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Comment by throwawayfire | Hacker News Reader

> Everyone says music "used to be better" but that's just survival bias.

Not "just" survival bias.

I think it's quite reasonable to take a position that there was more innovation and creativity in pop music in 1950-2000.

As the genre has matured, popular/commercially successful music has depended more and more on fewer and fewer producers.

Indeed, there are fewer commercially successful artists: the US Billboard Hot 100 Top 20 this week contains 3 tracks by Justin Bieber, 2 by the Weeknd, and 2 by Drake. That would have been unheard of.

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> it's quite reasonable to take a position that there was more innovation and creativity in pop music in 1950-2000.

A lot of people said the same in 1990, except their cutoff was 1980. All that synth is just rubbish, man, what about Led Zeppelin, that was new! Except they were just raiding blues and laying some electric guitar on top, of course, so really the cutoff is 1960; but to be honest them bluesmen were just recording stuff that had been sung in the cotton fields forever, so really the cutoff is the beginning of the slave trade; but really those melodies were just brought all the way from Africa, so really... etc etc etc

I think this essentially agrees with my point (that there was more creativity in the broad space of 'pop music' when pop music was a newer phenomenon).

I appreciate the reminder that a lot of pop music has a longer history as it developed from Black music styles. Thanks.

I think you've got that completely backwards. 2000 is about the time that the "long tail" exploded, where Youtube and Spotify made non-top 40 music a lot easier to find. In consequence there is a lot more really good music available today than there was pre-internet and it's a lot easier to find. It's not on the radio, but that's always been the case.

Exactly. One only has to look at the myriad of tv shows, video games, movies, etc. to see that we have more quality options than ever and are seeing even more niche, but commercially successful content. There’s more static too, but there’s a lot of good out there.

Everybody thinks we are in a golden age of television series, don't they?

I don't claim that these examples have the same history as music.

> In consequence there is a lot more really good music available today than there was pre-internet and it's a lot easier to find.

Tangentially, if (like me) you find this "long tail" interesting but don't know where to start, I've enjoyed going through Ted Gioia's "100 Best Albums of [previous year]" [1] each year. It's obviously subjective and subject to whatever biases he has, but the sheer diversity of the list is quite cool. Listening to a few albums per week is a pretty easy way to sample -- most of the albums are on YouTube or Bandcamp for free.

[1] http://tedgioia.com/bestalbumsof2020.html

And before, soulseek.

I don't think so at all - there's a lot of pastiche, some of it loving, but there's only so many ways to do a pop song. It's alright for forms to die. The real "long tail" that the internet introduced is that we now had access to all of the good music we missed before the internet. There's no reason to bitch about modern music anymore because there's no reason to be exposed to it other than aggressive fandoms and marketing.

I honestly don't even understand the impulse to listen to new music. The quality of "newness" is not a desirable one for me in music; I prefer qualities relating to sound. To me it seems like a distorted version of the impulse to be cool in high school.

The real problem is that commercial, recorded music crowds out local, live music. For local music I understand wanting to know what's new - you may miss out because bands aren't live forever.

> Indeed, there are fewer commercially successful artists

Source?

I reckon every decade had a handful of artists dominate the charts, so it wasn’t unheard of at all to see multiple chart toppers by the same artists at any given time. In fact, given the gatekeepers of popular music largely were concentrated around radio DJs and the “industry machine” of record labels, I’d hypothesize there’s a larger on average number of unique artists in the top 100 since the 2000s than before.

>Source?

https://www.billboard.com/charts/hot-100

You can change the week yourself.

If you pick a few random weeks before 2000, you likely won't find this pattern that I identified, with the same artist in the Top 20 multiple times.

If that's not enough evidence then there is a Python web scraper: https://github.com/jocelyn-ong/data-science-projects/blob/ma...

Good, and commercially successful, don't always go together.

Amazon is commercially successful but few would argue their UX is good.

Amazon's user experience is fantastic. Why else do you think they are so commercially successful?

Consumer logistics - which rely on not paying drivers and warehouse people much, and forcing them to work insane hours.

And AWS.

The web store UX has become appallingly bad - unreliable/fake reviews, tens/hundreds of sellers all roboselling the same identical items from China, poor quality items, unreliable/poor product search ("10TB external hard drive" shows... not many 10TB external hard drives). And so on.

Amazon pages are a cluttered mess, but they are a -familiar- cluttered mess because everyone has used Amazon for so long. Amazon succeeds in spite of its design, because everyone has become familiar with how it works. This approach would not work outside of Amazon, which Nielsen Norman discussed some 15 years ago (https://www.nngroup.com/articles/amazon-no-e-commerce-role-m...)

> Amazon pages are a cluttered mess

Ahh, you want "clean" design where maybe there is just one box with beautiful font and not all these options "cluttering" things. You want those options buried in an option tree maybe 8 levels deep.

Well, I'm pretty sick of this minimalist design philosophy that requires 10x more clicks to accomplish anything because a designer decided the original was just too easy to use and wasn't "engaging enough" to generate enough clicks. They have made the web a much worse place for getting stuff done online, and it's no wonder that Amazon, the home of one-click purchasing, has continued optimizing for having the UI get out of your way and accomplish the most with the least effort rather than building attention-seeking UI "experiences" that require lots of interactivity to get simple things done.

I wonder how this might read if written now, rather than 16 years ago.

NNG often say to follow conventions and Amazon has been leader for so long now that I can't help but think they have established many conventions now that might have been viewed negatively 16 years ago.

The big one that always gets me is sort by price doesn't actually sort by price. Or at least, not the price I care about (which is price for condition new, seller Amazon).

Do we know what the UX goals are for the site or what requirements they had? It's really difficult to gauge these things if we don't even know what they're going for.

Personally, there are some things I have found difficult to do (getting a chat going with a customer service agent) and some things that are very easy (checkout process, making a return). It's no surprise to me that they would make it slightly more difficult to find a live person to chat with since they probably want me to exhaust the other automated methods of solving my problem before doing that. Is that bad UX? I don't think so.

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