COMING SOON - Modern Music Masters
Modern Music Masters – Oasis
Foreword to the series
Modern Music Masters is series of short books about the life and music of a range of different musical artists. Each one is far from exhaustive but provides some context to the acts that you know and love, or are discovering for the first time. There is a strong focus on the country of origin and national chart performance, to give a rounded viewpoint and to place them in a cultural and political setting.
The first artist to be featured in the series is of course Oasis. The nineties kings of Britpop, that defined modern British indie-rock music. Read all about their rise to fame, their era-defining singles and albums, their huge concerts, and the ongoing battle between the Gallagher brothers that sat at the centre of their continued appeal.
Why the chart focus?
The singles and albums charts are an invaluable resource for helping to analyse the success of songs that artists choose to release, either as a straight indicator of their popularity, how their popularity changes over time, or exactly what else was popular at the time they were putting out records.
Musical artists never exist in silos, but perhaps more than any other art form, are reacting against (or are direct products of) the socio-political environment from which they emerge. It is therefore necessary to judge the impact of a musical artist’s work by the audience’s reaction to it. And the national charts were created to capture this exact data in real time.
The UK Official Charts Company is the most invaluable of resources - https://www.officialcharts.com/
More relevant than ever
With physical sales of music at an all-time low, the charts help us gauge what is (and isn’t) popular more than ever. The singles chart now encompass physical sales, downloads, streams and airplay, meaning there has never been a better time to capture exactly what it is that people are listening to.
Formerly it would take a record company to release a record for it to chart, now in the world of Spotify and iTunes, accessibility is so simple that results can be captured in real time. We now know that when an artist releases a cover version, for example, people often rediscover the original, therefore pushing a song back up the chart that might have gone unplayed for years. That is not to say that record companies have lost the strength that they once had to manipulate or capitalise on what is being listened to, there is just less demarcation than ever before.
However, if the audience for one act seems more modest in size compared to another, this does not necessarily mean that their impact is any less important, in fact the two could work inversely proportional to each other. This means that chart performance is not the only way to gauge success or impact of an artist, and as such the story of each act runs on its own distinct rails.
From the position of having produced just one of these books so far, the intention is for the series to be immediately identifiable, but for each new addition to follow the route led by the act.
I hope you enjoy reading as much as I have enjoyed writing.
Tom Boniface-Webb
August 2020
Foreword to the series
Modern Music Masters is series of short books about the life and music of a range of different musical artists. Each one is far from exhaustive but provides some context to the acts that you know and love, or are discovering for the first time. There is a strong focus on the country of origin and national chart performance, to give a rounded viewpoint and to place them in a cultural and political setting.
The first artist to be featured in the series is of course Oasis. The nineties kings of Britpop, that defined modern British indie-rock music. Read all about their rise to fame, their era-defining singles and albums, their huge concerts, and the ongoing battle between the Gallagher brothers that sat at the centre of their continued appeal.
Why the chart focus?
The singles and albums charts are an invaluable resource for helping to analyse the success of songs that artists choose to release, either as a straight indicator of their popularity, how their popularity changes over time, or exactly what else was popular at the time they were putting out records.
Musical artists never exist in silos, but perhaps more than any other art form, are reacting against (or are direct products of) the socio-political environment from which they emerge. It is therefore necessary to judge the impact of a musical artist’s work by the audience’s reaction to it. And the national charts were created to capture this exact data in real time.
The UK Official Charts Company is the most invaluable of resources - https://www.officialcharts.com/
More relevant than ever
With physical sales of music at an all-time low, the charts help us gauge what is (and isn’t) popular more than ever. The singles chart now encompass physical sales, downloads, streams and airplay, meaning there has never been a better time to capture exactly what it is that people are listening to.
Formerly it would take a record company to release a record for it to chart, now in the world of Spotify and iTunes, accessibility is so simple that results can be captured in real time. We now know that when an artist releases a cover version, for example, people often rediscover the original, therefore pushing a song back up the chart that might have gone unplayed for years. That is not to say that record companies have lost the strength that they once had to manipulate or capitalise on what is being listened to, there is just less demarcation than ever before.
However, if the audience for one act seems more modest in size compared to another, this does not necessarily mean that their impact is any less important, in fact the two could work inversely proportional to each other. This means that chart performance is not the only way to gauge success or impact of an artist, and as such the story of each act runs on its own distinct rails.
From the position of having produced just one of these books so far, the intention is for the series to be immediately identifiable, but for each new addition to follow the route led by the act.
I hope you enjoy reading as much as I have enjoyed writing.
Tom Boniface-Webb
August 2020
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