Are Yanks and Brits quite far apart in general music tastes?

[peteb]

31 minutes ago, Barking Spiders said:

I was raised in Liverpool in the 70s-90s and wasn't aware of any metal scene or any of that American AOR stuff being popular. The only metal band of any note from the area is Carcass.  Used to go and see bands in Manchester a lot too. Not aware there was much of a metal scene there either. Certainly Manchester hasn't produced any metal bands of note. Maybe hair metal and US AOR were more popular the other side of the Pennines.

 

Maybe, but also the Midlands and the North East.

 

We did play quite a lot of gigs in the Greater Manchester area / Lancashire rather than Manchester itself. 

 

[Barking Spiders]

1 minute ago, peteb said:

 

Maybe, but also the Midlands and the North East.

 

We did play quite a lot of gigs in the Greater Manchester area / Lancashire rather than Manchester itself. 

 

yeah of course, Brum in particular has been the hotbed of metal and hard rock in the UK. 

[peteb]

30 minutes ago, Barking Spiders said:

yeah of course, Brum in particular has been the hotbed of metal and hard rock in the UK. 

 

Yea, Birmingham was always a good town for us back in the day. 

 

[Jeffb28451]

Yeah...pretty much seems that way. Not smart enough to venture a guess as to why, though.

[MacDaddy]

On 23/02/2024 at 14:50, BigRedX said:

The thing with the US is that the overall audience size is so massive

 

The population of the USA is around 340 million, and the UK around 68 million, so why is there is not a difference of 392% (approx) in certification for album sales?

 

Gold certification:

USA 500,000

UK 400,000

 

Platinum certification:

USA 1 million 

UK 600,000

[Stub Mandrel]

On 26/02/2024 at 10:36, Leonard Smalls said:

That's a bit catch-all!

Rhythm and Blues was coined in 1949 as a phrase by a journo from Billboard magazine to describe, basically, black music. This included blues, jazz, swing etc, and had artists as varied as Louis Jordan, Big Joe Turner, Nat King Cole, The Fabulous Platters. As black music moved away from the basic 12 bar structure a new term was coined -"soul".

Meanwhile, a bunch of Brits had got into the blues and started their own combos based on their interpretation of this sound - It got rockier, and many British folks feel that this pub-rock sound is what Rhythm and Blues is/should be.

Meanwhile, in the US the term "Black Music" was coined, which covered everything from Miles Davis to Parliament and everything inbetween. However, in the 80s more white artists were using African-American influences so by 1990 Billboard re-purposed the term R&B to mean almost any music of black origin, which is a very wide church even discounting jazz (though this has just as many haters within the BC community as modern R&B!).

Me? I like bits of all of 'em

 

Modern RnB is a marketing category for all black music other than hip hop.

 

Rather like lumping all 'white' music other than country as pop.

[Stub Mandrel]

On 28/02/2024 at 12:00, Barking Spiders said:

yeah of course, Brum in particular has been the hotbed of metal and hard rock in the UK. 

 

And the valleys!

[Count Bassie]

On 23/02/2024 at 02:32, SumOne said:

US mainstream market seems to me generally more macho/conformist. 

 

UK Ska was quite political/anti establishment, the US stuff was a bit more for the Bro's. US hip hop has generally been more macho and boastful. Queen's 'I want to break free video' pretty much killed their US career but didn't do them any harm in the UK (or most of the rest of the world). 

 

Not so much US popularity for bands along the lines of Erasure, Pet Shop Boys, Pulp, Suede, The Cure. They'd be considered too sissy and odd for a lot of the US market that go for more conformist stuff like Country music that doesn't do so well in the UK. 

This seems to be unfortunately true. It's part of the same current that feeds our lately emergent hard-right movement, also unfortunate- but I don't wish to go there. 

American cover bands often want to be a jukebox rather than exercise their own signature on a tune, partly because they think the audience wants that- I find myself guilty of that and lately have striven to put a new spin on a thing rather than cop the bass line, getting technical about details and nuance. What have *I* got to offer?... Being a jukebox takes the fun out of the experience on both sides of the mic. 

Anyway I am not a big fan of American pop, but I do like rock n roll. I find Nickelback very annoying, but give me some Supersuckers, deep-track ZZ Top or Cheap Trick's first record, there you go.

But there's definitely an angle with Brit rock/pop that goes by/over the head of an American dive-bar audience. The cultures are pretty different. 

There's a good percentage of knuckle-dragging, flag waving mindset here. On the other hand we do have blues and early rock and roll history, it's our backyard...

My .02.

[Count Bassie]

On 10/04/2024 at 15:55, MacDaddy said:

 

The population of the USA is around 340 million, and the UK around 68 million, so why is there is not a difference of 392% (approx) in certification for album sales?

 

Gold certification:

USA 500,000

UK 400,000

 

Platinum certification:

USA 1 million 

UK 600,000

Nowadays in the USA we just basically steal it off the Internet. 

I only hear about streaming and downloads nowadays. I still like to go into a record store, but that's not the mainstream. Now it's like a retro-novelty thing.