Why are people in their 30s giving up on music?
theguardian.com
theguardian.com
So basically: we're becoming our parents, or repeating a story that every generation goes through. Personally, my parents had piles of records from the 60s-80s but didn't listen to that much music. I do listen to a few hours of music each day, including whatever new stuff I can find, but it's mainly work noise to cover up other sounds.
Some of the declining interest can be likened to comedy. When you're 15 or 25, there are a lot of jokes you haven't heard before. If you're 35... or 65... certain routines start sounding pretty worn out. With music I suspect there's also a social learning component: we fall in love with music when we're young and still trying to find our place in the world. Music tickles the same communication centers in the brain that are used for social positioning, and the value of that, also, fades later on.
And to add to that:
Your (my) wonderfully delicious albums of RATM, Audioslave, The Killers, etc all become second class citizens when the true masters of the household want to listen to Baby Shark or Elmo.
After 30 most people have job, kids go for parties a lot less often.
With vinyl, CDs, and MP3s, I could view my collection, select music I like, and build a deep relationship to it over time.
With algorithmic radio, all of artists and tracks become fungible. Easy come, easy go. Sometimes I will find a specific artist or track I like and take control to put it on, but after a month or so it too is forever forgotten.
Another issue is that stereo systems have gone out of style. Great music is enhanced by great quality. Music optimized to play from a cellphone or cheap Bluetooth speaker gives up a lot.
I Miss music, but apparently not enough to build a new collection and set up a stereo
Maybe I'm just being nostalgic for the days of when I'd be excited for a new release and listen through a whole album of artists like Pink Floyd or Daft Punk and having a level of satisfaction similar to reading through a book or watching a movie.
The same thing goes for Ozzy both with and without Black Sabbath. There's a momentum from beginning to end that is really clear when you look for it.
Personally, I get all my external discovery via better mediums. The problem is that I keep adding and adding great music to my library and then can rarely find it.
If you go to a gas station or similar place that has background music you can get people into conversations about 70s, 80s, even 90s music but for people on the street modern music is a cipher. They can't tell you who is singing, they even struggle to tell if it is country music or rap.
This is not a knock on rap rather a nod that it appears so influential that it has a mandatory bridge in the middle of almost every "new release". In the end everything that I listen to seems to blend together.
https://www.discogs.com/release/930684-Various-Grind-2-All-N...
to realize how excellent it is if you heard the beginning of the first track and thought "this sounds exactly the same as every other 'House' track".
One thing I'll add is that we're at our greatest point of exposure to the worst music of our era. Every era has a surplus of low-quality, unoriginal, or maddeningly trend-focused music that gets a lot of exposure. In time these lackluster records will be filtered out and mostly forgotten. In time people will look back on this period with a fondness for the great songs of the era that have endured and forget about the works that failed to differentiate themselves.
As such, it's easy for us to look back on the music of the last 70 years and think that things were better then because we don't have daily exposure to the lackluster songs of those past decades.
Perhaps there's a case to be made that these older songs are still listened so much today, even by those who weren't alive back then, because by some abstract measure of soul satisfaction they were better? I'm careful with this hypothesis as I don't want to be unfair with newer generations of artists, but I don't think it's so crazy to consider either.
For example, the last 10 years or so have been greatly influenced by social media and fear of saying the wrong thing and being "cancelled". Of voluntarily silencing ourselves. How wouldn't that impact the artistic output of this generation? Couldn't this be a reason for a lot of modern music "lacking a sense of personality"?
I feel with social media we have gone pretty far into investing in appearances alone, and I think I'm not alone in this belief. Maybe the next years will be marked by more and more people sharing a wish to return to the overlooked authenticity which we used to call "art with a soul".
Some bleeding edge zoomer culture hyper pop, 100 gecs, for you: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2PWMiy4RysI
I wonder how much of that is just lack of familiarity with the new artists/songs. My own music taste is kind of stuck in the Prog rock, early electronic, and Krautrock eras, and I can easily tell you within 5 seconds or so whether I'm listening to Pink Floyd, King Crimson, Yes, Jethro Tull, or Rush.
But, if you were to hand me 20 songs from modern day pop or rap artists, let me listen and study them for as long as I wanted, I probably couldn't correctly identify any set of other songs by the same artists. Some of their voices literally (in the actual meaning of literally) sound the same to me. I'm not sure how much of it is just a lack of an ear for modern pop singers, and how much of it is autotune actually making everyone's voices sound identical.
I think autotune and Top 40 charts are too often used as a scapegoat by people that simply became too lazy to seek out stuff on their own without first being filtered through a marketing campaign. The radio or the front page of any given streaming service is designed to appeal to the mass audience, so why would you be surprised as a fan of more outsider sensibilities when it doesn’t immediately represent your niche tastes? You’d be more likely to find that type of stuff in a music store, printed review, or some random blog not too long ago. Now, that may as well be discogs or wikipedia, and the internet is much more powerful today as a resource than the record store of old. I feel like many people are more bitter over their music taste not being socially validated by the mainstream rather than just enjoying what they like and being content with the circumstance that it’s “not for everybody.” TBH I feel like it’s more desirable as an artist to have a dedicated following of fewer number than being one that’s involuntarily shoved down everyone’s throat. Most modern pop and rap is as ubiquitous as it is because of enormous label astroturfing and marketing, just as genres like New Jack Swing or Nu-Metal or whatever was dominating MTV back when that was a 'relevant' source of music discovery. It's always been commercial! So it doesn't do much good to bemoan the corporate machine's aggressive shoveling of its corporate properties, just tailor your sources of discovery to places that better suit your interests if the lowest effort option isn't doing it for you.
To me, people that have a chip on their shoulder about autotune are frankly just projecting some other abstract frustrations and nostalgia over a nonexistent time where all music culture was contained to TV and radio. It wasn’t! Do some old fashioned digging and go deeper than just the surface, you’ll find plenty of good new stuff and a thriving music community if you actually try.
It's easier for someone to be say, a fan of folk punk while located somewhere without a scene. Why does that person care about background music in a random place? Why should they?
Woodsman, Zir Bujou, Austin Farewell's new single, Duomo, Amity Fall, Joep Beving, Fabrizio Paterlini's new album, Airginio Aiello's new single.
I would join for some wholesome or not-wholesome creativity
That said here's some people who are big in that sorta sphere (I'm not a tiktok user but I feel it's ripples): Mathematics - BBNO$(pronounced Baby No Money) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tH_i76JVTDg
There's a whole genre that popped up called Phonk, and then what got more popular on the internet is something called Drift Phonk. It's music that's meant to be played over drift compilations. Disaster - KSLV https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Pnq1_3BXIqA
A lot of tiktok is just a mixture of new and old popular music. So if you look at a chart of the most popular songs you'll see things like Day N Night by Kid Cudi, or Heat Waves by Glass Animals mixed with Doji Cat, Joji, and Bieber
If you want some creative music in general: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u-WTfP3WJc4 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3WDRxtd-2dQ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HkngTNyKaW4 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3w3-YLE04bo https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wBeWek3LPqQ
Being in my 40's, I thought there was some TikTok-specific music that has passed me by :)
Related to this thread, there was a recent Grimes interview on Lex Fridman and she had some interesting and good things to say about music and your brain aging (e.g. purposely listening to new music to "stretch your neurons" or something like that, which I also try to do). And ironically I heard of her precisely because of that habit, i.e. I think most of her listeners are younger than me (FWIW I first heard of her in 2015, well before any relation to tech gossip)
Before you accuse me of being arrogant: I feel like I should be mature enough to start listening to "real" music (e.g. classical) by now, but I find that it's too far over my head. So I think I'm in a musical "limbo".
I think anyone could likely find a trove of new (to you, at least) content by simply digging a bit outside of their comfort zone to try genres that are totally alien to your ears, like Avant Garde Jazz or Krautrock or Experimental music, just for example. Or by finding a genre you know you like, then exploring the likely myriad subgenres which emerged years later or are developing right now under its influence. A lot of the most satisfying things in life won't be fed to you, so the most important thing is to just keep an open mind and appreciate that although certain things may not click right away, it may not be worth writing off entirely. An important aspect of appreciating contemporary music is being aware of the cultural canon from which it was born and finds itself released within. I find that being able to connect some dots in one way or another between older and more contemporary artists/releases/genres will yield a greater appreciation of what's happening today. Applies to all forms of art, really.
It took me a while to be able to really get into it, but without Bill's explanations and enthusiasm, I would still be lost. His fantastic voice is icing on the cake.
That's one think I like about older blues. Many of those classic blues musicians still had to work to pay the bills, had families, and were never going to be pop stars. It's people singing about how tiring work is, how complex married life can be, and what it's like to worry about paying bills and just getting by to the next day. They sing about getting older and being less energetic and passionate than you once were.
The funny thing is that I only listen to blues on the radio at night when doing some errands, so I couldn't name a single artist I've listened to. But sometimes sitting in a parking a lot, just after turning the ignition, you realize you can let the ice cream melt just a bit to take the time to hear someone else sing about troubles that are ultimately not so different from your own.
Sure they often end up as albums, but they are originally heard as one-off products, and probably thereafter listened to by preference and not as intended. As well, it basically means songs that don't have videos are typically relinquished to the heard-once category.
Big KRIT - Digital Roses Don’t Die: https://open.spotify.com/album/4hL6vCeDYZjW84055aEuM9?si=xSW...
Favorite songs: Show U Right, Just 4 You
Anderson .Paak - Malibu: https://open.spotify.com/album/4VFG1DOuTeDMBjBLZT7hCK?si=FbH...
Favorite songs: Parking Lot, Heart don’t stand a chance
Kendrick Lamar - Mr. Morale and the Big Steppers: https://open.spotify.com/album/79ONNoS4M9tfIA1mYLBYVX?si=bZg...
Favorite songs: All of them
Mac Miller - Circles: https://open.spotify.com/album/1YZ3k65Mqw3G8FzYlW1mmp?si=68H...
Favorite songs: Complicated, Blue World
K7, vinyls, CDs are social objects. You can handle them, lend them, personalize them, put them on display, let anyone’s gaze fall on them, etc.
Digital files are less so.
Or.
QR codes, or RFID tags embedded in objects with a reference to an online audio file.
There has been some tech making the control tangible by moving objects like pebbles around.
Or generative music from AR recognition of the placing of items in relation to each other.
The technical quality of modern hip hop and pop are just astounding. There are literally dozens of producers working right now who would have been singular TITANS even a generation ago. Thanks to the black church "farm league" world-class virtuosic drummers and singers who are expert improvisers are easy to find as session musicians and it has completely changed how ambitious producers and songwriters are able to be.
And jazz now is fucking wild, it's unreal. The influence from hip hop & electronic I saw coming but metal, of all things, being a big one I did not. And the jazz/pop crossover influence is as fertile as it has always been. People need to get over their fear of autotune and let themselves have fun because it is.
Sure yeah most music is not particularly interesting but that has literally always been the case. But right now there is more variety than there ever has been, more skill going into making it, more good shit happening than there ever has been I think.
Exactly. And this is where the general whine about modern music stems from (which has of course always been the case).
>But right now there is more variety than there ever has been, more skill going into making it, more good shit happening than there ever has been I think.
Agreed. Modern music has fragmented into near infinite niches and it just takes some effort to find it.
For me it was Heavy Metal around the 70s and Rap in the 90s. They just didn't connect with me.
I even went though a phase in the late-90s where I liked House and Trance Music while my step-son liked Classical. It used to make me laugh to see the looks on his girlfriends' faces as they came in the front-door past my thumping bass and moved through to his room where gentle Classical was playing.
If you no longer have as much time or motivation for that due to having a family, it’s only logical that you won’t spend as much time on that activity
Not judging one way or another, but I liked music for non social reasons as well, and I still seek it out in adulthood. Kexp and tiny desk on YouTube are a constant source of great artists and performances