by Matt Colville

Created on: February 26, 2009

It seems as though the argument presented is that the commercialization of music has caused music to lose its "depth". I completely disagree for four reasons. First, the single most observable motivation for writing music has always been notoriety and financial gain. Now this may seem like a rather grim stance on music but I will address this later. Second, it appears to us that music has lost its depth because we have had more time to criticize and highly regard the music of the past. As more volumes of "stuff" written about the music of the 90's appear, the more we will learn to appreciate the music of the 90's and so on and so forth for the 00's. Thirdly, (it may seem inappropriate to make this point, but) if considering solely the quantitative meaning of the word depth, there are millions of songs being written everyday and it follows that music is actually gaining a large amount of "depth" even if these songs are all trying to enforce the same musical idea. Fourth, hopefully through all of these points I will be able to show that musical "depth" is really not an important topic of discussion at all. (with no intent of insulting the original post's suggestion)

The first area to explore when discussing the artistic merits of a work is the influence and motivation. Before music was recorded, a composer was only as "good" as his reputation and his endorsements by nobles and kings. Many incredibly gifted composers were only able to produce music due to the good graces of an often ignorant aristocrat. And many incredibly gifted composers only produced music when they were in need of more drinking and gambling money. Obviously, this is not true for all composers and my lack of tangible examples is not due to laziness, all the argument requires is that the reader accepts that some composers were motivated in this way; the others will be addressed later. The biggest shift in this motivation throughout history came with the advent of recording technology. Now the composer who writes music as a living for the entertainment of an aristocracy is not only singing to the masses, he is singing to an uncertain audience. He is no longer certain exactly who he is playing for and exactly what they want to hear as he did when he personally knew much of the audience in his community, whether he be a folksinger or a classical composer. The music created by the motivation for notoriety and fame changes from a desire for fame within one's community to a desire for fame within and

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