Year-End Poll #67: 2016
[Image description: a collage of photos of the 10 musicians and musical groups featured in this poll. In order from left to right, top to bottom: Justin Bieber, Drake, Rihanna, Twenty One Pilots, Desiigner, Adele, The Chainsmokers, Justin Timberlake, The Chainsmokers. End description]
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We're now in 2016. A year that was at one point considered to be the worst in recent memory, a title that would only be surpassed by every year that came afterwards. But in terms of music, 2016 brought us a lot of heavy hitters. Anderson .Paak's Malibu, Rihanna's Anti, Frank Ocean's Blonde, Drake's Views, Beyoncé's Lemonade, and David Bowie's final album, Blackstar -- I would be here all day if I tried to list every release that came out this year.
But what's notable about this year of releases isn't just the albums themselves, but the music business landscape they were being released into. After the fall of physical media, the rise of music piracy in the MP3 era, and the popularity of digital storefronts, streaming services like Spotify seemed to be this great equalizer. This is an easier opinion to have if you forget that Spotify is a massive corporation, and if you're not an artist living off royalties. The controversy over streaming is nothing new. But this is when we start to see the landscape of streaming splintering.
Drake's Views and Beyoncé's Lemonade were not released to the wider streaming market, with exclusive releases on Apple Music and Tidal respectively. Much like the current debate over streaming services for movies and TV, listeners were suddenly finding themselves stretched thin between different streaming providers. Spotify, Apple Music, Tidal, Amazon Music, Pandora, YouTube, SoundCloud, and many others. This wasn't a new phenomenon (both SoundCloud and Pandora predate Spotify by almost a decade), but now we're seeing more platform-exclusive releases. Listeners responded in a variety of ways. Some people switched platforms or kept multiple subscriptions to different services. Some bought physical copies of exclusive releases and imported them into their preferred platform. Some just didn't listen to the releases. And others went right back to piracy, repeating the same problem the record industry had been trying to snuff out for several decades now. Platform-exclusive releases aren't that common anymore.
As far as the music itself goes, as the sound of electropop wanes in mainstream popularity, dance music is starting to incorporate influences from a variety of Caribbean styles of music, specifically dancehall as seen with Rihanna's Work and Drake's One Dance, and tropical house, as seen with Justin Bieber's Sorry and Sia's Cheap Thrills (not featured on poll). However, I do want to differentiate the two, because dancehall originated in Jamaica in the 1970's while tropical house is a relatively recent genre that incorporates stylistic elements of dancehall and other subgenres of house music.
When it comes to mainstream rap and hip-hop, trap music is continuing to dominate. With music platforms allowing artists easier access to distribution, a sub-sub genre sometimes known as SoundCloud rap started to find mainstream footing. Some people also call this style "mumble rap". I will not, because I find the term needlessly dismissive and kind of obnoxious. All of these rising genres put together helped to contribute to a musical landscape that was moody and generally at a slower tempo than the pop music of previous decades. It's often reductive to attribute popculture at the time to the current zeitgeist, but considering how today's poll features songs with titles like "Work" and "Stressed Out", it's too tempting not to.
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Is your wizard ready to go out and meet new people?
(Preferably not while trying to do a fetch quest? )
Then, can I offer you a W101 Dating App C0mm in these romantic times? (examples above!)
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