No it's objectively worse. The average complexity is at all time lows.
Average artwork has always been garbage throughout human history. But I still found a few good paintings to hang on my walls. As long as you can get what you want it doesn't really matter what else is out there.
Is there a trick I'm missing to avoid this in {Ubers, grocery stores, bars, ...}? If so I'd love to know about it! Note: am blind, so can't constantly wear earplugs.
Or maybe, instead of devolving into absurdity we can just say that there are come qualities of being better or worse that most people can agree on.
Of course, you can simply bite the bullet and say "yep. The song with 1 note in it is subjectively just as good".
Maybe, but enough people like modern day pop music, so by that criteria it is good.
If people preferred more complicated music, then more complicated music would be popular and more of it would get made.
"Is this song good?"
"One sec, let me check how complex it is"
there's more than enough breakcore out there if you measure music quality like that. theree's definitely more than in the 20th century.
Modern music is less harmonically complex than even early Beatles, who used more chords (and more chord progressions) than are used today. Music today is highly repetitive.
Timbre is also less complex thanks in part to the use of virtual instruments and sample packs. Synthesized sounds and samples are intrinsically less complex than sounds recorded in a room. Any two hits of, say, a hi-hat will yield different waveforms and our brains pick up on these micro variations.
The Beatles used three chord progressions for everything with very little variation.
Modern music has far more variety.
The most popular genre in America (the world?) isn’t sung and doesn’t focus on tone, so this is hardly surprising. I bet if you measured rhythmic complexity or lyrical complexity it’d show the opposite.
You should see how much time EDM producers spend tweaking the waveforms of individual percussion hits. The idea that timbre in modern music is _less_ complex than in the past is just mind boggling to me, given the level of control that people have in sculpting waveforms and samples. There are entire EDM tracks that are basically just atonal explorations of timbre.
You can also get the same thing looped 4x that has no variation. Hard to fault either side. Musicians have to get work out rapidly and then occasionally something gets legs.