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Comment by bsaul | Hacker News Reader

You forgot a third thing : the absolute total lack of originality in any kind of music aimed at the general audience, from folk to pop to rap or even techno. It's just complete garbage and the good things are just copies of what was done 30 years ago.

If you keep giving people the thing they've already heard and known, because you're afraid you'll make less download if you try something new, then you'll reach "local optimimum" in all genres.

Soon it will be all computer generated, and what we call "music composer" will finally be left to the people actually trying to compose something original. You know, like real artists.

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You forget that "the good things from 30 years ago" were also called garbage when they appeared (mostly by parents).

It's the never ending story, old people calling youngsters music garbage.

As someone who lived through the 80s, I will say the pop music of the time was not particularly good, but it was at least original. It was a new sound, and there were new aesthetics being explored.

That is not true today ... is it? Any examples?

By the mid-1990s we had a very clear idea of what 80s music was (electric guitar, synth and rap) and even what 90s music was (grunge and all this electronic stuff that I thought was super boring but a lot of people liked so whatever). It’s 2018 ... I have no idea what 2000s music was. Everyone can probably name a bunch of musicians that were big then, but what sound was being pioneered? Messing around with vocoders / harmonizers? That seems very limited and small.

What is the sound of 2010s music? I have simply no idea.

2010's music is dominated by remix scenes. Across most of the popular new genres this pattern holds:

* Arrangements are consistently built on samples and reconstructions of older songs. Big productions regularly credit a dozen people as songwriters: a Top 40 production is a factory process. * Awareness for new acts is built with fewer "big break" moments, and more of a grind with high-energy guerrilla marketing, endless tours, etc. Inclusion in a soundtrack is a common success milestone. * Live performance takes the form of: DJ set with a few vocal/instrumental parts, idol dance routine, acoustic cover - aiming to perform with a live performer on every part is the exception for acts driven by their production, though of course you still see traditional styles represented as a full live group. * 100's of amateur covers, "dance remix" and "nightcore" versions filter out over Youtube, Soundcloud and parts unknown. The sound gets curated by these fan groups leading to innumerable niches each with their own "canon text".

It really stopped being about the gear, and is only to a limited degree about mastery of traditional technique:"the sound" is always a commodity. But the brand is also more than the sound, and popular acts always get their branding on point now, which does include whatever aspects of the performance are necessary for "authentic" portrayal. Music is more than ever a tapestry with increasing extremes of "big heads" - constructed formulas - and "long tails" - folk vernaculars.

> It was a new sound, and there were new aesthetics being explored.

Is that really true, though? Most of the music that dominated the 90s, for example, wasn't created in the 90s. Grunge and Punk started in the 80s and were repackaged for mass consumption later.

The monopoly on what constituted "pop music" was largely destroyed by the turn of the century. That's part of the reason there is no particular sound of the '00s and '10s. I'm sure there was a lot of experimenting that's happened in the last 20 years, but they aren't being repackaged for mass consumption anymore.

Ironically, this has made the process of finding new music both easy and, at the same time, extremely difficult. As an indie game maker, I'm sure you can relate to the "discovery" problem.

I certainly don't think current music is garbage. But I do think innovation has slowed.

If you compare music from 1960, 1980, 2000, and now (almost 2020) you'll notice that the 60's to 80's to 00's were incredibly different. Like, they clearly come from distinct eras.

While there is still innovation, there aren't dramatic changes happening as often in the past two decades. There are many popular songs today that could have been popular in 00's and vice versa.

Some rap seems to still be innovating, but rock, pop, and a lot of electronic music seems to be stuck in a rut.

> I certainly don't think current music is garbage. But I do think innovation has slowed.

I would agree quite strongly here. I make a point of grubbing through "new artists" and/or "new releases" on Amazon Music or Google Play Music.

"New Sounds" are simply extremely rare, or alternatively, inaccessible (by inaccessible I mean something like "I've Got No Chicken But I've Got Five Wooden Chairs" by Barton).

Of course, this is separate from my tastes - I'm searching for something that is an enjoyable new thing that tastes good and unlike my existing taste.

My personal guesstimate is that the wide availability of sounds has provided a too large landscape for newcomers to work through and then break out of, in general. It will almost take a naive art type to synthesize together a new sound that is both accessible and fresh - in my opinion.

New, innovative music is out there, even in the indie mainstream.

Moses Sumney, for example, is incredible. Give this a whirl. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NPeji3NS4uE

"extremely rare". :) not non-existent.

Mr. Sumney is, I'm sorry to say, not dramatically variant in the indie folk sonic system. I would say that it is a somewhat more electric orchestration of someone like Jesca Hoop; the sonic textures are similar. I don't care for falsetto - tastewise - I've run into a few other groups that are similar sonically over the past half decade besides Ms. Hoop.

It's plausible Mr. Sumney will evolve for a time and be substantially different - Doomed from that video presents the possibility unambiguously - but musically I would locate him in the indie-folk sound, with a different instrumentation and more electric usage.

> If you compare music from 1960, 1980, 2000, and now (almost 2020) you'll notice that the 60's to 80's to 00's were incredibly different. Like, they clearly come from distinct eras.

Wasn't that maybe because of the incredible evolution of music hardware? 70s music was IMPOSSIBLE to produce in the 60s, 80s music in the 70s, so on.

Today that hardware evolution is slowing down, so it's normal that the sounds don't change that much.

But neural networks are on the horizon, expect shocking things in a few years.

"Today that hardware evolution is slowing down, so it's normal that the sounds don't change that much."

It's not just the hardware.

Stravinsky's Rite of Spring could have been composed hundreds of years ago on basically the same instruments, but it wasn't. Nothing remotely like it was.

Twelve tone music, Dada music, all sort of other types of music could have been composed hundreds of years earlier, but it wasn't.

It's not just hardware and technical capabilities that evolve, but musical tastes, ambitions, and understandings of what music is and could be.

Similar things happen in other arts. The Black Square[1] painting could have been painted at any time. But tens of thousands of years passed before anyone did it.

Art is constantly evolving, and the boundaries of what is considered art and what people appreciate as art is ever growing.

[1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_Square_(painting)

> It's not just the hardware.

> Stravinsky's Rite of Spring could have been composed hundreds of years ago on basically the same instruments, but it wasn't. Nothing remotely like it was.

You are grossly underestimating the effect that technology had on music. Rite of Spring couldn't have been performed until the 20th century so there was no point in writing it.

Bach's children and Mozart (mid 1700's) were the first products of music pedagogy. Paper didn't become common until the 1800's. Interchangeable parts and factory practices made musical instruments much more consistent and available in the late 1800's.

All of this means that the average orchestral musician improved dramatically in capability over the course of less than 200 years.

> While there is still innovation, there aren't dramatic changes happening as often in the past two decades. There are many popular songs today that could have been popular in 00's and vice versa.

> Some rap seems to still be innovating, but rock, pop, and a lot of electronic music seems to be stuck in a rut.

Now that everything is available on-demand via streaming services, new music is competing not just with a glut of contemporary works, but with the ever-increasing body of prior works.

Why try something new when you can listen to your old favorites at any time? Unless the new thing sounds a lot like the thing you already really like.

When people complain about the quality of “music these days” they are almost always complaining about the most popular stuff that’s being endlessly promoted, which, yes, is mostly garbage. But the sheer quantity and variety of non-top-40 misic available today is mind boggling. I thought as I got older my musical tastes would calcify like my dad’s and his dad’s, remaining stuck in one decade, but the opposite has happened. I’m over 40 and am listening to more new (and new to me) music than at any time in my life. It’s just not the endless barrage of Drake and Taylor Swift.

Most of all music is garbage. The Beatles are more popular then Jesus, but at least 50% of their discography was composed of stinkers, that even fans have never heard about.

The difference is that with the benefit of time, we separate the wheat from the chaff.

between the 60s and 80s we had at least three major new genres : rock, techno, rap. And i’m not counting the minor ones (bossa nova, raeggea, funk, etc.)

What are the ones that emerged in the last 20 years ?

What i call garbage now isn’t music i don’t understand ( which would be what parents usually complain about), it’s music that i’ve already heard 20 thousand times before. The reason i can’t stand today’s music is because it’s copy / pasting itself over and over. This is new.

In the 90s: trance, drum&bass

In the 2010s: dubstep (minor), trap

Isn't rock also a lot of copy pasting? Not to mention techno. There is only so much space in a genre.

90s is before 20 years ago so i won’t discuss trance as a new genre or drum n bass as something major.

Which leaves us with... trap ? Seriously ?

There are a lot of things you can do to create really new musics. Historically this was done by breeding with music from different cultures. India has quartertones and melody based rythmics, africa has polyrhythmie, etc. The problem is that nobody in the dying record company industry had the guts to finance the emergence of things created by innovators ( who obviously still exist somewhere), and since online music services recommend songs based on what you’re already liking, there’s just no chance you’ll hear those creations.

There should be a new section in apple music called « new things you’ve never heard that will probably take you a bit of time to enjoy, but then you’ll thank us for it »

Online music services recommendations is one vector. Another is just peer to peer recomandation. Eventually someone will listen to that african polyrhythmie, and if it's so good, it will pass it on to his friend.

The fact that this is not happening suggests that maybe it's just not so catchy. And something being innovative and original doesn't mean that it should also be popular. Not many want to live in a crazily organic shaped house by the famed architect, not even those who could afford it, most prefer the regular boring rectangular ones.

BTW, a long time I saw in a National Geographic a crazy african song, which seems to me to be an african polyrhythmie (not an expert). I think it's an amazing piece of music. But I also see why this has little chance of becoming popular in US, at least in this shape. Maybe some producer could "un-ethnify" it and make it more palatable:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1R6WnTCpjfM

You dismiss trap, but I've heard some amazing arabic trap. For some reason, arabic vocals work very well on top of a trap track:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c0xk1UQYcXs

https://www.ft.com/content/98c64ce8-8ff1-11e8-9609-3d3b945e7...

It sounds like you're drawing arbitrary lines about what is and isn't a genre. House and metal have evolved various subgenres, to the point where some the subgenres have their own festivals.

Deadmau5 uses polymeters pretty extensively and rap/trap uses polyrhythms all the time.

Yes there is a ton of electronic music and yes a lot of it sounds similar but there are new things coming out if you can dig through all the volume.

A lot of the innovation is also in sound design and not necessarily composition.

I've collected a lot of music from the 60's. An interesting thing about that era is most of the content was covers of existing popular tunes. Albums and albums full of re-arranged re-implementations. That practice pretty much stopped in the 70s.

And in the 50s, it was jazz motifs variations. And in 40s, eh, just take a quick stroll through Ink Spots repertoire [1] - it's basically the same song all the time. And few decades before that, it was just sheet music reproduction.

70s and (particulary) 80s were all about sound texture cloning. Were it particular guitar amp/pedal arrangement, or korg/roland sound du jour.

I don't think it changed much in essence, only in form of cloning flattery. Today, kids buy trap samples.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TmT8S3qZnNk&list=PL210003EC6...

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