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Comment by marcus_holmes | Hacker News Reader

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)

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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! =)

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