Streaming Services are Redefining Musical Styles |
Posted: November 13, 2017 |
When you listen to the most popular songs on digital platforms such as Spotify, you will invariably notice that their popularity has been carefully crafted. Take, for example, the wild success of "Despacito" a slow ballad by Puerto Rican crooner Luis Fonsi; there is a considerable production effort that made this song possible, and it ranges from social media to celebrity fixation and from marketing to sound engineering. "Despacito," which is Spanish for nice and slow, is a collaboration between artists who are comfortable crossing over musical genres such as pop, hip-hop, reggaeton and Latin balladry. Although this song introduced Luis Fonsi to many listeners around the world, there is the undeniable fact that it features Daddy Yankee and Justin Bieber. The Canadian heartthrob has found quite a bit of success with previous collaborations with hip-hop musicians, and thus his foray into Latin pop came natural when suggested by producers. The collaboration was greatly augmented by the vast social media following of the artists involved; their musical agents worked hard behind the scenes to ensure that this single was properly marketed to all demographics, particularly fans of celebrity lifestyles. The Science Behind the "Despacito" Sound With all the above in mind, there is something else about the way "Despacito" sounds that makes it stand out, and it is important to think about the listening experience of fans who are streaming this song over an internet service such as Spotify: first of all, "Despacito" is designed to be player on headphones so that you can listen to the masculine banter of the artists, who seem to be enjoying their collaboration in the recording studio. There are electronic sound effects, a couple of rap vocal effects and a slick melody that was probably crafted on a digital piano; this intro takes 20 seconds and evokes the fast-paced editing of reality television. Popular music has always been influenced by technology as well as by socioeconomic trends and factors. It should not be surprising to learn that music producers and agents are now telling songwriters that they want to craft hits that have the "Spotify sound" that "Despacito" has clearly mastered. Spotify's Massive Data Analytics Music industry executives have a significant technological advantage that lets them create Spotify hits, and this advantage is powered by the massive amount of data that streaming music services collect from us. You can easily call Spotify a Big Data company similar to social networking giants such as LinkedIn, Tumblr and Twitter, which all have something in common: they manage monumental datasets on stream processing platforms such as Apache Kafka. While a large portion of data analyzed and processed in real-time fashion by Spotify is used to improve the quality of their streaming services, this company is a data gold mine for record producers and sound engineers who create music based our listening behaviors. The Future Sound of Pop Music Just like legendary producer Phil Spector used the "Wall of Sound" effect to adjust music to the sound limitations of AM radios, recording engineers have been studying the widespread adoption of digital music since the Napster era of the early 21st century. The beginning of "Despacito" corresponds to the 30-second rule of Spotify in terms of paying out royalties. This song starts out in a way that gets you hooked before playing the rest of the digital music track; for this reason, remix versions designed to be played at dance clubs may not feature the intro at all. To a certain extent, "Despacito" starts out sounding like a movie or the beginning of your favorite reality show. In fact, the next development in entertainment is to use Big Data analytics and processing to make digital shorts, feature films and television shows that are more like music videos. In the end, "Despacito" is living proof that we are living the age of Spotify, and that this is the way many popular hits will sound from now on.
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