Can we talk about the capitalist fuckery that is the entertainment industry?

I recently watched a video describing the phenomenon of the industry plant, and how the "viral sensation" which seems to come out of nowhere is almost always a façade (i.e. said sensation probably has ties to the industry in some form, and whose seemingly "viral" success was entirely contrived). Video:
youtube.com/watch?v=LiUkwP9XsYY

The music industry itself is pretty shady, totally corporate controlled with the artists getting screwed over a lot (360 Deals, etc.). I thought we could talk about this kind of stuff here and how it relates to the late capitalist muck we're in.

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youtube.com/watch?v=hhGUydNl7LY
archive.is/z79zU
youtu.be/tQNzy8I69kk?t=144
mic.com/articles/107896/scientists-finally-prove-why-pop-music-all-sounds-the-same
youtube.com/watch?v=h9nE2spOw_o
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real rap used to be about exposing ghettos and police fascism on MTV, now it's just about drugs, sex, and money, like every work of art capitalism touches.

Not to mention, "soundcloud rap" is only a thing because the labels primarily sign whomever has the most followers on social media. The days of checking out local talent are all over.

It is horrible, but negative effects of subconscious cannot be understated. Kids il post socialist states are literally dumber because of capitalist media.

Very interesting.

dumber isn't the correct word, just more hedonistic.
I'm not a "DENG DID NOTHING WRONG" revisionist but China really does have the right idea with banning shit like Fortnite. the internet is not for children.

They ban most western media for a reason.

You should read up on the hisory of K-pop really horrid stuff

youtube.com/watch?v=J8LxORztUWY
Cuck Philosophy K-Pop video

Japan and South Korea are like capitalism on steroids. Totally alienated societies.

Malaysia is heading that way too although their culture is like a pendulum swinging between late capitalist fuckery and traditional Islamic feudal fuckery.

Protip: nearly everyone who made it big in the music industry is an "industry plant" in some form. No one is really self-made.

Don't be stupid rap was always a mistake.

billie eilish is probably today's most blatant example of a pop star whose rise to fame was completely manufactured (and i say this as someone who admittedly enjoys her music). right after she was signed her label tried to hype up her social media clout by creating tons of sock accounts with handles like 'billieeilishqueen33' which would only follow her and each other. same reason why she posts so many pics of herself with other rising stars (usually other industry plants), it's all a form of viral marketing. not to mention she gets tons of interviews with big name publications, gets her music featured in commercials and film/tv soundtracks, product endorsement deals, you get the picture. in a sense i feel sorry for her because at 17 she's oblivious to the fact she's essentially being pimped.

that's historically revionist
youtube.com/watch?v=3w3Th4lNMaY

I feel like there was a moment when the music industry understood that the freeze peach meme that in the west was made to make the USSR look bad was going too far and they revved up the control shit. That's why rap was genuine at the beginning but that it fell oit quick as fuck (another reason it that it had high sinergy with the capitalist mentality). One moment I can think of is when they actually faked sex pistols god save the queen didnt reach top charts for example. Or when they created britney spears out of thin air.

Again, industry plant. Every pop star who got their start on the Mickey Mouse Club was more or less the same.

Little girls don't become massively famous pop stars unless they have a ton of industry professionals behind them. Same thing happened to Lorde (I'll try to be nice since I know Lorde has Zig Forums-approved politics and no doubt has a few waifufags who lurk here): she was groomed into being a pop star starting at age 12 with a whole gang of professional songwriters and vocal coaches catering to her, which is why she too seemed to blow up out of nowhere.

Billie's parents are both industry profs and her brother (who writes all her material) is a classically-trained songwriter. The whole DIY-livingroom-artist-hits-it-big is a myth which the industry loves selling.

I listened to her album nonstop when it came out. Fucking garbage earworm shit and anyone who likes it has the absolute worst taste in music.

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Woah…. So this is the power…. Of le wrong generation….

Lowkey and Immortal Technique exist.

Def. not the algorithm or anything.

Pure Heroine - 9/10
Melodrama - 5.5/10

TBH fam she should quit pop music and focus on something better, like musical theatre or some shit.

How to convert girls/gays who are obsessed with American celebs like Kardashians, Tana mango, james charles, jeffree star, shane dawson and so on to leftism and rejection of those things? Do they just grow out of it eventually?

How are you not sick of it

The only thing worse than using shitty reddit memes is using them wrong.

I like the rawness of it, although I agree it didn't age well.

You can't "logic" people out of their capitalist conditioning. It has to be something they snap out of on their own.

Once again, grossly overestimating social media. I like how people seem to have this "Hallmark Channel" impression of pre-Internet childhood.

I didn't know it had caught on there. Maybe you should go back.

I'm in my 30s (was a quintessential 90s kid) and agree.

All of us were hooked to our Gameboys. We played with Creepy Crawlers and Super Soakers, wasted our days running around our backyards instead of doing productive or family shit. Good times but definitely not muh idyllic childhood.

Jesus Christ you really are incredibly fucking stupid.

Dumb 2010s invader

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I mean those girls who watch reality tv all the time in class, uses english words to a cringeworthy degree and who is kinda dumb and gets bad grades but still acts confident and secretly has a crush on you

My mistake, it started on /mu/. Didn't realise you were merely guilty of having shit taste and being retarded, rather than being a redditor and retarded.

Fuck off newfag

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Which country are you from? I'm guessing either a rich Latin American country like Brazil, or somewhere in the EU like the Netherlands.

t. uses old memes from 2013 wrong

Lorde was fresh when she came out, now we have a whole hoard of mediocre teen/early 20s girls trying to imitate her to an embarrassing degree (Halsey, Alessia Cara, Melanie Martinez, Daya, Billie Eyelashes).

I want out of this nightmare world

norway, but one of the girls is from chile.

Your dad's gun locker is where the door is.

why did you listen to it nonstop if you hated it.

I do like that song 'meet me down at the tennis courts' okay though.

HOW THE FUCK DID I KNOW???

Ha, but anyway yeah it's a lost cause. Find someone else who will be receptive to your values.

I unironically really enjoyed it for the first 50 or so listens. Then it hit the switch that music isn't supposed to hit, reserved for Beatles and dad rock. The switch where it goes from being your anthem to "I'm so fucking sick of this the next time I hear John Lennon's voice my brains are gonna be on the wall" switch.

My favorite song was TEAMS by the way

Actual child prodigies are the ones who have impressive vocal ranges, sing classical music (not pop), and can play instruments other than ukulele.

After watching that video I have to ask, what's the difference between an industry plant and payola? Aren't they just the same thing? Record companies paying radio stations and Youtube/Spotify to promote certain artists?

Agreed it's called capitalism.

Personally I think Lorde is overrated af. You're in good company.

Meant for:

First as tragedy, then as farce.

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youtube.com/watch?v=STpRL3e_cPE

FBI: interesting.

Lol we already went through that argument in the 90s/00s

youtube.com/watch?v=isg3byi_ZGg

Most rappers are broke.

youtube.com/watch?v=cVvcum0Qj78

This is great.

I really like that album yeah

This is the song people were outraged about BTW, it hits like a freight train

youtube.com/watch?v=hhGUydNl7LY

I'm becoming an animator, I swear if the revolution doesn't happen soon and I have to make shit for Disney instead of propaganda videos I'm gonna be sad

Amazing how so few rappers understand basic economic shit, like how interest payments work, or what goes into a fucking contract.

Disney only hires grads from CalArts.

Well that's the same as with people in general. Most rappers probably have access to financial advisers but get too greedy and ignore them. Just look at the fucking SouljaGame.

Well thank god for that. I'm currently at Full Sail in Florida. It sucks because I wasn't a Marxist when I enrolled, and now I've come to realize how much the entertainment industry embodies everything socialists stand against… and Im pretty fucked lmao.

Workers get shit pay, no recognition, work for 20 hours a day, and are constantly forced on dumb cash grab projects. I'm glad we're having a thread about this finally

That's funny, because I knew a few people from high school who went there back in the late 00s (I'm this boomer:>>2788581). Neither one of them said that their FS education helped them all that much, the one guy who did film and assumed he'd get the experience needed to be an industry professional came right back home. The girl who did photography fared a bit better (I think she still does it but I haven't spoken to her in over 10 years).

The thing is, a lot of those trade school-type institutions teach you the basic shit, like how to work in a studio, but the real professionals doing all the hardcore stuff like calling the shots with creative control/producing are the ones who went to a big uni like UCLA or UCF, learned all the theory, took tons of courses on film aesthetics, wrote their own screenplays or produced mini films as their senior projects, and graduated with a BA degree. It's a highly competitive field regardless.

Yeah I mean… I'm 7 months in, currently doing 3D modeling and shit. It's getting annoying with how much they expect of you, even though they claim that they're here to help people who haven't done this stuff before. All this shit is piling up, I might just find something else to do before I get too invested.

I love u guys but I hate it when you discuss music. Le real rap fags & born in le wrong generation dweebs are amongst us

You forgot: Soviet nostalgia posting.

Don't you have class at really weird hours too, like you have to get up at 3AM to go take a test or some shit? Because that's what the photography girl told me when I asked her about her experience there.

It depends on the class. Lectures are 4 hours and then you have another 4 hours of a lab where you do a bunch of schoolwork. It's Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays for some students. Other students have it every day. They like to "mimic the workplace" by putting you through hell.

fortnite is an abomination of videogames as an art form. it's a fucking party game. almost no skill ceiling, no skill curve.
I'm not critical of fortnite because it is a videogame, but precisely because it isn't one.

Sounds like it. I did two semesters at film school myself (at a big name university though) before changing majors and eventually transferring schools, and yeah it's a lot of bullshit. On an actual film set you can arrive at 6AM, wait around for hours and not film anything until 6PM. Grips and other techies get paid shit wages, extras are basically slaves, actors always feud with directors, pretty shitty.

I originally wanted to go for screenwriting, which I found out would have been a total waste when I actually spoke to a person in the industry (he drove me back to my dorm from an anti-war protest of all things). He said, actual screenwriters never have degrees in film but in literature, history, or (GASP) political science. That saved me some useless education had I not transferred.

Hollywood should just be carpet bombed TBH.


Never played it so I can't judge.

archive.is/z79zU - article on how basically every song in popular music is written by the same handful of people, if anyone doesn't already know. I've always found it mildly surreal to hear people referring to the music and public persona of popstars as if they're individual humans expressing themselves. Barring a tiny handful who accrue enough power to talk terms to the suits, they're just interchangeable masks on a vast machine, with all their feuds and dramas as fake as fucking pro wrestling. At least South Korea is upfront about it, explicitly treating their popstars as disposable company employees for the most part.

Max Martin, already called it.

Yeah I agree. This crisis of mine is pretty new too, considering the last class had be distracted because it was just so easy. Do I really wanna do this? I've already changed schools twice… like shit

youtu.be/tQNzy8I69kk?t=144
Melon called her out.

My advice is to go to an actual art school like MassArt or RISD. Everyone I knew who went to either of those schools loved it and said they gained a lot of skills. Pretty sure they're public too so you won't go into debt.

That was depressing to watch but the American music industry does pretty much the same thing.

I fucking love this video, I'm surprised it has such a positive like-dislike ratio… maybe we're moving forward after all.

Who's the guy in the video? It deserves a lot more views.

There are many fascinating studies heavily censored by your vertical submissive delegation that you could implore for a concise satisfactory elucidation.

i like how two people in that image are still relevant post-2017.

Yes?

They also banned rap which makes no sense. I can understand banning bullshit rap but why would you ban someone like, say, Kendrick?

the "le wrong generation" meme actually has some science behind it. There was a study of commercial music since the 60's. They found in the last 30 years music has become increasing homogenised and formulaic. As in they measured higher variance in musical sounds in "pop" music earlier in the century.
It's not hard to explain either - in the early days of rock/pop they had to take a totally blind risk on creating a record to sell. That involved finding a whole assortment of proletarian artists playing whatever they wanted.

Now "pop" or mass music is manufactured so there's no financial risk - and it gives the bourgeois elite the power to enforce what is popular.

So I think that explains why people have that sentiment towards music. My own dweeb opinion is that music can undermine the interests of commerce if the proletariat use it to influence culture.


at least I think that might explain this:
mic.com/articles/107896/scientists-finally-prove-why-pop-music-all-sounds-the-same

Pop music was always shit though. Remember this was the biggest hit of 1969:
youtube.com/watch?v=h9nE2spOw_o

Biggest hit of 1975:
youtube.com/watch?v=0aU57V6VBW0

You don't really need to scientifically prove this. Music from the past sounds better because only the good stuff gets remembered. Like
and other shit gets swept under the rug because it was the generic pop of its time, meanwhile classic rock and R&B gets replayed because it sounds good in every generation.

Just imagine if 20 years from now you had a "classic rap" radio station that, in regards to 2010s hip hop, only played the lyrical/woke stuff. Your kids would assume all hip hop from that era sounded like that when in reality most of it was utter overly-commercialized garbage. See what I mean?

Nigga we already got people out here thinking the 90s was nothing but 2pac, NWA, Wu-Tang, or Deltron.

Let me re-articulate myself.
a) yeah there's always been terrible manufactured "pop" - however the music business used to have to market a lot more proletarian music which is why there were a lot of original music movements that infiltrated the masses.
b) Today's music market doesn't do this anymore.
c) I think there is an active bourgeois interest in keeping mass music homogenised so it doesn't undermine commercial culture.
d) In the 60's they had manufactured music, but there was still money to be made in taking risks. Today they have solved that problem for the most part. There's very little if any transgressive proletarian culture in the mainstream pop music of today
e) This is evident in the actual composition becoming homogenised measurably so - and as mentioned by someone else; three or four songwriters are producing the majority of it.


My contention is that proletarian music is seen as threatening and culturally unpredictable by the bourgeois class.

Either way, I think there should be a deeper political critique of popular music. Yeah only the good stuff gets remembered but less and less of the good stuff penetrates the "mainstream" consciousness. The data suggests that as far as I can see.

Everything is on Youtube and Soundcloud now gramps

Yeah I realise that. Being a musician who's music is on those two platforms.

Is it that big of a stretch to think musical movements that have expressed the alienation of the proletariat resonate with people more than manufactured dopamine tunes?

Also soundcloud and youtube aren't that different from radio. There's a level of control of what makes it to the masses. The internet hasn't liberated culture lol

Pop isn't even relevant anymore. Now it's all about rap.

Well pop is such a meaningless word, not really much consistent about it other than its "popular music".

Yeah it is all about rap for the most part - I don't know that the "band" is dead yet though. Or maybe it is. I always thought rap came out of the LA riots era that expressed anger and rebellion - but was quickly commercialised and became about consumption. But I don't know anything about it really.

A lot of 90s rap was about that bullshit as well.

What? Taboo and I Am > I Was are good albums.

Billie Coal-burner:

90s rap isn't old rap

lmao I remember when her team used to post Lordes old soundcloud demos on /mu/ ages before she blew up. I try to post about this kind of stuff on /mu/ from time to time but all it ever ends with is trolls pretending to be PR/Marketing interns killing the thread.

That's how you know she's a plant: she has a round the clock PR team.

I mean she's only 1 example, there are a ton of examples of people just from /mu/ who have gone on to achieve varying amounts of success, organic or otherwise. Literally everyone knows Fantano used to be a /mu/ shitposter and that Death Grips used to do ARGs on 4chan, or even about Will Toledo or whatever but the rabbithole goes much deeper. A lot of these artists are ones who have found success after savvily using the internet and then gone on to get signed but I think either a lot of people are cynically detached from exactly how the industry works in a post-internet era or there literally are interns who are paid to shitpost on imageboards.

I remember when JPEGMafia used to shitpost on /mu/ all the time under his old Devon Hendryx name, and even a legendary thread where he sperged out because everyone was making fun of him for sounding like a knock-off Death Grips. The thing is though, he clearly leveraged the platform in order to hone his craft, as an actually independant artist and then eventually got picked up by a label (Deathbomb, who are known for paying attention to artists like this; they signed Death Grips early). That's just one example but there are a few more.

Additionally, there are tons of people who are involved in the music Industry who just happen to casually post on /mu/, like various P4K writers, one in particular who I can't recall the name of, the Bassist from DIIV, Jamie Stewart of Xiu Xiu fame (He also did a interview podcast for /mu/lopalooza a few years back, really nice guy who apparently will respond if you email him), who didn't so much use the platform on the way to finding success but just were involved in Imageboard culture.

Cont.

Remember when Ruhe was a big fan of Miley Cyrus?

Where it really gets interesting though, is when you look at the models that have been taken up in the realms of Marketing & PR in the post-2010 era, as various Social Media platforms and services have sprung up. You can point at people like Lana Del Ray, who had been in a label backroom roster for years, with Interscope attempting to relaunch her career appropriating "DIY" aesthetics but that's just 1 instance of a Major using a technique for a video.

I think Chris Ott is right that the genesis of this convergence between "Independant" & "Major" label music did actually start when Sonic Youth took a label contract, which sort of opened the floodgates for a cultural clash and for many bands/artists to actually make the leap over whilst there was still decentish money to be made, but it's evolved. Since then the Industry has increasingly learnt how to appropriate and remarket all kinds of aesthetics from an even earlier entry point and Capital in the Media Landscape has become ever more centralized (you can look at countless studies & examples of this). Ofc we can point towards how this is an inherent function under Capitalism but for music fans exploring the minutae of such is intriguing. The thing is, even after SY had enabled more artist to leap into the mainstream with less stigma, it was still relatively simple for purist music fans and other such types to know exactly what was astroturfed and what wasn't (and you can find all the screeching about "selling out" and the endless debates archived in various places), but it didn't actually matter since the market cap for those niche audiences was only ever in the tens of thousands in the first place, the industry had an in and they wanted to expand appeal to shift more units. A Label A&R doesn't care if your independant scene thinks X band is selling out, they just want the rights to the IP so that they can take it to a new audience.

This new era though I think is part of a marked paradigm shift that led to labels scrambling to assuage falling profit rates by adopting new technology and in the process using new heuristics and integrating entire new wings of industry in a post-internet era. Ott has multiple videos about things in a post-2000 landscape with Labels & PR firms paying for reviews in supposed "Indie" Zines, bands only being able to make a living off of paid advertisements and "music supervision", how incestuous and full of petit-bourg kids most indie scenes were and how there really isn't any ability for a working-class band to make money off the back of their music even in an era where it's supposed to be a land of opportunity etc. but all of these were all strategies borne from this initial move from Majors into independant scenes and them increasingly becoming more adept at utilizing this marketing strategy which eventually led us to where we are now.

Cont.