Listening/Technology/Journal

Pop music replaces hymns at two-thirds of funerals, survey finds

Pop music has replaced hymns at two-thirds of British funerals, a survey from Co-operative Funeralcare has found. Pop was the number one request at more than 30,000 funerals over the past 12 months, and only 4% of mourners requested classical music.

My Way by Frank Sinatra remained the favourite for a record seventh year running, requested at 15% of funerals. It was last usurped in 2002, by Bette Midler’s Wind Beneath My Wings.

Adele entered the funeral music charts at number 22 with Someone Like You.

In 2005, hymns accounted for 41% of funeral music requests, but in the past 12 months the figure has fallen to 30%.

‘Thriller’ and the Lessons of the Mega-Super-Album - NYTimes.com

By ROB HOERBURGER, who’s always worth reading.

How ‘Call Me Maybe’ and Social Media Are Upending Music - NYTimes.com

Only a year ago, the charts were dominated by stars who had come out of the old machine of radio and major-label promotion: Katy Perry, Rihanna, Adele, Maroon 5. This year’s biggest hits — “Call Me Maybe,” Gotye’s “Somebody That I Used to Know” and Fun.’s “We Are Young” — started in left field and were helped along by YouTube and Twitter before coming to the mainstream media.

Isn’t this the Arctic Monkeys/MySpace story with different proper nouns?

Also: “Call Me Maybe” may not have come through traditional channels, but it sounds like something that did.

Artificial Intelligence Gets Creative - WSJ.com

The people who guard the gates of big music labels guffawed at the prospect of a hit-picking algorithm, but [three year old company] Music Xray has now secured recording deals for more than 5,000 artists. The music industry can no longer ignore the algorithm.

I’m surprised to read that 5,000 artists signed record deals in the last three years. I wonder what that means, exactly.

Is Pop Music Evolving, or Is It Just Getting Louder? | Observations, Scientific American Blog Network

A group of researchers undertook a quantitative analysis of nearly half a million songs to look for widespread changes in music’s character over the years. The findings, published online July 26 in Scientific Reports, show that some trends do emerge over the decades—none of them necessarily good. (Scientific American and Scientific Reports are both parts of Nature Publishing Group.)

Edward Sharpe's 'Home' Succeeds Train's 'Hey Soul Sister' | MediaWorks - Advertising Age

‘Home’ by Edward Sharpe & the Magnetic Zeros Lands in Ads for the NFL, Blue Cross Blue Shield, Microsoft Kin and ‘Cyrus’

The piece assesses how much the musicians are really benefiting from the exposure, and is mildly interesting. 

Side note: “Home” was my fourth-favorite song of 2009. And this is relevant to what I find interesting about advertising’s role in popularizing music. Referring to my favorite song of that year, the unbelievably great “Out At Sea” by Heartless Bastards, I smirkily wrote at the time: “It’s awesome, and perhaps if it ends up in a car commercial or whatever it’ll get the respect it deserves.”

This could still happen: It doesn’t really matter if a song is a couple years old, it can still “break” belatedly. And the situation with “Home” proves that, even it’s not making the artists overnight millionaires.

Justin Bieber loses YouTube crown to Rebecca Black

Many critics have described her heavily auto-tuned track as the worst ever but it’s helped her YouTube channel reach 112 million views.

Billboard Faces New Competition as Music Charts Evole - NYTimes.com

“BigChampagne, a media measurement firm in California, believes there is an opening for a new chart that better captures an artist’s popularity and commercial success. Last month, the company introduced a service, which it is calling the Ultimate Chart, that ranks artists based on the number of albums sold, singles sold, songs streamed online and other factors.”