Objectively, pop and indie are two totally different genres of music. But lately, the line where one begins and the other ends has been blurred as overproduction of indie music has made the sound more generic.

Overproduction happens when an artist who can sing well and play well is produced to the point of sounding auto-tuned, and there’s no rawness in the sound. But there’s a reason they do this.

The radio is generally monopolized by pop, especially when it comes to appealing to younger crowds. In order to get smaller indie bands airtime, record companies began overproducing to make them sound more like pop. There’s an underlying idea that if they sound like pop, they’ll get played. It’s the Phillip Phillips American Idol effect.

And it’s not even like they’re selling out. Indie artists need to eat too — and so they still write and record and sing all of their own music, while their producers jack up the mastering until the band is hardly recognizable. If they get airplay, people will buy their records, and go their tours. It’s a win-win.

Except it’s not.

Even if they do get the mythical airplay promised by their record company, fans who hear them live expect a pop band and usually leave the venue disappointed. Fans that originally loved them don’t go to the show because they aren’t interested in the new sound, even though they sound the same live as they did before the overproduction of the album. Nobody is winning in this scenario.

Bands that have fallen into this trap recently include The Head and the Heart, Regina Spektor, and even Bastille. But it doesn’t have to be this way. Bands can be successful just by playing their own, original sound. The Lumineers, Grimes, Nathaniel Rateliff and the Night Sweats have all found success by staying true to themselves. By playing their sound, they’ve built a following.

Mastering and producing an album should be about making the sound as close to live as possible. While there is no way to perfectly capture a band live, if they are talented and can sing and play, producing an album shouldn’t really be about changing their sound at all.

Rostam Batmanglij was known as Vampire Weekend’s keyboardist. But he also produced two of their albums — fantastically, of course — and has moved on to both creating his own music and producing others. His latest album, “I Had a Dream That You Were Mine,” with Hamilton Leithauser is mastered perfectly. It sounds like Leithauser is singing directly in your ear. It proves that mastering is an art form that can make or break an album.

While it is understandable that indie bands do need money to eat and also need to draw in an audience, there is a place for indie music to be successful without turning it into pop. Playing at festivals, gaining a loyal fan base and staying true to their sound is the way to true success. Overmastering just makes bad pop — and we already have enough of that, thank you.

Emera Riley is a junior magazine journalism major. Her column appears weekly in Pulp. You can email her at elril100@syr.edu.

Published on September 27, 2016 at 6:55 pm