How do people continuously fall into this trap? "New X sucks" No, it doesn't. You just don't make an effort to seek out new things and wish everything stayed the same as when you were young.
> You name it, there is somebody out there making good music in that genre today. You just have to look beyond what is talked about on TV.
Sure, but that assertion doesn't actually help with finding those musicians. It could both be true that 1) great music is being produced AND 2) the horizons of the commercial/mainstream music industry have contracted, making those musicians harder for most people to discover. Sort of like how the movie industry is focusing more and more on easily exported comic book blockbusters, at the expense of middle-budget dramas and comedies.
Then there's also the fact that the streaming revolution has made crap easier to find, and there's a lot more crap than good stuff, which hurts discoverability. As an example: I've been looking for kids music on Spotify recently, and it's a sea of low-effort auto-tuned garbage from people following the economics of spam. It's pretty much impossible to find a good version of a classic song unless you already know the artist.
In general, I find search engines to be a really poor discoverability resource for anything, not just music.
You really just need a music platform to sample referenced acts, which YouTube is the universal one. It's really not that difficult.
I've done this before- with Spotify, I've even picked albums based on their cover art, the name of the record, the name of the artist. Occasionally the aesthetic vibes align and I find a new artist that is actually enjoyable. Usually not. But if you're just trying to find new music, there's ample methods to do so.