A kung fu fighter in a disco

People being able to buy music to listen to is nearly as new a thing as the Young People's Popular Music, of course.

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katstevens.livejournal.com

And being able to buy things to play music on.

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Well, yes. That's the bit you need first, and things that play pre-recorded music have only been about for a smidge over 100 years. I have zero clue how many people were able/willing to afford them, also, particularly as radio was a Huge Rival to the gramaphone in their early days.

Also, I am annoyed with the bbc for thinking that old people buy old people's music, and young people young people's.

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Yes, so the alBUM lists are kind of a red herring - but the point is that "OMG 50somethings listen to pop" isnt anything to get excited about, its been the normal state of things for all but a few decades.

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It's not saying Old People Love Pop, though - it's saying 'Old People Love Barry Manilow'.

The top 100 is strewn with records that can only be described as easy listening.

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i. i'm not sure what constitutes "popular music" prior to the age of widely available recording and/or music broadcast (starts roughly in the 1920s) (i don;t mnean there aren't various candidates, i'm just unsure which is "most like" our current idea)
ii. prior to overlap of popular and recorded, where did you go to engage w.music? gather round the family piano? the pub? the ballroom? the village square? the locales are inflected classwise and the class inflections have difft age implications
iii. the 40-year anomaly is a fact i think but not in the sense of "soon we will return to normal" cz i have no idea what normal is --- we are hugely over-used to being marketed at in respect of age-style taste... clearly it's possible to push back against this fostered semi-passivity but i think it needs conscious effort

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oops took too long

the album itself is the anomaly -- a 45-minute collection of songs as the ONLY POSSIBLE unit

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re ii. I guess one of the age implications is that 'the young' wd often have been left out of communal music activities.

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middle class children yes, working class children no (?) -- at least in the 19th century

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Sheet music wasn't popular among the working classes but illustrated ballads* etc. were, I thought?

*OK yes I know "ballad" did not necessarily mean "sung ballad"

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Are farmers middle class or working class? My mother has inherited lots of sheet music from the teens.

Were pianos more or less expensive that the new fangled radios and gramaphones?

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expense: i think it would depend what decade you're comparing in

there were also player pianos and punch-hole music; and uprights in the parlour were (in the urban UK, at one point) an object of working-class aspiration

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where did you go to engage w.music? gather round the family piano

hello sheet music industry! in thee olden days you didn't buy the single, you bought the the music to play yourself.

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That's a bit of a class issue, too - you had to have something to make music on (piano) and the education to read sheet music.

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Was the ability to read music more common 100 years ago than now? It feels like it was, but I don't know.

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I would guess that it was in the middle/upper classes, at least among girls. Piano plying was one of the basic accomplishments you picked up to help you pick up a husband. Less common in boys/men, I would guess - music wasn't as important as Latin, there.

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I sort of want to see some research on the music consumption of moms/old people/ whatever. We can't all be subcultural punks. Or clubbers.

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chezghost.livejournal.com

I wonder if there is anything in the idea that when rap, dance music etc. took off this saw a shift away from pop music led by melody, verse/bridge/chorus and other trad traits in pop, which in turn brought about this sense of doom among the older record-buying crowd who at any previous point had been able to digest the new as it still generally followed the rules of the old song-wise. maybe you could throw punk/post-punk stuff in with the dawn of techno. or maybe that doesn't hold water.

i say this because when i was growing up it really DID seem like people my parents age and older HAD lost interest in buying records. in the 80s i think my Mum bought only two albums - Flowers In The Dirt and Introducing The Hardline According to Terence Trent D'arby - and she was pretty with it! Mind you she didn't turn 50 until only a few years ago, ditto my Dad.

this could well be all rub theory as is just based on my own experiences.

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I think the BBC article is right to say that some people simply got into the habit of buying lots of records.

I think the huge success of Mojo etc. suggests that the late 80s didn't turn a lot of ppl off forever.

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Well, suppose you had youths being the ones buying most of the records in the 1930s. If there was no specific "youth" music, the charts wouldn't show that "youths" were the ones doing the buying.

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in that y-is-for-youth (http://web.pitas.com/tashpile/y4youth.html) piece i did for s&s, i discovered one metric for what constituted "youth" was the age of the actors hired to play romeo and juliet in hollywood movies of same: whereas in the 70s the star-cross'd lovers -- i think juliet is 13 -- were indeed provided w.teens to play them, in one big-name production in the 30s, romeo (leslie howard) = 43

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