Is it me, or did the 80's just have better music. Maybe it's just the when you become cognizant of music. My first album was Men at Work. Wore that tape out, and the music is STILL good.
The details: 1996 Telecommunications Act (viewable http://transition.fcc.gov/Reports/tcom1996.txt ), string search for "SEC. 202. BROADCAST OWNERSHIP":
> NATIONAL RADIO STATION OWNERSHIP RULE CHANGES REQUIRED- The Commission shall modify section 73.3555 of its regulations (47 C.F.R. 73.3555) by eliminating any provisions limiting the number of AM or FM broadcast stations which may be owned or controlled by one entity nationally.
Prior to this, each city had its own local stations and they'd all compete with each other. This change paved the way for Clear Channel aka iHeartMedia, Inc to purchase pretty much every commercial radio station around the country, resulting in the same programs everywhere. I read a reddit post recently that went into more detail about the process but I can't find it.
> Arguably pop music, as measured by the singles charts, peaked in early 1966, thereafter beginning a shallow decline in overall quality which was already steepening by 1970. While some will date this tail-off to a little later, only the soulless or tone-deaf will refuse to admit any decline at all. Those with ears to hear, let them hear.
After a couple more decades of continuing (though not uniform and consistent) overall decline, the broad truth of this looks more evident than ever. In much the same way that classical music probably peaked roughly around the death of Beethoven, with the shallow decline in overall quality becoming steeper some time in the late nineteenth to early twentieth century.
The point is that The Beatles are better than Boyz II Men, not that Led Zeppelin is better than Nirvana.
I'm sorry, in my opinion, music has just gotten a lot worse in quality over the years. And the other poster's post about ClearChannel taking over all the radio stations nationwide in the late 90s, I think, is good evidence that it's not just my biased opinion, the environment and the music industry has really changed for the worse. The industry was run in a very different manner back in the 70s and 80s, and it should be obvious that that's going to have a huge effect on the music.
The unfortunate issue is that these days modern music labeled as "classical" seems to be dominated by unlistenable or nearly unlistenable works composed under the guise of "let's break convention with harmony and so on" thus ending with pieces that might be interesting on an intellectual level but that do not move the average listener at all.
Of course the polite way of putting this is that modern classical music is "challenging", but from my perspective if it doesn't move you (and I don't mean move you towards the nearest exit of the concert hall) it's not really music.
Almost certainly this.
That can be part of it, but some eras can have better music than others too, period. The same way some centuries have tons of important artistic and intellectual works and others are mostly void of them: societies changes, new models, etc.
This is especially the case with respect to specific genres: e.g. not so much good bebop in 1990-2010 as in 1940s, even though there is some. Genres have their peaks and lows. This holds for genres like rock and r&b too.
This is certainly true of architecture--ref: the various discussions here about the widely perceived ugliness of much of Brutalist architecture. On the flip side, some might not find it inventive or whatever, but few are going to call most examples of neoclassical or Beaux Arts architecture ugly.
I agree with your point within genres but I disagree with your point as a whole. The main issue is knowing where to look, which can actually be quite difficult for some periods, as a lot didn't make it onto Youtube or Spotify. I've done some digging, though, and within each decade since the dawn of electrically amplified recording (1925), I've personally managed to find a style of music that I consider "as good as anything in any other period" i.e. timeless.
The thing is, some of these styles have been forgotten in contemporary discourse: Western Swing went from THE most popular style of music in the 1940s to being completely forgotten or tossed under the rug along with "I hate country and rap." If you ignore Western Swing because it's "country", you ignore the most interesting musical movement of that whole period (and you fail to fully understand the origins of Rock & Roll/Rockabilly/Sun Records/Elvis).
Other styles/movements have been reduced to the work of one or two idiosyncratic artists who are revered/remembered more for their personal story than for their place in the broader context: Django Reinhardt is the first that comes to mind (listen to Eddie Lang & Joe Venuti[0], then Milton Brown & His Musical Brownies[1], then come back to Django[2] and see what you think). Johnny Cash and Hank Williams are two others where most people are more familiar with their personal stories than their contextual relevance (and I'd argue one is a lot more important than the other).
I'm willing to list off my personal findings/recommendations on styles/artists but it would take me a while to get from 1925 to today. If there's interest I'll write it up but this post is already getting long.
[0]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qgzAoDhzUJA
First post has a lot of good recommendations from the 20s that I stand by. I'd rewrite most of the second post, though. I'll just do an overview here of what I'm familiar with:
30s -- swing/big band, western swing, acoustic/country/delta blues
40s -- western swing (cont), electric blues, honky-tonk, bop, vocal groups (less familiar)
50s -- bluegrass, rockabilly/rock & roll, honky-tonk (cont), folk revival, post-bop
60s and onward is a lot harder to follow, but...
60s -- folk, folk-rock, psych rock, psych folk, PLUS all sorts of jazz (bossa nova, modal) and country (Bakersfield Sound)
70s (note country drops off the map here) -- jazz-fusion, free jazz, disco, soul, singer-songwriter (less familiar), prog (less familiar)
80s -- post-disco, smooth jazz (yes, it can actually be good), punk, detroit techno, proto-house, rap (less familiar), new wave (less familiar)
90s -- house and beyond (my knowledge outside of dance music drops off pretty hard after the mid 80s)