Music Recording History and Stereotypes

Music Recording History and Stereotypes

            The music of today has evolved vastly from the music of our parents and grandparents.  Not only have the genres and types of music evolved, the technology used in modern music and used to bring us modern music has evolved as well.  At one point in time, the only way to experience music was to encounter it in person.  In today’s day and age, you can listen to more music than you could ever imagine without leaving your computer desk.  The digital world has helped to make almost any song you want to hear available at the click of your mouse.  This digital world has also made it possible for you to find new music and artists you like without ever hearing them before by using services like Pandora.com or Last.fm.  Jeff Leeds writes in his article “The New Tastemakers”, “services like Pandora have become the latest example of how technology is shaking up the hierarchy of tastemakers”(Leeds 276).  Technology is helping music evolve and branch out, but it may also be affecting the stereotypes in music as well.

            Before 1877, there was no way to record a human voice at all(Schoenherr “Recording Technology History”).  The only way you could experience music would be to experience it first hand.  During this time, a person’s opinion of a specific artist would be based solely on their stage performance.  The visual aspects related to a specific artist would come only from the artist’s appearance themselves, and possibly from things like poster ads.  Therefore, the stereotypes affiliated with that artist would be formed from the experience each person had watching them perform or from opinions obtained by others or the general public.  Some of this is still true today; if a good friend tells you an artist has a certain stereotype associated with them you would probably take their word for it.  An example would be if someone told you the artist George Strait was a country artist with a honky-tonk style, you would most likely just take his or her word for it and not find out for yourself.  In the same sense, if you saw a certain artist in concert it could make you like that artist much more or make you dislike them.