Tag Archives: music-industry

Gatekeepers, Ballads, and Misplaced Contempt: A White Paper on Starship, We Built This City, and the Cultural Misreading of No Protection

Posted on December 27, 2025 by nathanalbright

Executive Summary This white paper addresses two related and persistent anomalies in popular music criticism surrounding Starship and their 1985 album No Protection: Why “We Built This City” is routinely treated as one of the worst songs of the 1980s, … Continue reading →

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White Paper: Why Hit Albums Are Hard to Follow: Structural, Psychological, and Market Constraints on Musical Continuity

Posted on December 27, 2025 by nathanalbright

Executive Summary Despite increased budgets, improved studio access, greater label support, and heightened public awareness, artists who produce a breakthrough album frequently struggle to match—let alone exceed—the sales and cultural impact of that success. This phenomenon is not primarily a … Continue reading →

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White Paper: Song Reassignment in Pop Music: Cross-Project Migration, Group Succession, and the Modularity of the Pop Music Production System

Posted on December 20, 2025 by nathanalbright

Executive Summary Pop music is built on an industrial model characterized by high specialization, modular production, and fluid ownership of creative assets. Because songs are often written by professional songwriters or production teams rather than the performers themselves, it is … Continue reading →

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White Paper: Curated Memory vs. Measured Success: What Bread’s Compilations Reveal About Popularity, Taste, and Soft-Rock Canon Formation

Posted on December 14, 2025 by nathanalbright

Executive Summary Bread’s legacy is unusually shaped by compilation albums rather than by sustained attention to their original studio LPs. By comparing The Best of Bread (1973), a comprehensive view of Bread’s singles output, and later greatest-hits collections, this white … Continue reading →

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White Paper: A Short History of Boy Krazy

Posted on December 12, 2025 by nathanalbright

Boy Krazy (sometimes mis-remembered as “Boy Crazy”) are one of those small but revealing footnotes in pop history: a short-lived New York girl group whose one big hit arrived two years late, whose album was largely built from repurposed Kylie … Continue reading →

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White Paper: Mapping the Topology of Music Genres to Radio and Station Segments: Alignments, Overlaps, and Untapped White Spaces

Posted on November 25, 2025 by nathanalbright

Executive Summary The structure of radio programming is historically built on demographic assumptions and legacy scheduling models. Meanwhile, music genres and subgenres have followed their own evolutionary trajectories, driven by sociocultural shifts, streaming data, listener mood patterns, and generational identity … Continue reading →

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White Paper: The Neglected Production of Phil Collins

Posted on November 25, 2025 by nathanalbright

Phil Collins is usually remembered as the voice behind “In the Air Tonight,” the drummer-frontman of Genesis, and the pop superstar who dominated 1980s radio. What tends to be forgotten is that he was also a remarkably busy and influential … Continue reading →

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White Paper: The Structural Mismatch Between Artistic Creation, Corporate Promotion, and Consumer Demand

Posted on November 13, 2025 by nathanalbright

Executive Summary Across the cultural industries—publishing, music, film, television, visual art, gaming, and emerging creator-driven ecosystems—there is a persistent three-way mismatch between: What artists want to make (creative fulfillment, innovation, self-expression) What companies want to sell and promote (predictability, scalable … Continue reading →

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White Paper: Understanding the Difference Between Best Of, Greatest Hits, and Singles Albums

Posted on November 9, 2025 by nathanalbright

Executive Summary Within the recording industry, compilation albums serve different artistic, commercial, and archival purposes. Yet terms such as Best Of, Greatest Hits, and Singles Album are often used interchangeably—causing confusion among listeners, collectors, and even within label marketing departments. … Continue reading →

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White Paper: The Musical Partnership of the Female Singer and Male Producer

Posted on October 27, 2025 by nathanalbright

Executive Summary Throughout the history of popular music, a remarkably consistent pattern has emerged: the collaboration between a female singer and a male producer or instrumentalist. From The Carpenters to Everything But the Girl, from Frou Frou to Billie Eilish … Continue reading →

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