It sounded to me like a case of "back in my day" but with incoherent arguments.
My personal explanation is the collapse of the record industry. I don't think it was due to piracy, though piracy didn't help. It was mostly due to the abandonment of the old practice of scouting for interesting new music in favor of producer-led manufactured pop. The suits wanted a more reliable way to produce marketable acts, and they got it... at the expense of virtually all innovation. The same thing happened to mainstream Hollywood studios who can now only make one movie. Of course it only works for a while. Now everyone is bored and nobody cares and listenership and movie attendance numbers are crashing.
(This is always what happens when the bean counters run things. You get a short term bump in profit, but what they are really doing is cannibalizing the value of the enterprise in hidden ways. The body is basically digesting its own organs. Eventually you are left with a shell with no value.)
Piracy did worsen this trend in the record industry. When the economic model starts to be threatened, a natural response is to become more conservative and cancel anything innovative. It's usually the wrong response, but it's a very normal human response to a feeling of threat or starvation.
All of that has held up pretty well because it was all good music. Nobody is going to remember the absolute dog shit pop that teens listen to today. It's boring, repetitive, devoid of deep emotion, and is basically the same song over and over.
What I see is that many teens today (those who really like music) are listening to old music from the 60s-90s and very little new music. That's because their generation's music is objectively awful. I have seen studies that have quantified this via means such as Shannon information content. The content of popular music has been declining since the late 90s, and the similarity of songs and acts has been increasing.
Teens after 1990 who fancied themselves liking music and being intellectual listened to older music too. I know, because I had friends like that. They considered Nirvana and grunge repetitive crap. Emerging techno and rap too. They would listen Pink Floyd or Beatles, but those were old at that point.
Both my parents have pretty good formal music education; my dad was a high school band director for a while. They never said as much, but I am pretty sure that from their perspective most of what I listend to in high school in the early 90s was "absolute dog shit pop" and " objectively awful".
To be fair, Coal Chamber and Sublime are "objectively awful" :D
I love Alex Grey's art and I liked the music when was in high school, but I get why folks who are into stuff like hard bop or Chopin think that it's not super refined.
There can be musically well crafted music and there can be creative music. Occasionally you get music that is both. My point was that post-late-90s pop is neither. It's churned out repetitive trash that relies heavily on cheap hooks and bass lines to be catchy and inspire superficial emotion.
The slide of music toward mindless manufactured repetitive pop started in the 80s, but it was in the late 90s that it became really obvious.
Just an opinion (and I am aware it's not a popular opinion), but the Beatles going on Ed Sullivan is what really screwed up our system... prior to that the contemporary popular music was jazz, and that was a moment when every boomer musician I know gave up accordion or clarinet or whatever and got into a shitty garage band.
Like, I think there are worthwhile developments even in the shittiest, most repetitive music. Lately I've been having a grand time making electornic music in a single groove box...
my main point is that there's no transcendent "goodness" to US pop music, as various generations each think the newer generations stuff sucks for one reason or another.
Personally, I love the stuff my teenager sends me, even if a lot of it heavily rips of Devo or the Talking Heads or the Dandy Warhols or whoever.
Then, very briefly, the technology of recording music developed to the point where it was commercially viable to mass-market music. As happens with any technological revolution, that triggered a massive spike in innovation. That spike lasted ~50 years, we're just getting to the end of it.
My point is that what happened between ~1950 and ~2000 isn't normal. That's not how fast music normally changes. That was a specific response to a specific stimulus. It will take another stimulus of equal magnitude to provoke a similar level of change.
(also: musicians were almost permanently broke prior to the recording industry. Interesting, and sad, to see that returning too)
https://populationmatters.org/sites/default/files/styles/ful...
Everything moves faster now because there are more people to move it. The rate/person is not that different.
What we have seen since the late 90s is the collapse of musical creativity (at least in popular music... you can still find some creative music if you dig really hard) in spite of population and economic activity continuing to grow. That is not normal. That's a dark age.
You could make an argument that innovation follows the money. The innovation boom of the late 20th century correlates with the music industry profit boom of the same priod. Now there's less money being made, there's less innovation.
Also, you could probably chart the risk-taking of the music industry. They started off not knowing what the hell anyone wanted, so produced weird shit. Then they got hit by waves of disruption. Then they got a grip on it all and stopped taking risks. Which is where we are: stuff that sounds different doesn't get published.
Except, of course, that we have people self-publishing now. There probably is completely freaky weird awesome shit being made, but we don't hear it because discovery is hard in such a huge sea of music.
Interesting stuff.
Universities favouring publish-or-perish are another dead end development.
pop music was better before (even 80s music! =)
They got better at predicting what could sell, but commercialized recording didn’t appear later.
Further, prior to recording, musicians couldn’t make a living without that same broad appeal. People don’t buy tickets to shows they don’t want to see, and patrons don’t commission works from artists they don’t like.
The only artists free from commercial concerns are ones who have money from other things.
I don't really see this at all. I might agree that mainstream music hasn't changed much since the late 2000s, when synthesizers seemed to mostly replace guitars in popular music. to me, taylor swift sounds really different than she did in 2009, but pretty much the same as in 2011 or so. then again, I don't really pay enough attention to this kind of music to give it a fair analysis.
grunge was certainly a major departure from what was popular in the 80s, but it's not radically different from a lot of less popular music that came before it. I would argue there's much more variation in the last twenty years of hardcore subgenres than there was between hüsker dü, pixies, and nirvana.
There is still great music being made, and the really deep stuff has always gotten ignored by most people most of the time. Heck, I majored in music and I don't listen to Bach or Coltrane every day. That stuff is too rich for every occasion.
I'd say that innovation within genres - just people making good songs - is every bit as important as creating new genres. New genres aren't automatically created at a certain rate. They're an event, triggered by major social changes or new cultural influences most of the time. For America to invent a new genre we might need to conquer or be conquered by someone else, or have a new wave of immigration.
Some good artists currently making popular music with depth and interest off the top of my head:
St. Vincent, Dessa, Chris Thile, SquarePusher, BJ Cole, Run the Jewels, Billy Joel (I list him here because rather than just repeating his same hits forever, he went and recently released a classical-style piano album that's quite good, so he's still growing and changing as an artist), Tori Amos (she's been making music a long time but has a new style every decade or so).
I think time will tell us that a bar, alcohol and blue smoke will do more for creativity than a gym and health food all day long.
On a totally different note - have you listened to Them Crooked Vultures? John Paul Jones, formerly Led Zeppelin, playing distorted console steel is pretty wild.
Holds equally true for motion picture.
There is a very irritating snootiness in the review that only thinks classical music as art, and just passingly acknowledges jazz - which by the way was denigrated often in vehemently racist terms when it first appeared.