The way artists have made, recorded and listened to music has evolved since its implementation in American culture. First, people mainly performed music until the Great Depression struck and music’s focus shifted towards recorded sound. Musical pioneers, such as John Phillip Sousa, were upset at this shift and rightly so as it threatened artists’ passions and livelihood. But what the public desires will ultimately drown out old voices and new and more sophisticated technology will prevail. Eventually, the radio and recorded music were the norm, gradually rising in the early 1900s. Although radio was an astronomical marketing tool for the music industry, it did not compare to the effect that motion pictures had on music (Popart University). Contrary to popular belief, the …show more content…
Some artists go to great lengths to create shocking and provocative music videos in order to generate sales. Being a musician myself, I would never want to succumb to selling music because I made a video with half naked women. Back in the early 80s MTV would not air Rick James’ music video for “Superfreak” and he deemed it to be because of race. However, the video does contain women in provocative clothing dancing and grinding on James himself. This is why MTV “claimed” they would not air it which makes sense because society was generally less accepting of content like that during that era then they are today. A more modern example would be Nicki Minaj’s “Anaconda” music video that has garnered over 500 million views on YouTube. It is more or less a video of Minaj and others “twerking” throughout the video and the Huffington Post even wrote an article titled, “Nicki Minaj's 'Anaconda' Video Has All The Butts You Could Ever Want In A Music Video.” Nicki Minaj has done wonders for female rap music, breaking barriers left and right, but music videos like this somewhat taint those