed from Tupac Shakur’s era to big rappers like Lil Pump who recently signed a record deal with Warner Bros. for eight million dollars. The classic elements to rap are the theme of the lyrics, the rhythm, and the rhyming, as well as the bass in most rap songs. We have seen rap change. It really started with artists like Lil Wayne who changed the flow of rap introducing a that no-one had seen before, sometimes slowing it down and mixing up the beat in a unique way. Rap has split its genre so much that now they have gospel rap. Artists such as Lecrae, KB, Andy Mineo, and NF have made their marks in the rap genre from this unique branch of music.

Another aspect of music that has broken music into different genres is the lyrical sense of the songs. Staying with country music, let’s take two artists: Jimmy Buffet and Brantley Gilbert. Jimmy Buffet is known for many of his songs, such as his song with Alan Jackson called “It’s Five O’clock Somewhere,” which spent eight weeks on the top of Billboard’s Hot Country Song list. This song’s lyrics are about not wanting to work anymore, leaving work early, and getting drunk at the bar. Brantley Gilbert’s music is more of a country rock, as one of his top selling songs, “Take It Outside,” talks about “the good ole days,” where if someone had a problem with someone else they could just go outside and fight to settle things. Both artists are technically in the county genre but have completely different styles of music. Brantley Gilbert’s style is more of the “get your hands dirty” type of country music. Jimmy Buffet’s lyrics are quite the opposite, as his are more about resting and partying. These two completely different country artists represent different branches of country music.

In addition to the branches of each genre, there have been new genres created recently that have changed music, such as indie pop, alternative rock, air pop, and EDM. These genres have had huge successes and have been controlling the Billboard charts. Most of these types of music have sounds such as synthetic and computer-based sounds that have never been used as much in music as ever before due to the advanced recording and creation of music that will be discussed later.

My third argument is recording music is easier and has better sound quality than ever before. There are four eras of recording to look at: the acoustic era, the electrical era, the magnetic era, and the digital era. The acoustic era lasted from 1877-1925. During the acoustic era, people recording typically used a large conical horn to collect and focus the physical air pressure of the sound waves produced by the human voice or musical instruments. A membrane or diaphragm, located at the top of the cone, was connected to a scriber or stylus, and as the changing air pressure moved the diaphragm back and forth, the stylus scratched or incised analogue of the sound waves onto a moving recording medium, such as a roll of coated paper, or a cylinder or disc coated with a soft material such as wax or a soft metal. The next era of recording was the electrical era when they used a system of electrical microphones, electronic signal amplifiers, and electromechanical recorders, which was adopted by many music publishers in 1925. Sound could now be captured, amplified, filtered and balanced electronically. This means when you record a sound, you are able to alter the volume, pitch, or frequency of the music. This was a monumental move in the line of music at the time, but something simple enough today. We can do it better now on an iPhone, as the microphone on an iPhone is better quality than anything that had been made in the ’40s. The third era of recording music was the magnetic era, introducing features such as multi-track tape recording (MTR), when different sounds are recorded on different sessions and put together to make a cohesive whole. This was also the introduction of the disc as the primary mastering medium for sound. Fast forward to the digital age, the era in which we are living today. This is the era when digital encoding surpasses all previous recording technologies. Unlike all previous eras of recording, which captured a continuous analogue of the sounds being recorded, the digital era captures very dense and rapid and discrete samples of the sounds, which makes the sounds more crisp, taking out static or background fuzz.

Making music has never been so easy; anyone on any level of musical education can make music. All you need to make music nowadays is a laptop and a music editing application such as Logic Pro X. A few of my friends and I have been making music as a hobby, and we have more capability to record and edit the music than big name music artists had in the ’40s or ’50s. This does not mean the music we make is better than those that have come before us, but if we worked hard enough and developed our talents and abilities, we could make some quality music.

The first counterargument I will refute says the current technology trends in the industry have led to music artists not making as much money as previous artists used to make. The music industry’s profits have dropped a shocking sixty percent in the last decade as we see in charts from RIAA U.S. sales database. This is due to the loss of buying and selling of music. Music used to be put on files of polyvinyl chloride, also known as vinyl. When music was made on vinyl, it was hard to pirate or steal.  As soon as it could be turned into a file, many previous listeners didn’t choose to pay for it anymore. Another factor is about a century ago it was more popular than it is now to buy and listen to entire albums. Today iTunes, the largest music store in the country, sells individual tracks listeners can mix and match in personal audio-collages.

Music has suffered a loss in revenue over the past decade and ever since the beginning of the digital era in general, but lately it has been on the climb. The RIAA (the U.S. sales database) announced sales of recorded music in the U.S. generated $7.7 billion in revenue in 2016, its highest sales figure since 2009. The growth also represents an 11.4 percent increase from the previous year, the best percentage gain since 1998. These gains, the RIAA said, are largely due to an increase in on-demand streams from services like Apple Music, TIDAL, and Spotify’s paid tier, which accounted for $2.5 billion in revenue, more than double from the previous year. Together, on-demand and free streams accounted for $3.9 million in revenue. Although music sales are not what they were in the late ’90s, we may see it there again shortly if music sales follow the 2016 trends we see on the RIAA sales charts.

The second counterargument to refute claims music today is too perfect. There is no room for error in today’s world when it comes to the element of recording music. Editing music today has to be done with almost surgical precision. They remove the types of things that often made music of the past more interesting such as idiosyncrasies, nuances, and inexactitudes. For example, compare two songs, “Louie Louie” from the Kingsmen and “Fancy” from Iggy Azalea. “Louie Louie” was recorded in one take while Iggy Azalea’s song “Fancy” was most certainly not. Another interesting thing is in one part of the Kingsmen’s song, the drummer drops his stick and exclaims a profane word I will not repeat. But nowadays there is no way that would be put into the final cut. It would be edited out so the song would sound more perfect.

Music being too perfect is not a problem to most listeners as we can see by their digitally-edited music sales. This type of digital edited music is pop music as we know it today. Music cannot be too perfect. As humans we should strive for perfection in everything we do; this includes music. If there is a flaw in the music, edit it out or try it again. Any artist in the digital era that doesn’t  perfect every note or cord won’t be as successful as an artist that does. This is due to the fact this generation has grown up in the digital era and have grown used to the “perfect” music, while the older generations have grown up listening to flawed music and appreciate that aspect of the music.

Music has only developed for the better. The progression of technology has led to the progression of music, which we see through the different eras of music and time. The music recording process and distribution is easier and better than ever before. The music industry is bringing in revenue and looking to come back to where they once were. The experience of music is at its peak, and this is something to be excited about.

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