JPF Home Page Forums General Messages Songwriter Message Forum Your positive and negative songs.

Rand, I think your above post is completely on the subject. The business, though always favoring "up positive" songs from writers, seems to go in and out of periods where it is at least somewhat receptive to the tear jerker. With these test groups, those periods move in a smaller range.

It makes sense that technological advances have such an impact on music. There are more distractions. Music in the sixties and early seventies was the only youth oriented mainstream entertainment. We had three channels on television. Video games were not available in the home. The teenager's bedroom may not have even had a tv or a phone, but everyone had a record player. We would sit and wear out the newest album, listening to every nuance, every word that we could discern above the scratching and the hiss.

Today, most teenagers listen to music as a soundtrack. It's either imbedded in their video games or it is blaring in the car. They have a cable or dish that sends them channels with programs and movies aimed at them, also with soundtrack songs. And their shared culture is the text message. So the pop music of today becomes a soundtrack, very peer driven, and with little room for introspective or complicated lyrics.

In Country music, specifically, we have thrown the adult out with the bath water. The Garth Brooks revolution (David Allan Coe once called Garth "The Anti-Hank" ), didn't only show Music Row how to sell a lot of albums. It also moved Country music's target audience to the teen and young adult.

So basically, we're in a market that caters to the young. Until and unless the teen angst song gains popularity again (think Janis Ian's "At Seventeen") we'll be looking at a market that produces party soundtracks on the pop side, and young adult themes on the country side. The percentage of happy/sad will be disparate.