The artists, they are a-changin’

The excitement of your favourite artist dropping a new album is what maintains our interest in the music industry. As a regular listener to Spotify’s New Music Friday playlist, you’ll often find me counting down the days, hours, and minutes until a new song hits iTunes at midnight. But imagine if the music that your favourite artist released was consistently the same. Following the same beats, flows and melodies year on year… Lyrics stale, you’ve heard it all before. However, artists who change their genre or style continue to be met with hostility from the media and their own fans.

Just a simple Google search for reviews of Taylor Swift’s lead single ‘Look What You Made Me Do’ reveals abundant negative comments on her new work. They all take issue with the fact that Swift has changed. People still want to hear songs like ‘Love Story’, despite it being nine years ago; they forget that this Swift is different, not just in age, but on a personal level.

Music, before everything else, is a craft and career

The artists we love are human too. We overlook the fact that as we wait in a mixture of anticipation and impatience for the next single to be released, the person making that single is living a life just as we are. Admittedly, they will be experiencing, in many ways, a very different lifestyle. Dealing with the burdens of relentlessly being in the public eye, we forget they also face the delights and pressures that every day brings.

Just as marketing experts track the changes in consumer spending, teachers track trends in the classroom, and doctors assess the quality of new medicine – musicians also need to keep up with the current state of affairs in their industry. Music, before everything else, is a craft and career. It is a mode of creative expression and income, and as the artist and industry changes, so will the music they produce.

The only way maintain excitement is for the artists to keep transforming, to keep us wondering what they will do next and where their career will go

When Miley Cyrus drastically changed her sound and image, it was associated with a desire to cut ties with her Disney past, to reinvent herself as an artist in her own right separate to ‘Hannah Montana’. Compare the Coldplay of Parachutes with that of Mylo Xyloto or A Head Full of Dreams. Dissimilar in almost every way, a result of experimenting with new instruments and technology, which gave them success in their recent tours. More recently, Nicki Minaj and Bring Me The Horizon, with the release of ‘Starships’ and ‘Drown’ respectively, departed from their niche genres of mixtape rap and extreme deathcore, to tap into a more mainstream market.

Ultimately, music is more than the songs artists produce. Other creative aspects that come alongside the albums themselves are often side-lined, but changes mean new videos, tours, merchandise, and more. Without the artist changing, the music would become dull and the industry as a whole would become stagnant. The only way maintain excitement is for the artists to keep transforming, to keep us wondering what they will do next and where their career will go. Do I like all of the changes that my favourite artists have undergone? Not by any means, no.  But any change is good change as the long as the artist themselves believes it to be so. It is not down to the listeners, the record companies, or the critics to decide what is right and what is not. As long as the artist is confident in their work and happy with what they’ve produced, what is important is done. What does it matter if ‘the old Taylor is dead’? Her music hasn’t disappeared, it is still there to be listened to, and only leaves me excited for what the new Taylor has to bring.