If you’re in the Philly area, I hope you had a chance to listen to a great radio event – the top 2020 songs of all time, as voted on by listeners of WXPN, University of Pennsylvania’s well-known radio station here. Two thousand and twenty different songs, presented in order from lowest voted to highest voted, from a pool of over 300,000 WXPN listeners who all had a chance to vote for their favorite ten songs each. The ten songs were ranked and scored with ten points going to the listener’s first choice, ten points to their second choice, and so on. Songs from every decade from the 1920’s to 2010’s were featured. Any choice was fine, there was no filtering based upon style of music. Stairway to Heaven made the list (not denied!). So did Rhapsody In Blue and Louis Armstrong’s What a Wonderful World.
And if you were paying attention, there was something VERY noticeable about this list. Something which, if you think like a producer (as I do), you couldn’t ignore. Something VERY DIFFERENT from the vast, vast majority of all music being played today.
Almost every single song had a live drummer. Almost none of the songs used drum machines, MIDI drums, or drum samples. And over half of these songs were most likely not even recorded to a click – they were recorded “live in the studio”.
Yes, there was a lot of classic rock on the list. Some jazz. Even a little bit of classical (Beethoven’s Ode To Joy made the list!) And of course those songs were recorded with live drums, because MIDI wasn’t even invented until the early 1980’s. But even the songs from the 1980s and 1990s still largely had real drums – Pearl Jam’s Alive, Nirvana’s Smells Like Teen Spirit, and other representatives of the Grunge movement famously were recorded live in the studio with real drums and usually without a click.
And these are the top two thousand and twenty songs that listeners chose.
What does that tell you about the way most music production is being done today?