Lady Gaga's entire career has been an A/B test. She started out as a singer and songwriter who actually poured some meaning into her music, and had no success. Then she seized the common pop chords, added a heavy back beat, stripped her songs of any meaning, and started wearing meat dresses. I'd say that B worked for her.
In addition, she's part of a larger A/B test being run by the industry. Music producers have a nearly unlimited supply of cookie-cutter musicians who they can produce in different ways to see what works. They're expendable, so when they fail the producers can move on and the musicians can go back to playing local clubs or whatever they did to get the producers' attention in the first place. I've known several musicians who got popular in a local scene, got a "big break" and released one heavily-produced album that sounded nothing like their previous work, and then faded back into obscurity. Every now and then one of them breaks big and the producers can cash in for a few albums.
Media companies do a/b their products, they have test audiences, focus groups, and such. By the time you get to that scale you think like a business, not like an artist.
It seems Gaga herself doesn't even know how the main stream music industry operates now. The record labels certainly a/b test the mixes on test audiences and choose the mix that rates better. That's why a lot of main stream pop (one example I know of for sure is Katy Perry) has a different mix engineer on almost every song.
They actually farm the mixes off to independent mixers who do the work. Then test the results. If your mixes rate well, you move up the labels artist hierarchy and will be offered more prominent artists to mix in future. So it is kind of a natural selection of mixing.
Some artist management by labels involves this at more than just the mixing stage. Song writing is also in many cases done like this. If you have the skills of Linda Perry, you'll bubble your way to the top. I'm not sure that Gaga does this process with song writing (does she write her own material?), but I'm willing to bet the label certainly does it with mixing. It's quickly becoming the norm in the industry.
Maybe Gaga knows this and that is why she dodged the topic by answering a question with a question.
>"This is precisely the problem with Google. Soulless."
A service like google doesnt need a "soul" , it needs strong products, great user support and fast servers.
And dont worry about A/B testing music, producers knows what works and not , and are using the same gimmicks over and over again , and a lot of marketing techniques ( including A/B tested marketing ).
Is there something fresh and new in Gaga's music ? no , it feels over produced and over marketed , i dont think Gaga's music has soul , it is like mc donalds , pre-pooped food. It has no soul.
While I'm not a Gaga fan by any means, I do have to say that her music is a notch above typical canned pop. Sure, it borrows heavily from pop idioms, but it's got an edge to it that seems unique to her, and the lyrics address themes a tad more deep than most pop music does.
Even that's subjective, of course, but at least she writes and arranges all her own music which isn't typical of factory-produced pop stars.
