What has been the main reason people think R&b music is pretty much dead ?

[Ronnie Lott]

I was reading some of the comments in that recent Chris Brown thread, and I saw quite a few people saying R&b is pretty much a dead genre.So I was wondering what killed it? Less then five years ago R&b was pretty popular but now it seems to me like if you want to sell records you have to be Dirty and raunchy.I have always liked Hip hop music a little more then R&b but I am still a big fan of R&b music.There needs to be balance.If R&b is dead or dying what are people going to listen to in the future to get in the mood? It pretty much irritates me that people like Adele, Justin Timberlake and other white artists are doing R&b type music and are actually selling records, but for some reason the music industry can't find a black singer to do the same type of music. Don't get me wrong I don't have a problem with either of those singers in fact I used to have Justin Timberlake's first two CD's but in my opinion there has to be an agenda.

You're just out of touch man.

 

[Kenny WRLD]

We have Frank Ocean and SZA. Rnb winning

 

[Wear My Dawg's Hat]

r&b was huge throughout the 90’s and early 2000’s, so 20 years is a reach lol
Singers and producers even today have church roots

It depends on what you consider "huge"?

As a genre, r&b fell behind rap in the early to mid 90s. The music industry feasted off of the growth
of the companies Death Row, Interscope, Bad Boy, Def Jam, So So Def, No Limit, Rocafella, Murder Inc, Rap-A-Lot, Slip-N-Slide, Cash Money.

R&b oriented Uptown couldn't compete once Puffy Combs left to form Bad Boy.

Andre Harrell tried to revive Motown in a commercial rap wave and couldn't do it.

LaFace was an r&b outlier and even their successes included pop semi-rap (TLC) and Outkast.

 

[Booker T Garvey]

This is a pretty loaded question but I’ll hit you with the core reasons

1) The music business focuses primarily on quick hitters now, songs they can put in commercials, movie trailers, corporate events etc etc..smooth rnb ballads don’t fit this mold. You can’t play a slow song during a call of duty trailer.

2) Hip hop pushed RNB out of the mainstream last decade during the ringtone rap era - hasn’t come back since

3) Most great rnb is gospel influenced, the singers have soul and sing from their gut - this style of music and singing just flat out isn’t popular anymore; hitting runs, ad libbing, grunting, letting the music take over is seen as corny now - probably seen as a little crazy too

 

[Oceanicpuppy]

No church or jazz artist are crossing over to R&B

Except a few

The blackness has been suck dry out of it.

 

[Big Boss]

Something else lacking in R&B is the lack of Blues influence. When you listen to old soul music and R&B, you can hear that old deep south Blues element in the sound of the music and vocals. Real instruments certainly contributed to that sound, but these modern producers don't really rely on that anymore. There is no in-house band like a Stax Records or Motown would use for their vocalists.

Facts

 

[The Fire]

It depends on what you consider "huge"?

As a genre, r&b fell behind rap in the early to mid 90s. The music industry feasted off of the growth
of the companies Death Row, Interscope, Bad Boy, Def Jam, So So Def, No Limit, Rocafella, Murder Inc, Rap-A-Lot, Slip-N-Slide, Cash Money.

R&b oriented Uptown couldn't compete once Puffy Combs left to form Bad Boy.

Andre Harrell tried to revive Motown in a commercial rap wave and couldn't do it.

LaFace was an r&b outlier and even their successes included pop semi-rap (TLC) and Outkast.

you still had r kelly, usher, Mariah, Alicia keys, Omarion, etc going platinum

 

[DLaren]

I haven't listened to rap music since the early 2000's -- I've been all R&B for over a decade and fortunately for me all of my favorite artists are still making records:

Tank
Boyz II Men
Tyrese
Trey Songz
Jagged Edge
112
R.Kelly
Beyonce
Jaime Foxx
Leona Lewis
Jodeci
Genuwine
Sam Smith
Ruben Studdard
Pleasure P
Jahiem
Usher

The only people hurting for good R&B are the young folks who grew-up on auto-tuned "singers". There's a few young dudes who can really sing like Luke James, Eric Bellinger, & Chris Echols...but they're not in the booth often enough putting out music.

So I'm good with my "old" singers, because unlike rap artists, my R&B favorites can do what they do for another 40 years.

 

[Wear My Dawg's Hat]

you still had r kelly, usher, Mariah, Alicia keys, Omarion, etc going platinum

Withdrawing Mariah from the group (she's a pop artist who paved the way for Aguilera, Ariana Grande, Megan Trainor, Adele and all the other vanilla r&b of the moment), their sales and popularity did not reach the level of rap's dominance during those years.

And their one-off successes also did not rise to the level of r&b's total black music dominance from the late 50s up to the mid 90s (the period that includes: Fats Domino, Little Richard, Aretha, Sam Cooke, Gladys Knight & the Pips, Motown, Stax, Philadelphia International, Roberta Flack, Betty Wright, Freda Payne, Earth, Wind & Fire, Parliament Funkadelic, Stevie Wonder, Chaka Khan and Rufus, The S.O.S. Band, James Brown, Patrice Rushen, The Time, Michael Jackson, Prince, D Train, Whitney, Mtume, Luther Vandross, Lionel Richie, Anita Baker, Vesta Williams, R Kelly, Mary J Blige, Usher)

 

[FeloniousMonk]

Record Labels and the like switched focus..

 

[010101]

the concept of genre is damn near dead
folk listen to everything and that's reflected in the music
across the board artist are just less talented and they be corny

*

 

[Wear My Dawg's Hat]

There was a time when the Budweiser Superfest was the ONLY black music stadium tour
going.

This was in 1987 when r&b culture, black radio and Soul Train were still dominant.

 

[hayesc0]

Because rnb and hiphop merged a few years ago. They're damn near interchangeable now. Singing nikkas rap now and vice versa.

Exactly thread can be closed now lol.

 

[Poitier]

There is a lot of well written, traditional, soulful, and new RnB out there.