Jason Giroux
If you’re studying modern music, particularly popular music, you’ll want to learn a bit about marketing and how the information related to marketing might be skewing your view of music a bit. Remember that, where popular music is concerned, music is a product. It’s designed to be marketed and sold to a particular demographic. As a serious student of music, you’ll need to learn to separate the music from the marketing that goes along with it.
Nonspecific Genres
It’s always great when a musician goes beyond the conventional boundaries of their genre or style, but sometimes marketers do things that make no sense in this regard. There are some categories of music that are meaningless when describing the artists typically categorized within them, save for the meaning that they have in terms of encouraging sales.
Here’s an example. In the 1990s, the word “alternative” began to be used as a way to describe music that was actively being marketed to the teenage to 20s demographic. What it was an alternative to was never really clarified, but the label stuck. Within the alternative section at any music store, you were likely to find the following types of music all in that same section:
Grunge
Punk
Ska
Metal
Gothic
Industrial
Indie Rock
What do these genres have to do with one another? Not much, really. Alternative was a great marketing term, however, and sticking bands from these genres in that section of the CD case could drive sales. On the good side, it is a way to encourage people to explore a bit beyond their comfort zones musically speaking. On the bad side, if someone looking for a new Gothic band to listen to ends up going home with a Grunge CD, they’re probably going to be really irritated.
Ignore the Label and Listen
You’ll find that you can go a lot further understanding modern music by ignoring whatever label came on the CD or with the download. Oftentimes, the label just means that the music is being marketed toward people who identify with the connected subculture. Listen to the music with an open mind and you’ll likely hear it for what it is.
Remember that some music genres change considerably over time and that bands may find themselves reclassified to suit the current conception of where their music fits. Led Zeppelin, for instance, was almost universally regarded as a heavy metal act in the 1980s, but they’re most often called classic rock these days.
If you want to get actual information about music, simply disregard the marketing labels. You’ll start to find that those labels are largely constructs, in many cases. When the only defense between two types of music is a BPM count, you’re probably safe in assessing them as both being members of the same genre with slight variations on style. You might not make the people who are totally dedicated to the genre label happy by saying so, but studying music means listening to the music, not the marketers.