songs that weren't a bands biggest hit, but have gone on to be their legacy song and biggest iTunes seller

(I wish more ppl listened to ‘50s music, I love it, but I’m not surprised that “Kansas City” or whatever isn’t among the top 10000 most streamed songs.)

Jailhouse Rock and Johnny B Goode have ~250 million streams so not terrible for ancient tracks

Honestly the grandpa in 1955 buying an LP of Sousa marches is pretty much an exact analogy to the Boomers on YouTube streaming ‘50s music.

Huge part of this is that by 1975 multi track recording had completely matured and plateaued, so “Bohemian Rhapsody” or “Born to Run” don’t have much of a retro sheen, even if the style and genre are older. So these days a lot of 50 year old music can be played alongside contemporary music ( especially if it’s been compressed) without a startling shift timbre and fidelity.

i was going to post something like that bendy, but not as concise. photography keeps getting better and better. it may be ready finally to hit something like a plateau but personal snaps from even 6 or 7 years ago look dated already. movies from the 1990s look dated, both in the film grain and lighting sensitivity but also in the stodgy fixed camera movements. but 'high definition' audio recording already sounded as perfect as it ever needed to sound by the mid-60s (i'd say?) and yes, multitrack recording matured not long after, and by the early 1980s you even had absolutely locked MIDI timings. there is just not a dropoff in quality, even back to blue note and stax and motown. nothing comparable to 4:3 aspect ratios or shooting on film with giant heavy cameras

That's interesting. DAW-based digital audio, esp with mostly DId or in-the-box instruments, does sound pretty different to me from the mic-ed amps recorded to tape you hear on 70s records - often not as good to my ears but definitely different. There have been objective advances in signal:noise ratio and dynamic range but it might be the case that things have advanced beyond what the ear needs, at least as far as pop music is concerned?

I'd argue that those are stylistic choices. You can play to a click track and pro-tools the kick drum onto the grid, the record bass on top of that, add some sampled loops. Or you could mic each drum and isolate from other other musicians playing live, then mix for a "natural" sounding drum track with the push-pull rapport of a live band. But the final recording isn't going to sound more pristine than say, My Life in the Bush with Ghosts or Zuma. Like, aughts lofi rock is lo-fidelity for expedience and lack of access to eight high-end microphones. In one band I was in, we actually borrowed two mics worth more than all our cars combined, but we couldn't get any more quality out of them than a SM57 and a plate mic I borrowed from the work teleconference system, and the results weren't glossy, but they were definately more than lofi.

Re: 50s on Spotify, my mother used to always have good oldies station on when I grew up on the 90s, one that largely played 50s, with a smattering of British Invasion tracks. (Checking now, it’s moved onto “the best variety of the 70's, 80's and 90’s”). I get nostalgic for it sometimes so resorted to creating a large 50s playlist I can put on shuffle, though it has deeper cuts than KLOU did—I trawled old top 40 playlists from the fifties, as I wasn’t eager to recreate the experience of hearing "Chapel of Love" every two hours.

Huge part of this is that by 1975 multi track recording had completely matured and plateaued, so “Bohemian Rhapsody” or “Born to Run” don’t have much of a retro sheen, even if the style and genre are older

Curiously, 1940s big-band records sound more recent than they are to my ears, because I associate dense productions with multitracking. But they were able to simulate dense production without multitracking just by having 25 instruments playing at the same time.

blatherskite, that sounds like a good playlist! i have very fond memories of listening to the oldies station in the car with my mom in the 90s, and her gleefully turning up the volume on things she hadn't heard since way back when, or thought I would particularly appreciate.

I do think there's a noticeable difference in classical recordings between the 70s and the present day in terms of dynamic range and noise floor (e.g. between the Boulez pieces recorded in 2003 on Christina Petrowska-Quilico's Sound Visionaries album and the Messiaen and Debussy pieces on the same album that were recorded in the 70s). Agree that the level of improvement matters less with pop music, which tends to have a narrower dynamic range and less silence.

Re: 50s on Spotify, my mother used to always have good oldies station on when I grew up on the 90s, one that largely played 50s, with a smattering of British Invasion tracks.

I don't know if the demographics of Spotify and other streaming service subscribers are available, but I suspect that the boomers who are still listening to 50s and early 60s music are disproportionately not streaming it. I was just in a car with someone in his late 60s who's primary audio panel on his car's screen was Sirius/XM, with the Beatles station, Stones station, 60s station and a couple other oldies ones all bookmarked. His listening consisted of just scrolling through those 5 or 6 stations till he heard something he wanted to listen to. I assume that Sirius/XM subscribership is disproportionately boomers, and they presumably are overrepresented in terrestrial radio listeners as well.

Spotify's pre-Beatle Rock & Pop selection is, er, pretty spotty, with alot of dodgy comps, redundant comps, and rerecords that aren't always labeled as such.

The SiriusXM 50s station is pretty decent (NP: Platters, “The Great Pretender”)

(as a caveat, they do play a lot of Frankie Avalon and stuff like that though)

Ugh at rerecords

I guess there's also the idea that it's more acceptable, because most fans of that era of music aren't listening that closely, they often grew up with music as more of a background thing.

Pre-album-era pop has always been a bins full dodgy comps, redundant comps and re-records, though there used to be a music press and store clerks to identify the better collections and reissues. Streaming era is rough on airbrush artists who can make scenes of a jukeboxes, poodle skirt girls with argyle socks, and hotrod Fords driven by ersatz Fonzies. Quick grab of milkshake clipart and some WordArt text will suffice!

the worst examples of this are usually country artists where decades and decades of shitty repackaged comps from 20 different labels have to compete with the 'official' studio lps. George Jones discography for example! this is even worse for those artists where 'public domain' applies to the older stuff.

I just went to listen to Olivia Newton-John's Physical on spotify and was surprised that Physical doesn't even make her "Popular" section. Like sure, Summer Nights is one thing, but the theme from Xanadu?

hmm, I see Physical with 41 million streams and Xanadu at 29 million. Popular is more what's hot at the moment though I think.

Iirc, parts of ONJ's catalogue were late arrivals on Spotify as well.

He's not "pre-album-era pop", but I was shocked looking in the iTunes store how many crummy repackagings there are of Ornette Coleman's Atlantic recordings, all with bad art... and not really any cheaper than the original Atlantic albums!

xps: ah, I didn't know how to see Physical's streams since it wasn't on that list.

On desktop you can see the top ten-- Physical is #6

"xanadu" is weird yes, but i'm not shocked that a bunch of songs from a popular and enduring movie musical are more popular than "physical," which sucks

https://datastudio.google.com/u/0/reporting/74cda77c-f120-40f7-932f-5cdca9d2120a/page/VrXI

I do know September by Earth Wind & Fire but am mystified why it should be the one track by a Black act in the 70s.

Wedding playlists?

the way "september" seems to tower above basically any r&b song of its era (or nearby eras even) in the minds of white people these days is bizarre and i don't get it either. i have a friend who is my age but seemed to engage w/ very little pop music in general thru most of his life but seemed to gradually get into it (mostly rock) thru, like, guitar hero soundtracks and such (+ todd in the shadows videos for more recent stuff - lol). he adores "september" but i'm not sure if he's familiar w/ like any other r&b hits of any decade besides a few by prince. idk if he even knows other ewf hits!!

If you look at EWFs imdb entry, it is used sporadically in soundtracks until 2010 after which every year September is used multiple times. Some of these shows I don't recognize, but notably it's been used in two episodes of Family Guy, which probably ironed it into the brains of a certain segment of the population. Then in 2016 it was the closing song in the movie Trolls (performed by Justin Timberlake and Anna Kendrick).

This is the kind of banal explanation I was hoping for.

certainly demi adejuyigbe's work the past few years has bumped september quite a bit for a certain sort of crowd

Taylor Swift covered it as well iirc?

Tbh, I first heard it when we did the 70s poll some 15 years ago and it made an immediate impression.

huh, i feel like it's had this standout status at least since the 90s. it's one of those songs i feel like i've known since I started listening to the radio, certainly for years before i even knew what it was called. like it was already getting played in settings (yes including weddings) that had no space for anything else of its time/genre.

In my childhood I probably heard "Celebration" five times for every time I heard "September."

Now it's the other way round.

God, Celebration used to be everywhere. It took a long time before my sole association with that song wasn't car dealership year-end model clearance events.

For me it evokes a now-demolished Busch Stadium between innings of a Cardinals game, but yes, it was inescapable from 1980-1985 at least

"September" was sung on American Idol a number of times in the 00s

In my childhood I probably heard "Celebration" five times for every time I heard "September."

Ditto, and I wouldn't mind never hearing Celebration again. So good on the youngs for choosing September instead.

God, Celebration used to be everywhere. It took a long time before my sole association with that song wasn't car dealership year-end model clearance events.

Funny story from the "September" wikipedia page:

Using a chord progression written by Earth, Wind & Fire guitarist Al McKay, vocalist Maurice White and songwriter Allee Willis wrote the song over one month. Willis was initially bothered by the gibberish "ba-dee-ya" lyric White used through the song, and begged him to rewrite it: "I just said, 'What the fuck does 'ba-dee-ya' mean?' And he essentially said, 'Who the fuck cares?' I learned my greatest lesson ever in songwriting from him, which was never let the lyric get in the way of the groove."

I actually heard 'celebration' on the radio this weekend and it felt weird that it wasn't part of a commercial and just played through in its entirety

Oh, Kool & the Gang's "Celebration"? I knew that (in its entirety, from MuchMusic) when I was 12. I didn't hear "September" until I was in grad school.

I literally cannot hear "September" without thinking of ILM and Pomplamoose.

If you're tired of Kool and the Gang's "Celebration" you're tired of life.

I sing a variation of "Celebration" nearly every day— sometimes it's to the dogs, and I also often will be in the shower and suddenly bust out with "CELEBRATE MY BALLS COME ON"

^--- not tired of life

Earth, Wind & Fire's "September" seems the epitome of this.

― zama roma ding dong (Eric H.), Friday, April 26, 2019 11:39 AM (two years ago)

Just seen that Eric called it but it took the rest of us two years to catch up.

I wonder how many streams come from actual end-users and how much stems from office/cafe/restaurant playlists

Thing is, "September" was actually EWF's biggest UK hit. (#3, tied with "Let's Groove", but the former stayed longer on the chart). I'd always assumed that was the case everywhere, but in the US there were five bigger hits, so there you go.