Andrew Sega
Also known by the moniker Necros, is an American musician best known for tracking modules in the 90s demoscene as well as for composing music for several well-known video games.
If I was obsessed with making money off of my music, I wouldn't have released it for free on the internet for the last 5 years.
Certainly there are songs out there that are massively popular, and you can use some reverse analysis to see how they're put together, but it's difficult to reliably engineer a "hit". Add to this the constantly swirling winds of cultural taste, and you can see that the music industry is more akin to playing the lottery than anything else. Having some talent or taste can give you a bit of an edge, but it's still a huge roulette wheel..
A human is a complicated organic/electrical system, which is immersed in a culture. Try raising a monkey like a human, it won't work, you need the human's certain brain characteristics (including self-reflection) in order to create a truly intelligent creature. The brain processes inputs and perception in very particular ways, and I think until we understand the underlying processes better, there is no way to really simulate it in software. Computers will continue to be good at simplistic analysis, and raw processing power, but the subtlety of emotions is something intrinsic to the human organism and culture.
Stylistic evolution comes from listening to what other people have done and making a Darwinistic modification.
Ideally, a song should contain both elements of high melodic tension, and low melodic tension. No listener wants to sit through a totally high-energy 180 BPM non-stop 6-minute ride through synth mania unless they are already busy grooving madly on some dance floor in a smoky club somewhere. Also, unless your listener is on heavy sedation, he or she will not enjoy your sparse 18-minute ambient tune which consists of the same languid piano riff repeated over and over again.
I think there are some objective [musical] qualities... how complex something is, how melodic, how diverse the tonality is, et cetera. But I could also make a piece of music that contains all of those and yet isn't "good" from a subjective viewpoint. For example, take Beethoven's "Moonlight Sonata", Beatles "Yesterday", and Underworld's "Born Slippy", and play them all on top of each other at the same time. Great music in their own right, but terrible sounding together.
Imagine presenting a Nirvana or BT track to someone from the 1850's, they would probably see it as noise and not much else. Society as a whole has a much more nuanced and wide view of what music can be now. It still usually contains various rhythmic, melodic, and vocal components, but they can be combined in so many interesting ways now.
I'm much more into 'electronica' (yeah, I know it's cliche these days).
If someone gave me a million dollars to run a music label, I would focus on creating a specific artistic point of view, and creating some channel to build a fanbase. Warp Records was a great example of a label that had a particular style, and many people would buy records just because the artists were associated with the label.
I find a lot of club music extremely boring.
Well, when music "moves" someone, it doesn't necessarily have to be in a positive direction. Some people certainly get moved by darker music, and there are all sorts of emotions which music can create that are interesting -- aggression, foreboding, anger, fear. Not everyone wants to feel happy all the time :)
One of the issues these days is the sheer amount of music out there to be listened to. There are more bands than one could ever hope to explore.
The problem these days is again just the sheer amount of music available, and that music isn't as important an experience in people's lives in the 21st century as it was previously.
I think [Britney Spears] is a perfect example of an artificial construct -- someone with a decent voice and a very marketable image, that producers and business people turned into a pop star. Unfortunately, I think it took a toll on her, mentally, and I feel bad for the trouble that success has brought onto her. However, her music is pretty disposable, and she doesn't have the intelligence and cultural impact of someone like, say, Madonna.
I think much of the conflict in the world is directly the result of people's varying interpretations of reality, or perhaps you could term it the "distortions" in their lenses. The best one can do is to try to consume as much knowledge as possible, both from your experiences, and from the words of others, in order to try to form a complete picture of the world.
I'm not a big fan of asynchronicity just for its own sake - a lot of people push rhythmic variation so far that the basic pulse of the music gets lost (and the listener is confused).
Unfortunately Sting's jazz work isn't nearly as inventive as his rock songs.
Well anyone can make a 'weird' [chord] progression by randomly picking triads.
It's hard to quantify a 'top ten' list of songs for many reasons. I like many styles of music, and it's difficult to compare radically divergent types of music with each other.
There's a big difference between playing shows for fun, and playing shows because you're in desperate need of the money.