In defense of the 'Popular = Bad' falacy
I know this is deeply controversial, so I will try to avoid skewing facts as much as I can and provide just things that actually occur. The reason I'm defending this is that I got called out on it, my insecurities where shown and I could not respond it immediately. I thought a lot about it with genuine intentions to understand why I prefer non-popular music over popular music.
To be clear, I'm a music lover. I love hearing people expressing themselves through audio. Sometimes I deeply relates to a piece even though I understand it that, musically speaking, it's not very groundbreaking. I wouldn't like Jazz because it somehow makes me smarter to hear time signature changes or wild chords. I love Jazz because it's so free-flowing and can be used to cause a whole range of emotions, proving of how flexible the genre is by itself.
Everybody has their own understanding of what music is for them, it's purely subjective and I understand that very well. For me, I hear music just like someone would see an piece of art. I see the little details and I want to understand the intentions behind the art. What it wanna convey? Am I interpreting it well? Undoubtedly, music is art. It's fair to compare music and painting as both derive from the introspective vision of an artist.
Introspective vision of what? What is art anyway? Well, Art is the language that represents an idea, concept or feeling to other humans through an medium, like a photo, a canvas and well... music. It's a thing humans do to share their human experience thing to other humans. We generally do this to cope the fact that.. 'Yes! we.. exist!!'. It doesn't really have a monetary value, the artist may pull a abstractedly thought price to compensate the spending during a week or month of work but, by itself, it doesn't have a price value on it's own.
As we have moved on, the contemporary world arrived and we're making art because it's "profitable" for a selected group of individuals. Those individuals are of course the popular artists that made a empire of money with their work, but my point is way more surgical than that. I believe there is a very very obvious difference between an art made by a popular artist and a not so popular (talking about less than 1K streams); of course, not generalizing, they both have ups and downs.
The most important difference is in the quality. The popular artist have a army of audio engineers, producers, vocal performers, people who work in the industry for years and mastered the art of making perfect music. I can't really deny that because generally speaking, the charts are filled with very well produced songs. One song have the hands of multiple talented people who know what they're doing very well.
As long as I can go to appreciate the work of the production team, at the end I think this is at it's own demise. Sometimes a song convey the idea better when it's poorly produced. See the idea of Lo-Fi Hip-Hop songs: I don't really like that genre, but I understand that those songs have generally bad production for a reason. Same goes for something like Vaporwave: it's more magical when it's poorly produced because it reminds you of something that never happened. Those are superficial level examples, but you can clearly see that the production quality of something doesn't directly correlate with being a good communicator.
What end up happening is that almost all mainstream artist fall into that hole of having an entire team for a "better" output, which end up sounding a lot more corporate, barely any personality left (ignoring vocals). This is where an amateur will almost always win. They really don't know what they're doing at times but this encourage taking risks or doing something wild to get to their idea. I've come across a lot of those artists and I can say very boldly that they all sound very characteristically incomparable to each other. They sound very unique and nothing that I've heard or seen before, which by itself may give a peek inside their brain. Maybe not necessarily a better work, but it's very good for me to see something that is not always perfectly executed. If we aren't perfect, why should our craft be?
The whole reason a work can be "well executed" also implies that we thrive for reaching production quality, which can mean a seek for perfection. There is, however, the amateur artists that copy a mainstream one, which most of the times is just a depressing version (parody-like) of the original. Don't do that. Build your own vision.
The equipment is also very different. Sometimes this also correlates with quality. A good pair of headphones like the Senheiser HD600s shows imperfections very clearly and you can fix it in no time compared to a budget headphone, but again sometimes we need those imperfections to make it more like "I'm just toying around" aspect to the art, which is way more welcoming.
It's not that I'm against very well executed songs. They can sound corporate at times, and since most non-pop artists are almost broke for plugins and equipments, they will oftenly sound "cheaper" in their production. That's not bad! Almost always creativity is stimulated when you have narrow boundaries, which forces those producers to take different approaches to things, leading them to get that "i'm just toying around" welcome sign.
Let's use The Amazing Digital Circus as an recent example. The pilot gathered a lot of views, currently sitting at 244M1. Despite the show having a lot of funding and being extremely popular, it still is indie animation. The animation is not perfect, it has it's flaws and a Disney animator would probably laugh at it. What gives? It has a lot of personality and characteristic to it that make it entertaining to watch. Making it perfect like a Disney animation would make it soulless because we're so used to the professional "perfectly" made animation that we often forget that this really doesn't need to be that way.
In conclusion, pop artists often forget that music (and any other art form really) at it's purest, is an art form, and expression is king above everything, everything else being optional. An low-status artist have a lot less to lose when making decisions, leading them to make bolder artistic or stylistic choices that creates a more interesting, relatable, welcoming charm to their craft; while more professional work tends to go to the safest bet that is more likely to generate lasting revenue for entire production team involved.
Data from January 2024 (YouTube)↩