itunes backstreet boys as long as you love me instrumental

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Careers and cultural personas are built through repeated exposure and the gradual revelation of a performer’s range and ambitions.

Throughout pop history, styles and sounds have followed a cycle from innovation to bandwagon trend to banality-and perhaps, many years later, to a nostalgic revival. Songs also depend on human beings as writers, performers, and listeners, and humans are marvelously inconstant today’s thrill is next year’s yawn. It has to balance familiarity and surprise. Far from it: each hit needs some distinguishing novelty, every time, hit after hit. Hit songs, for all their formulas and established production methods, are not the kind of consumer product that can be standardized and then endlessly replicated. Surely some machine, somewhere, must hold an algorithm that may register as ingenious or infernal but can guarantee that a song will be a hit: a musical analogue, as Seabrook suggests, to snack food’s addictive, experimentally ascertained “bliss point” of salt, sweetness, fat, and crunch.īut the beauty of popular music is that it can never be quite that simple. It might seem that since today’s hits are made, played, and tallied with machines, they are also created by automation. (The streaming service Spotify, gathering data from every click, tabulates not only a user’s entire listening history, but exactly how much of each song was played.) At the same time, a successful song has to do what pop hits have always done: create the musical and emotional connection that makes a listener want to hear it again and again. It can’t waste a millisecond in getting attention, and its commercial performance is measured more precisely than ever. To become a Top 10 hit now, a song has to compete against an infinitude of rival possibilities for the ever more fragmented attention of its potential audience. Pop music has always been a balancing act of art and commerce, and in the twenty-first century there are different thumbs on the scale. Luke (aka Lukasz Gottwald, the longtime guitarist in the Saturday Night Live band who went on to make hits with Miley Cyrus and Katy Perry) itemizes his workforce to Seabrook as “artists, producers, topliners, beat makers, melody people, vibe people, and just lyric people.” The book makes clear what all those jobs are, as Seabrook visits studios to observe hitmakers at work. Now, a newer kind of collaboration prevails: more atomized, more ephemeral. Top 10 pop, a peculiar subspecies of music shaped by the demands of radio, has sidelined the old, romantic songwriting archetypes of the lone troubadour with a guitar-like Bob Dylan or Joni Mitchell-and of the self-contained band, like the Rolling Stones or U2. In alert close-up reporting, with financial savvy and historical perspective, he explains how Top 10 songwriting has become industrialized-separated into component tasks that are assigned to specialists. In The Song Machine, Seabrook pulls together both how and why the craft of hit-making has revved up to Internet speed. They are music for the current and next generations of digital natives. Even as they aim for the visceral, real-world response of a dance or a sing-along, they sound almost entirely virtual, echoing in cyberspace.

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The songs are constructed with software and played back through digital processors.

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The songs are full of synthetic sounds and unvarying programmed drumbeats, while voices-which are sometimes the last physical, human element-arrive with computer-tuned precision and a robotic buzz. The Song Machine: Inside the Hit Factory by John Seabrook, a staff writer at The New Yorker, describes how they get that way.įor listeners whose tastes were shaped by the pop hits of earlier eras, with their hand-played instruments and naturalistic voices, the modern Top 10 sound especially artificial, almost post-human. They are relentlessly and almost scientifically catchy.

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They pour out of radios, pulse loudly at stores, back up TV commercials, punctuate movies, provide walk-up music for sports stars, pump through exercise classes, leak from the earbuds of nearby subway riders. Even for those who try to tune them out, the songs insinuate themselves. Taylor Swift at the Teen Choice Awards, August 2014Ī pleasure, an annoyance, a digital marvel, a mass-market commodity, a cultural touchstone, a gimmicky cheap shot-a twenty-first-century pop hit can be all of those, often at the same time.