Taste

In the Negus reading, he talks a lot about taste in the music industry and more specifically,  genre. Negus touched upon how incredibly hard it is to get a record deal as an up and coming artist or band and even more so if you do not conform to one specific genre. Drawing from experience, Negus wrote that when looking to sign a record deal the question of “what is your genre” always arose, and it was extremely difficult to get signed if you said you did not fall under one specific genre. What he found interesting about this is that artists themselves had eclectic tastes when it came to music and their listening habits almost never conformed to one specific genre. This shows the power the record companies have over peoples tastes, they want you to think that it is the band’s taste of music or even the listener’s taste but in reality, it is the taste of the record company and whatever they believe is going to make them the most money.

I chose this picture to represent how many genres there are in music today, and especially how many different genres we consume as listeners. The audio I chose is a songwriter Jack Antoff speaking about Taylor Swift and her music. Taylor Swift is a good example of someone who has different tastes in how she makes music. Starting as a country star to a now pop star people have argued that she has changed genres, but the audio shows how one of her songwriters believes that it is good to try different things in music and not everything has to conform to a genre. A clear example of how artists tastes are different from the record labels tastes.