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The only part of this I really agree with is that the music industry is harming artists more than usual. It is a meme at least as old as jazz or even older (Baroque music was so-named because it was said to be lopsided, like a misshapen pearl) that music ain't what it used to be.

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 dislike the stuff called music so much these days that I have started to listen to classical music. As a hardcore grunge and heavy metal addict I ever thought that hell would freeze before. But the nth remix of a 90 hit doesn't move me - nothing original in it.

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.

Classical can get pretty metal, for sure. :) Wagner and Mahler come to mind.

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.

> That's the part I completely agree with. Music is absolutely stuck. There have only been micro-genres, such as the many micro-genres of techno/EDM or hip hop. There has been nothing approaching the birth of hip hop, techno/rave, grunge, "alternative" rock, and so on. Those all came of age in the 70s, 80s, and 90s. For some reason after 2000 music died.

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.

Music became largely teen-oriented by the late 90s and onwards. Spice Girls, Backstreet Boys, Britney Spears... fast forward to the 2010s and nothing has dramatically changed - Justin Bieber, Ariana Grande etc. Maybe it's a very profitable spot exploited by producers and songwriters.

When I was a teen in the early 90s I listened to Tool, Nirvana, emerging Techno/Rave, Rap, as well as older rock like Pink Floyd, The Beatles, Jimmy Hendrix, and King Crimson. I could keep going but that's a sampling. In college I got more into electronic and obscure hip hop, both of which were quite new and innovative at the time. I lost all interest in pop because that was the late 90s when all pop went to crap.

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.

> 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.

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.

Anecdotal, but my parents (whoil like, Hendix/ Zep / Floyd) thought that Tool / Nirvana / et al sucked. Hard.

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'm surprised someone with formal music education wouldn't take at least some interest in tool, even if they didn't actually enjoy it.

IMO (and heavily-- just my opinion) it's incredibly repetitive stuff that's often making fun of its audience.

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.

They are not totally wrong, though I would debate Tool with them. Even if you don't like the style or content Tool is really well done musically. Grunge was innovative and creative but wasn't that musically "serious." I can see classically trained musicians hating it. Same goes for punk.

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.

"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.

Manufacturer produced pop’s beginnings are exactly contemporaneous with the invention of recording. Just as soon as people learned that they could sell a recording, they started collecting and selling them. And they took care that what they recorded they could sell. And people did buy it. See the Columbia music hillbilly series for example. The recorders totally looked for the most marketable acts.

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.

Another issue is that today discovering new music becomes hard. An algorith will tell you what you like based on your past hearing habits. New music will come to you as a surprise by the one who is paying most to feature it to you. Passive consumption like listening to radio which virtually no one seems to do these days means to be confronted with new things you may dislike but there might be something new which becomes a trend and later a new genre.

Holds equally true for motion picture.

The past decade has been acknowledged as the Golden Age of Television. Art evolves - and Breaking Bad is as much art as Anna Karenina.

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.

Have you ever heard of "classical" music? It's a single music genre covering about 500 years of music.

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)

The rate of change is approximately constant when you adjust for population growth:

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.

Interesting. But it's circular reasoning isn't it? "there were less people, so less innovation. Then there were more people, so more innovation. But now there's more people, but less innovation, so it must be a dark age" doesn't really work as a self-evident statement.

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.

I think inovation is stagnant because of team work. No tongue in cheek. But when you take a look at the sea changinf inventions it has been the work of a nerd who was passionate for a prlonged period of time. Not a team which has to publish every brain-fart as a paper.

Universities favouring publish-or-perish are another dead end development.

This may be true, but a lot of the early 60's music was very much collaborative. I think it's more about a risk-taking culture. Universities are not risk-taking cultures.

you seem to be circling around the idea that winner-take-all dynamics have taken over music (and other industries) because of the internet. rather than democratizing exposure and innovation and distributing esteem and reward, the internet has collapsed major strains of interest into one conglomerated popularity contest where even fewer can make it big. the curation of the music industry was useful when access was limited and marketing had cost and power, but not so much now, so it's demise is more coincident than prerequisite.

pop music was better before (even 80s music! =)