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Music can be lifeless, bland, lacking honesty and integrity, and standardized, or in other words so-called ‘factory’ music is what is heard and played for the majority of listeners, since it is the main type of music played on the radio. It’s as Zappa once said in an unearthed and unaired MTV interview, “pop the lever and pull the chain, out comes the little brown choo-choo train, calling it “the Warner Brothers mentality,” and “corporate America”, and describing it as a reverse toilet for eating defecation. Standardizing the concepts of genre, stylistics, format, and visuals in music, as well as regulatory and market capture, destroyed an industry that was rebuilt out of its own self-destruction by artists that were lesser known, and had little to no capital, simply making better music. Novelty, experimentation, and new forms and styles were largely played by unknown artists that thrived and survived in cultural droughts, even creating trends in mainstream and radio music that built from unknown artists.

Starting in the 1920’s and 1930’s through to the 2020’s and today, the music industry has had a hegemonic, top-down control on the music industry. OSI in the 1930’s during The Great Depression created what was called ‘Easy Listening,’ and it was the only music on the radio at the time, intending to ease and pacify the concerns of the populace. This period of radio music has roots in the Red Scare and is the first and primary example of where corporate and government meet in the music industry. It stood in stark contrast to prior forms such as romantic classical, yet was part of a series of shifts to capture the industry, starting as early as Ragtime.

These trends would continue into the 1940’s and 1950’s where corporate interests and standardization in country music, blues, and jazz culture didn’t hinder these genres, but would ultimately lead to these common standards falling behind. With country, the standardization followed the time of westerns on television, and popularity with both rose around the 1940’s and starting falling around the mid-1950’s, As for Jazz, sadly the standardization came early, for example with “blue eyed” Jazz and crooners taking the face, and taking ownership of the genre from black musicians in the 1920’s that innovated by interpreting classical and orchestral works in novel ways by adapting them for smaller ensembles, which also led to the creation of the drum set.

Blues also led to quite a lot of innovation, as with its amount of improvisation, something it shares with Jazz, and yet, in times since, and despite the innovation, blues has become irrelevant through its standardization by the 1990’s. Through innovative genre-blending, Blues, Jazz and Country would come to form the basis of Rock and splinter into various forms, such as Folk, or in later movements, ‘Doo-Wop’ in the 1950’s and 1960’s that stemmed from Soul, Blues, and Jazz. The meeting of Jazz and Blues and Rock is also notable which could be considered to begin as early as the 1940’s, yet would not see a large interest until the 1960’s and 1970’s. These styles and forms continued to blend through to the 1960’s.

In contrast, in the 1930’s through to the 1950’s and today there was a burgeoning Avant-Garde and Post-Jazz or Post-Classical experimental movements. The experimental music of the 1930’s through to the 1950’s started to experiment with small Jazz ensembles and smaller ensembles for performing experimental and modal compositions. In the 1950’s and 1960’s there were also Rock-oriented experiments and experiments like field recording, Ambient, Music Concrete, and from the 50’s forward these experimental new forms found a home in the studio and on handheld recording hardware. These were experiments which would take music forward into a counter-example of the standardization of radio music.

In the 1960’s the media stranglehold tightens with giants like Capitol, yet it marks an era of experimentation contrasted by the standardization of previous decades, and despite the drugged-out radio musicians of the day. In this time talent was valued more than skill, and from the 1960’s to the 1970’s production would become more highly valued and as a trend it would become more common. Music grew up and in different ways grew stale in the 1970’s, and the experimentation thrived while becoming more cohesive and structurally sound, while the age of Disco, Club music, and dance clubs walled stylistics into a box of pop senses and sensibilities, leading to a period in the 1980’s where the factory perfected itself with a series of stylistic and formattic commonalities.

The 1960’s fusion of Jazz and Rock brought a large amount of experimentalism to the forefront, with the Rock’n’Roll and Country movements turning to Psychedelia on the radio and Folk and Folk-Rock respectively. Genre blending was at the forefront of music, and these new musicians in the Jazz/Rock scenes prioritized progressive and compositional music with a skillful and nuanced performance, taking Rock structures and instruments beyond their normal capacity, and this is similar to the Psychedelic Rock movements and radio music at the time tended toward loud and with guitar solos. The invention of the electric guitar had proven to be important for the music industry, and listeners love the sound of Rock, but also start to appreciate more experimental forms, as evidenced by the appearance of 10+ minute versions of songs on the radio.

The 1980’s saw standardization in the form of technology, such as the popularization of the drum machine, or synthetic instruments, or studio techniques that wound up taking away from the creativity and performative or stylistic elements from the artist, such as compression techniques that make analog instruments seem synthetic, or quantization techniques that “fix” off-time drummers in post-production, or even the DAW, the Digital Audio Workstation. In other words, these technological innovations brought a death of analog, and thus a death of the performer, and a death for the skill of artistry. There was more standardization than ever.

In contrast, while this standardization took place, the 1970’s and 1980’s experimental music was counteracting the ‘factory music’ of the era. Running counter to the norm in the 1970’s were genres such as Noise, Ambient, Art-Rock, and Punk, and in the 1980’s Hardcore, EDM, IDM, No Wave, Post-Punk, and Hardcore Metal, along with other expressions. These many forms began and gained popularity in the underground and would continue to see growth and novel experimentation through to today, in a cultural Renaissance of sound-art and creative, experimental, novel music.

In the 1990’s underground music grew more popular and even more experimental through many style and genre combinations, deconstructions, reconstructions, and blending, etc., and gave rise to somewhat common forms of experimentation. Unusual, abnormal, and novel music was highly valued in these times, and artists valued the novelty and quality of the music over audio fidelity, contrasting trends in the 1960’s and 1970’s pop recordings.

A problem during the 1990’s was regulatory capture. The ‘Telecommunications Act of 1994’ consolidated lawmakers, radio stations, laws governing transmission of music, and laws regarding copyright and music publication, along with disc-jockeys, producers, labels, and musicians into one legal and corporate umbrella. This act brought all radio stations under the control of four labels, which controlled three radio conglomerates, which employed only 20 or so disc-jockeys I’m a regulatory capture scheme that aimed to control which music made it to air–a move that was directly anti-competitive, anti-consumer, and monopolistic.

As for the longevity of any radio music near the mid 1990’s and into the 2000’s, the relevance of some song or musician was usually measured in weeks or months with more successful artists staying on air around one or two years. The music on the radio at this time borrowed heavily from previous successes in the 1990’s underground, with faux R&B, faux Gangster Rap and Hip-Hop, and accessible Alt Rock, marking a period where the industry had again come across a measure of market success in sales.

The 2000’s also mark another series of regulatory captures and corporate warfare, as in the Ticketmaster and Clear channel duopoly of ticket sales and venue management respectively, which ultimately destroyed the prospects of independent venues and artists in local scenes. Legislation pushed and created by the big four labels strongarmed venues to sell tickets through Ticketmaster pairing that “privilege” with being owned and operated by Clear channel, giving them the ability to host bands, meanwhile Ticketmaster and Clearchannel took massive fees and cuts of profits from the venues in the form of sales, ticket sales, food and alcohol sales, and merchandise sales in the form of royalties. Yet again the four major labels conspired to enact legislation which gave them massive undue control over the industry in an anti-competitive, anti-consumer, monopolistic capture of independent venues in many areas. There was also the corporate warfare of ‘payola’ or ‘pay-to-play,’ in which corporate-aligned promoters are sent into local scenes by labels to close gaps in their control of venues and the market which forced artists to sell tickets in order to get on stage. While this market capture began in the mid-1990’s this capture continues today.

The light in the darkness of regulatory and market capture during the 2000’s came from innovations in computing in the mid-to-late-1990’s. The inability of the music industry to capture or even penetrate online markets was a problem for them. In counteraction, Napster started at this time, with labels and radio musicians scared off the ’net while many artists saw it as a tool for promotion and distribution, and a sign of the coming times. Napster’s executives had many artists contact them asking how to promote, distribute, or sell on Napster; and Netlabels began to appear around this time, distributing MP3s for free on cheap hosting; and social media offered a way to promote and be heard more widely in new ways, with such sites as ReverbNation, MySpace, and YouTube being beneficial for promotion. The advent of the ’net along with digital sales helped underground styles and scenes thrive.

The Punk, Hardcore, and Metal scenes in the late 1990’s and 2000’s started to ‘converge’ with Metalcore, Screamo, Grind, Mathcore, and other experiments. There was also a notable amount of pop in these genres, yet there were many exceptions. Meanwhile, artists in the art-music scenes around the mid-1990’s and later tended to be more commonly lesser known yet would have quite the impact in the 2000’s and 2010’s. Ambient, Drone, Dark Ambient, Glitch, Sound Art, Abstract, Collage, these sounds begin to see more popularity around this time in a thriving underground, and other styles form out of these experiments stemming from the early 1990’s leading into the present.

On the other hand, in yet another instance of market capture, the 2010’s saw music streaming services, another cooperation between regulation, the music industry, and big data and big tech. Labels and lawmakers hailed Spotify as an anti-piracy tool, yet the irony is that at their start, around 60% of the music on Spotify was stolen by Spotify and put on their service. They didn’t pay artists, and most ironic, they used pre-release, bootleg, or unauthorized versions in their service.

Of note is the music streaming revenue model’s hostility to the musician and the consumer. A streaming listener pays 15-40$ monthly while listening to 400-700 plays on average. The three largest labels and Spotify take the biggest cut of this subscription fee, while the artist makes merely 3 tenths of a penny on each play, rounding down to the nearest penny. An artist on some streaming platform that reaches ten thousand streams in some month makes only 6$ or so for those ten thousand plays, less so if they pay for digital distribution, less so if they pay their label too. Usually, a single album sale direct from a band will earn some artist 6-8$, again, less under certain conditions. As such, streaming services have shown themselves to be an overpriced and low-value rental service for media that in truth is a big data harvesting tool and advertising company, rather than a media company. The sad part is when media disappears from the services we use, meanwhile trending media, ads, are juxtaposed over the music one is trying to listen to.

In contrast, the late 2010’s and early 2020’s led to many surprises such as the return of physical media, the vinyl revival, vinyl record sales overtaking CD, and streaming revenue being surpassed by purchase revenue, and in addition these changes in the industry were brought out by small labels that began to distribute and market their artists on the ’net, almost exclusively on Bandcamp by 2020, and thriving where in the mid 1990’s and until the early 2010’s they would not have succeeded.

In this vein, Bowie had been a very adamant proponent of the Internet during the 1990’s, saying that “the Internet represents a great opportunity for mankind,” and as for the music industry, it’s failure to adapt in spite of the previous century of market and regulatory capture led to its own failures in sales and marketing. Rarely anyone truly and and actively listens to much radio music as of the mid-2010’s and there are the same ten versions of the same ten songs by talentless musicians that won’t be relevant in two to three weeks, meanwhile the Art-Music, Underground music thrives like never before, with the sales, streams, and trends making it clear that music listeners actively desire authenticity, honesty, and creativity in their listening.

The innovations that came to form the basis of pop and rock, and the basis of the novelty of various experimental forms since the 1970’s have taken the place of ‘factory’ or standardized music. The standardization in Pop have led to its slow decline, same as with many forms. Rock’s initial success and revival today was in its ability to accept blending, combination, deconstruction and reconstruction, and turn various elements of other forms and styles into novel ones. The beauty in the underground is in its innovations in style and form, which led to a subcultural Renaissance that is overtaking the cultural dogmas in music culture. By leading the charge since the 1970’s, these experiments have brought music to a place where artists express themselves in unheard and multifaceted forms. The future will certainly bring many new forms and artists for decades to come and with the decentralized methods of distribution, marketing and sales provided by the ’net, no longer do only a few major labels control music culture.

(Originally written in early 2025.)