I recently came across Roman Messer's remix of Message In A Bottle by The Police on BeatPort, which reminded me of this video by YouTuber Solar Sands:
The video is mostly focused on the film industry and the effects of sequels, remakes and the use of CGI to feature actors who have passed away in them. Although he doesn't necessarily talk about music, I've noticed that the mainstream music industry has been similarly recycling and rehashing older songs more and more lately. Thanks to artists releasing these remakes under their own name, very little people learn about the original version of a song if they're not told it's a remake (which is pretty much bound to happen on sites like Spotify, which often do not feature a desciption of the song like BeatPort or Bandcamp do for example).
Regardless of whether they state it's a remix or not, 99.9% of the time the song either A) is just an uninspired rework of the melody which presents very little to no new or unique ideas or B) samples the source in such a way that you could replace said sample with something entirely different and you'd get a final product that is sonically identical. In both cases, the remix does not provide any justification for its own existence or why the source should be remade in the first place.
This is the current Trance Top 10 on BeatPort as of writing. I find it very disappointing to see that only 2 out of these 10 tracks are original, with the rest being either explicit or implicit remakes of songs that are at least 15 years old (25 if you omit Sun in the Winter) which fall into one of the two categories I've mentioned above. The main Top 100 isn't all that different either, with most of them being rehashes of house, disco or soul tracks from the 90's or 80's. The fact that these remakes are so popular makes it hard for me to ignore them and seeing artists I like such as Armin van Buuren and Oliver Heldens (who are perfectly capable of making original tracks of their own) participate in this trend is incredibly saddening to me.
I know that this is an issue that has been present for a much longer time than just last year. It's not hard to see why it's so popular either considering things such as nostalgia, the impact of the internet and streaming services on the music industry and how the music industry itself used to be more experimental in nature in the 20th century, when problems surrounding class and ethnicity were a lot bigger than they are now. This year however, I've seen it growing more and more up to a point where I now automatically assume every single new song released by a mainstream artist to be a remake until proven otherwise.
What are your thoughts on this?
The video is mostly focused on the film industry and the effects of sequels, remakes and the use of CGI to feature actors who have passed away in them. Although he doesn't necessarily talk about music, I've noticed that the mainstream music industry has been similarly recycling and rehashing older songs more and more lately. Thanks to artists releasing these remakes under their own name, very little people learn about the original version of a song if they're not told it's a remake (which is pretty much bound to happen on sites like Spotify, which often do not feature a desciption of the song like BeatPort or Bandcamp do for example).
Regardless of whether they state it's a remix or not, 99.9% of the time the song either A) is just an uninspired rework of the melody which presents very little to no new or unique ideas or B) samples the source in such a way that you could replace said sample with something entirely different and you'd get a final product that is sonically identical. In both cases, the remix does not provide any justification for its own existence or why the source should be remade in the first place.
This is the current Trance Top 10 on BeatPort as of writing. I find it very disappointing to see that only 2 out of these 10 tracks are original, with the rest being either explicit or implicit remakes of songs that are at least 15 years old (25 if you omit Sun in the Winter) which fall into one of the two categories I've mentioned above. The main Top 100 isn't all that different either, with most of them being rehashes of house, disco or soul tracks from the 90's or 80's. The fact that these remakes are so popular makes it hard for me to ignore them and seeing artists I like such as Armin van Buuren and Oliver Heldens (who are perfectly capable of making original tracks of their own) participate in this trend is incredibly saddening to me.
I know that this is an issue that has been present for a much longer time than just last year. It's not hard to see why it's so popular either considering things such as nostalgia, the impact of the internet and streaming services on the music industry and how the music industry itself used to be more experimental in nature in the 20th century, when problems surrounding class and ethnicity were a lot bigger than they are now. This year however, I've seen it growing more and more up to a point where I now automatically assume every single new song released by a mainstream artist to be a remake until proven otherwise.
What are your thoughts on this?
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