Mainstream pop music

First of all I’m going to explain the term ‘commodification in taste making’. Commodification means that everything — also emotions, services and music — is being dehumanized and presented as “merchandise”. The commodification in taste making with regard to music is the fact that we think that some music is played a lot on the radio because a big part of the listeners wants this to be so, so you’re socially forced to like the track in return for not being “weird”. That’s however not the situation. There’s Payola, where labels pay the radio station an amount of money (or other kind of favors) for giving their track multiple spins on the radio. So which pop song becomes huge is highly influenced by the guys behind the big marketing campaign, and so also the songs we need to find ‘good’.

I always find the question “Why do you like this song?” very hard to answer. In the case of pop music (this term refers to the mainstream pop music) it’s not very easy but also not very hard to answer. I think that the term ‘pop’ in 2015 has less and less meaning because the huge pop stars are ‘trying’ to do things differently. It’s clear that a lot has changed this year, it seems like everyone is suddenly a fan of mainstream pop music. In 2015, it’s cool to like Justin Bieber. A big reason for this is the fact that the line between (mainstream) pop and indie is getting thinner.

Take CHVRCHES as an example, the music they make is pure mainstream pop music. But because they present their project as a ‘band’ with one girl and two guys they’re considered ‘an indie band’. The music Taylor Swift makes is similar to their music, but because Taylor is one girl and because she doesn’t write all her songs by herself she’s considered by the so-called ‘alternative music lover’ a doll of a greater marketing machine (even when some songs of Taylor are closer to “indie” than songs of CHVRCHES).

I’d like to use the term ‘grown-up pop’ referring to Beyoncé, Justin Timberlake and Taylor Swift. The last Beyoncé record was dark, alternative and extremely professional produced. Mainstream pop music is, for me, more defined by the extent to which it is adventurous, daring and new; than by the images surrounding an artist.