Mixed genres, Collaborations & Mash up’s

Mixed genres, Collaborations & Mash up’s

Collaborations
Today, there are not the traditional set genres, of pop, rock, country etc. We are introduced to many more sub-genres, and ‘mash ups’.
As the industry is growing and becoming more and more competitive, artists are pressured to find new and fresh sounds, often resulting in collaborations, remixes and the birth of a new sub-genre.
Big artists tend to get together and create new music to get themselves known to other audiences that may not have listened to their music on a solo basis.

Florence and the Machine (contemporary Indie Pop) teamed up with dizzee rascal (A former ‘Grime’ artist, who has recently been influence by more mainstream rap) to remake and release the song ‘You got the love’ renamed – ‘dirtee love’. Florence and the machine covered the classic song ‘You got the love’, gave it a fresh twist and made it one of the biggest selling singles of the year. When she came together with Dizzee Rascal to perform on the award show ‘the Brits’, it caused a massive storm within the music industry and the public showed a huge amount of support. With the popularity of the song being so huge, they decided to record and release it as a single, and it sold more records than the original cover by Florence herself.



Collaborations didn’t just stop at singles, many artists have come together to form full albums in order to attract different audiences and appeal to a wide range of people.

Jay Z and Linkin’ Park collaborated Rock and Rap to form the album: Collision Course

This was a massive success in both the USA and the UK, attracting Linkin’ Parks’ audience to Jay Z and vice versa. This was a well thought out move as they both have larger audiences. They are now generating even more money that they were originally. It has allowed them to reinvent themselves in order to stay fresh and current in the industry.



Nas and Damien Marely mixed rap with reggae and created the album: Distant Relatives

Again this was a success, and allowed two different audiences to mix. Reggae and Rap audiences tend to be very similar, so this wasn’t as hard as Jay Z and Linkin’ Park trying to mix some completely different genres, however the album Distant Relatives has given the influence for other artists to collaborate and give the birth to even more sub-genres.



David Guetta is known for collaborations with some of the biggest artists of today, from Rihanna and Kelly Rowland to Akon and Flo Rida.
He started with remixing songs of other artists and then began to work on collaborations and releasing singles with some of the most popular artists in the industry.



Mixed Genres
Many songs made today are not just one traditional genre they are either mixed with, or influenced by others. This allows the artist/s to appeal to a wide audience and become successful in the ever changing and competitive industry.
Plan B, an original Rap and Grime artist, didn’t have much success with his original sounds, so he changed his style to appeal to a wider audience and is now one of the most successful male artists of today.
He stays true to his rap routes but mixes this with a ‘blues’ sound, the fact he can also sing, allows him to mix these genres together. He states he wishes to explore each genre of music and release an album for each so he can reach out to as many people as possible.



‘The Roots’ had a very mixed genre from the start, they are predominantly Rap but with a mix of light rock. Having this unique spin on their music, allows them to stand out against other Rap artists.



These are just two examples of the many in the music industry today. It is becoming ever more popular for artists to mix up their original sounds to ‘reinvent themselves’ and stay current.

Mash ups
As well as collaborations and the mix of genres, the mix of two different songs is very popular too.
These are these in bars or nightclubs, and are often mixed to form a new ‘dance’ style track. In nightclubs, you either have an adapted version of one song, with an increased tempo or adapted into a dance track, or the mix of two completely different songs to have the same effect. This can help improve the sales of singles. People will hear a remix or a mash up in a nightclub or on the radio and this will attract people to either download the original song, or even the remix/mash up itself, and still in both cases, the artists name gets better known. It will also attract another type of audience, as the audience for dance music, will be introduced to new artists.



Illegal Mash ups
www.soundcloud.com is a website that allows you to search a song, and it will list all the remixes/mash ups of that particular song. It also allows you to upload a version you have created yourself, allowing the public to share music. This can bring up a lot of issues from copyright.
There are many problems like this on the internet that are causing problems to the music industry, from illegal downloading via Limewire and illegal mash up and remix of songs.
This causes a loss in revenue for an artist/s and the music industry itself. Youtube converter is not illegal, as you are simply converting a video file to an MP3 file, however the fact you can easily download songs off youtube.com for free, means that less people are buying the artist/s singles.