The evolution of music
Music has changed over time. The evolution of music has been due to several reasons. One of the reasons that the nature, meaning, and composition of music changing over time is due to the society adapting to a capitalist environment. Nowadays, everything is commercialized. The capitalist society has led to the development of a monopolistic market; therefore, everyone is trying to obtain the majority amount of profit from their venture. Music has not been left behind in this societal development. People are producing music with the primary aim of selling and not as a means of communication. People produce music that attracts the majority number of people or rather music that is trending. This has seen the development of two types of music, popular music, and serious music, which have different implications for music’s aesthetic experience.
The original purpose was to create an aesthetic experience. Aesthetic experience has a lot to do with personal experience in the way that we perceive art like music or films. Popular music, as the name suggests, is more popular Pop Music attracts a massive number of viewers making people enjoy it as a social experience. People do not mind the message or the meaning of the popular music genre but enjoy how they are catchy and attractive to listen to. Popular music does well in the current capitalistic nature of society since it enables musicians to sell more CDs, albums, and obtain more awards. Once one song is successful, more music develops, imitating it to be successful, too, in terms of popularity (Adorno, 2005). Popular music tends to use the same patterns, making it repetitive in the use of its musical elements; therefore, there are regulations on how popular music is produced.
While popular music is standardized and needs to follow a particular way of production, serious music, on the other hand, upholds uniqueness when producing new music. The detail of serious music derives its music sense from the concrete totality of the piece, which, in turn, consists of the life relationship of the details and never of a mere enforcement of a musical scheme” (Adorno, 2005). If one kind of serious music tries to imitate the other due to McDonaldization, the listeners will not understand its message since it will miss out on one detail, which will be lacking in the context. McDonaldization is a kind of standardization of production, work, and consumption (Crossman, 2020). Serious music uses the totality of all details for people to understand its unique lyrical and expressive quality.
Pop music acts as a type of music that promotes mind control. Both the musicians and the listeners have been made to follow a particular design of producing and consuming today’s music. The design of popular music makes people distracted. At some point, music was a rival of material alienation. However, today music is more into the aspect of succeeding in the commercial industry. Music has, therefore, conspired with authorities that regulate it curtailing the freedom that music should have. Pop music has limited the creativeness and innovativeness that art needs to uphold. Musicians have denounced the insubordinate character that they owned when composing other types of music as serious music. With popular music, people listen by they do not hear; they have devised a way of faking happiness. Pop music only becomes popular for some time. When it becomes boring, another song, closely related to the previous one, is composed, and the circle continues.