

How Much Does It Cost to Make a Hit Song? - JacobAldridge
http://www.npr.org/sections/money/2011/07/05/137530847/how-much-does-it-cost-to-make-a-hit-song

======
dstyrb
A concise summary of just about everything wrong with the mainstream music
industry.

This excerpt is particularly nice: "You want them to turn on the radio and
hear Rihanna, turn on BET and see Rihanna, walk down the street and see a
poster of Rihanna, look on Billboard, the iTunes chart, I want you to see
Rihanna first."

Another relevant article: [https://medium.com/cuepoint/why-do-all-records-
sound-the-sam...](https://medium.com/cuepoint/why-do-all-records-sound-the-
same-830ba863203)

A horrific excerpt: "Two or three times a year, a company like L.A.-based
Music Research Consultants Inc arrive in town, hire a hotel ballroom or
lecture theatre and recruit 50 to 100 people, carefully screened for
demographic relevance (they might all be white suburban housewives aged
26–40). They’re each given $65 and a perception analyzer—a little black box
with one red knob and an LED display. Then, they’re played 700 seven-second
clips of songs. If they turn the knob up, the song gets played. If they turn
it down, it doesn’t."

Why is it so hard for indie artists these days? The world may never know.
Damned Spotify.

~~~
shalmanese
This is one segment of the industry Shazam is hoping to disrupt. The theory is
that songs people are most curious about Shazaming is a better perceptual
signal than adjusting a knob 700 times and you can gather way more data points
way more cheaply.

If you think the process is horrific, at least there's people trying to make
it more accurate.

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timdoug
Related: "The Manual (How to Have a Number One the Easy Way) is a 1988 book by
The Timelords (Bill Drummond and Jimmy Cauty), better known as The KLF. It is
a step by step guide to achieving a No.1 single with no money or musical
skills, and a case study of the duo's UK novelty pop No. 1 'Doctorin' the
Tardis'."

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Manual](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Manual)

------
coldtea
> _Daniels manages a songwriting team of two brothers, Timothy and Theron
> Thomas, who work under the name Rock City. "You got all the best people,
> you're gonna make the best records," he says._

So why do they make formulaic crap, and not even nice formulaic crap, like Tin
Pan Alley, but just formulaic crap?

I'm not saying this because of any nostalgia and such. I never lived in the
times of Tin Pan Alley, and I like stuff from Rick James and Aphex Twin to
Burial and MIA. But the BS sold as "R&B" today is beyond crap by most metrics
-- the fact that's it made by "comitee" is also telling.

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JacobAldridge
If the last line of the article grabs you, here's the obligatory link to
Courtney Love's seminal 2000 piece on the topic -
[http://www.salon.com/2000/06/14/love_7/](http://www.salon.com/2000/06/14/love_7/)

(And the previous HN discussions about it -
[https://hn.algolia.com/?query=courtney%20love%20does%20the%2...](https://hn.algolia.com/?query=courtney%20love%20does%20the%20math&sort=byPopularity&prefix=false&page=0&dateRange=all&type=story))

------
tomcam
How Macklemore's (totally deserved) success was achieved as an "indie" effort.
Spoiler alert: maybe not completely indie.

[http://raprehab.com/macklemores-indie-rise-is-simply-a-
white...](http://raprehab.com/macklemores-indie-rise-is-simply-a-white-lie/)

