The 1980s are still doing quite well among all but the oldest generation.
Is it possible that music may actually be getting worse? Corporatized, consolidated, computerized.
Look at Hollywood now too: everything is a sequel, prequel, remake, reboot, or adaptation. There’s hardly anything original anymore.
People listen to a wider variety of music and the same Billboard notion of popularity doesn't really paint a useful picture anymore. What plays on the radio or in TV ads is the lowest common denominator corporate waffle, and is played heavily, but it doesn't represent what people listen to overall.
I have personal playlists of everything from House music and 90s Eurodance to all kinds of J-Pop to 19th century folk music to early 2000s rock to 80s synth pop to orchestral music. I couldn't name a single Taylor Swift song offhand, but apparently she's pretty big.
There's tons of music out there and I find the plethora of niche subgenres now fairly overwhelming and don't even know how to classify the stuff I enjoy listening to.
Recommendation engine feedback loops do not aid in discovery, just repetition.
I'd say it's never been better. Music is more accessible which means more folks get exposed to it earlier and in more variety and in turn we get more musicians.
It's only going to get better.
As an extreme example, I'd argue the popularity of David Hasselhoff's I've been looking for freedom in Germany is almost entirely a result of "retconning" (if not fabricating) its supposed popularity at the time of its original release. It would have probably been forgotten entirely if it hadn't been rediscovered "ironically" in the context of ridiculous claims about its influence on the fall of the Berlin Wall. Heck, I remember owning a casette of the album as a kid only because "it's the guy from Knight Rider". For adult women his claim to fame was co-starring alongside Pamela Anderson in Baywatch as one of the few men regularly appearing bare-chested on daytime television - I'd say his musical talents played a very small role in his original popularity and it's telling nobody remembers any other songs than the one he performed on a TV show. He was never considered good, he was just a familiar face (and body) and made a catchy tune.
Though I thought David Hasslehoff's 'True Survivor' music video for the Kung Fury kickstarter was a banger. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZTidn2dBYbY
“Nothing is more responsible for the good old days than a bad memory.” comes to mind
Even something established like Punk reached new heights with more modern approaches (ex. Sleaford mods, Team Scheisse in German)
I think music is very subjective still but new music never stopped to impress me.
There's no hiding the "influence" of Sex Pistols, and I'd much rather listen to Sex Pistols, Ramones, and also Rancid than this band.
Do not see the appeal.
Note, Mitski debuted in 2013 but most of the strongest records over the past few years, from hip-hop, pop to experimental rock to metal, seems to be by artists or individual who've been making music for around a decade-ish roughly. Maybe this disqualifies the whole lot and you're trying to highlight some weakness in the debuts of the past few years. If so, maybe you should wait a decade? If not, I can assert that some of the most talented artists of history are making music today. By any metric.
Some of these have been around longer than others.
Jacob Collier, Vulfpeck, Cool Sounds, Sylvie, Bobbing, Abigail Lapell, Big Theif, Tank and the Bangas, Richard Houghten, Kurt Vile, Thundercat, Little Simz, Nora Brown, Barrie, Dominique Dumont, Lusine, Cory Wong, Billy Strings, DoomCannon, Cory Henry, Mark Lettieri, Nate Smith, Yussef Dayes, Yumi Zouma, limperatrice, Slow Pulp, Vetiver, Bibio, Altin Gun, King Gizzard, Julian Lage.
I could go on.. give me an artist you like or a genre and I could likely find you new music.
Of course there's no denying we have lots of creative and talented new musicians, but very seldom do I think they beat "the greats", or are even on par. Usually they feel more like knockoffs, and I find I'd rather go back and listen to the original instead.
I'm not familiar with these artists, but I had a listen to about 20 of them, and I will say that I can hear where a lot of them got their inspiration from, but they (not all of them) feel lightweight compared to artists from back in the day.
In these genres I'd much rather listen to the following artists than any of the ones you mentioned:
Bob Dylan, Neil Young, Joni Mitchell, Townes Van Zandt, Earth, Wind & Fire, The Isley Brothers, Johnny Cash, Coltrane, Gillespie, Miles Davis.
"Nate Smith" in particular sounds so much like your stereotypical modern artist. Everything from the production, melodies, his voice and vocal chain sounds like at least 20 other artists. Very uninspired in my humble opinion. This is what we can expect AI to produce.
Those are all great artists you listed but to attempt to quantify that they are any more talented or creative than contemporaries is a silly exercise. It's art.
This is a small list of random artists that I've listened to over the past few years. Jacob Collier is a perfect example of exceptional generational talent who not only is technically mind blowing but also incredibly original. I bet every one of those artists you listed would say the same about him (if they haven't passed of course).
Nate Smith likewise would be welcomed as the drummer in any one of those bands. Did you listen to the right Nate Smith?
Inspiration is a given, and nothing wrong with that. But I often feel like instead of inspiring to new heights we get a watered down version.
Watered down is just not how I'd describe any of the musicians I listed
Larnell Lewis also delivered a world-class performance on that entire album.
The guy has a lot of interesting work, but I think the thing that blew me away the most is the composition 'Warble'. If memory serves, that's the piece where he explored 64th note and dotted 32nd note displacements in order to mimic J Dilla's 'wonky' swing. I've tried capturing the Dilla swing; it's nearly impossible to do on the drums without sounding like you don't know how to play the instrument. Nate Smith, on the other hand, makes it sound fantastic.
The guy is a wizard.
But there's a crucial difference between what's out there and what people are listening to. There's a lot of obscure stuff that not many people are listening to. Whereas the top charting music is what millions of people are listening to. It matters a lot what's getting marketed, what the majority of people are exposed to.
Unfortunately, very few repliers are addressing the first point that I made in my comment: "GenZ and Millennials show a much smaller preference for their own decade's music."
Seems very hard to accurately measure, could be that people don't know what was released in their decade but the stuff from the 80s is easy to pinpoint.
It seems implausible that young people don't know that new music is new.
Why would the 80s be easy to pinpoint for people who weren't even alive in the 80s?
Musicians are more discoverable than ever. Unlike in the past it doesn't matter nearly as much what's getting marketing/ gets air play at the top of the charts, because if you have a desire to find music that you like you just have to try and it's all there for free with an Internet connection.
If one can't find new music to ones taste it's not because of what's being produced.
The "Internet" is just hand waving. The internet is massive. Almost everything is available on the internet, but that's a problem, not a solution. Sometimes it's like finding a needle in a haystack.
> If one can't find new music to ones taste it's not because of what's being produced.
So what is the explanation for "GenZ and Millennials show a much smaller preference for their own decade's music", which again, you haven't addressed.
I'm sorry that it's difficult for you to find what you like. My tastes are very broad and I find new artists every week just listening to Spotify, Bandcamp, YouTube while working. My wife and I and our friends share music that we like with each other. We see live music and get exposed to openers we've never heard of.
That said music is a big part of our lives.
The source was the submitted article under discussion in these comments!
> I'm sorry that it's difficult for you to find what you like.
I never said that. I'm not even discussing me, or you for that matter. I'm discussing the aggregate differences between the generations.
Apologizes, when you referred to it being a needle in a haystack I thought you were referring to your own experiences.
If you're only considering your 25 favorite new songs out of tens of millions then sure, it's better. But also there is recency/novelty bias which counteracts and may overcome any past/nostalgia bias
In conclusion, if all you're doing is listening to music alone in your apartment then it's never been better. Until you step out into the real world and realize that, best-case scenario, everyone hates your music and everything that it represents. More likely they will be completely bored and indifferent.
I think you're missing the point.
Plenty of artists are just making art for themselves.
Why don't we all just wear VR headsets all day?
LOL enjoy your atomized Balkanized tower of Babel existence. If it has to be explained then you're consitutionally incapable of understanding it anyway.
You're disgusting.
Either that or you actually spit on the very idea of community and shared culture in which case you are yet more disgusting and are my enemy.
This is no place for personal insults, so I'll call it here as this clearly isn't a genuine exchange.
>If you enjoy it and the musicians are making it what else is there?
LOL.
Also, a kiwi, a german, and an uzbek in a discord channel does not a community make. I'm talking about people playing banjo on their porch because that is what people do in their community and their region
And definitely don't like things based on the real world, the real world is shit.
Vs:
> This may surprise some, but since 2000, just over half of all movies released have been original screenplays.
https://stephenfollows.com/are-movies-becoming-more-derivati...
The problem is they aren't blockbusters, so you don't remember them. From the same link:
> While the number of movies based on original screenplays has been increasing since the late 2000s, their box office share has continued to fall. In 1984, 73% of the box office were original screenplays, whereas forty years later in 2023, that figure was just 30.6%. And that’s despite their production share being similar (i.e. 60.4% vs 55.9%).
And from a separate post:
> Sequels were twice as frequent in the late 1980s than in the 2010s, if we use production figures as our measure
https://stephenfollows.com/are-there-more-movie-sequels-than...
https://stephenfollows.com/how-original-are-hollywood-movies...
> 39% of top movies released 2005-14 were truly original, i.e. not an adaptation, sequel, spin-off, remake, or other such derivative work.
I don't know, I watch most of my movies at home (I have a nice setup) and watch as many old movies as new. I never feel like I have any trouble finding an original film. The blockbusters may soak up all the ticket sales, but there's just no shortage of original films to me.
But my comment was not about you. ;-) My original point was "GenZ and Millennials show a much smaller preference for their own decade's music." And if you "watch as many old movies as new", that's certainly not a ringing endorsement of new movies.
Nowadays I have quite some things in my record collection from my teenage decade, some of which I discovered only a few years ago, some of which I knew and liked back then, but it wasn't popular music back then.
I always liked to think of this as some kind of survivor bias. There is trash music in everybtime period, but the good music will be listend to more often and thus shape the collective musical memory of a decade. The time we're in hasn't had the chance for that to happen yet, so it seems arbitrary and random as it happens and more defined in hindsight.
It also matters where you look. The 80s have a very recognizable pop music, but it also has Punk and multiple other things.
Later, in 2000's, with P2P and streaming radios, I was astounded by some music genres. And, a bit further, with Jamendo and Magnatune, I found incredible gems not found anywhere.
So so much of it is awful. It's interesting granted, but people ignore that the charts were filled with bland covers of other popular songs even in the 60's.
Hip Hop is a great showing of survivor bias. Sure, Tupac, Biggie, Beastie Boys etc are classic but people are rarely listening to the bland safe music from that era. So so many songs where the rapper couldn't think of anything more inventive than "oh you're having FUN well wait till I go and get my GUN I'll shoot you dead and you'll be DONE"
In 30 years, people will hear Kendrick's discography and think "god no one makes meaningful hip hop anymore" while forgetting about the "pop music but instead of a guitar solo, it's a bad rap verse" or the vast amount of emo/trap/SoundCloud stuff where the good stuff is rare.
The exciting thing about living now is the ease that someone can send a link to me. Constantly my friends and I are finding recently released or decade old music that we can simply message the other and say "you'll love the production on this" - whereas for years, you saved up your pocket money and bought one album and that's all you had until you could afford another.
People who say modern music is rubbish rarely make any effort to actually find any. You've kids now talking about bands like Arctic Monkeys but they don't realise the indie landfill of shite guitar bands that all had the same look, same twangy sound, same trajectory. For every Panda Bear/Animal Collective - there was 100 bland animal based bands all copying the same formula in the hope of being as big as Pigeon Detectives lmao
Trying to explain these arbitrary aggregations with a single story is obviously fruitless and mostly a good way to make up nonsense arguments.
[1] https://familyinequality.wordpress.com/2021/05/26/open-lette...
Wrt/ Hollywood: I think they are not the monopoly they used to be, because the powers are shifting by streaming, and short video services. Similar to how AAA games are more stagnant than the indie gaming scene.
"Music" is too broad to "get worse". There are trends in music that can be considered bad, such as the lessening dynamic range of the recordings - the Loudness War[0]. But there is more music than ever, computerized or not, so if you find that some source of music is bad, you just need to look elsewhere. Music production is easier than ever, so even very niche sounds are kept alive, like the lofi sound of post-punk decades ago[1].
Is it a "return of the 80s", or is it a rejection of newer music? Again, "GenZ and Millennials show a much smaller preference for their own decade's music." This is a difference from previous generations, which tend to hold on stronger to the music of their times. The current trends of current pop culture have always had a much stronger influence on young people than any "nostalgic" trends. When I was young, nostalgia from earlier decades had almost no influence on myself or my peers.
I see rejection, disappointment and disillusion as a general theme that's going on in culture, but I can't say that these weren't present in the past cultures as well - going back some decades, the popularity of punk and its offshoots show just how much these feelings resonated with the audience back then.
I think that with the widespread access and nonexistent barrier to entry to past cultures via streaming, attention just spread over the existing cultural palette, resulting in lower average consumption of the new and current. It's not that the new and current is rejected - it's rather that long tail is longer and taller.
For the past 2 years, mainstream chart-toppers like David Guetta or Calvin Harris have been (respectively) covering 90s eurodance songs or making new ones in the same style.
This is not an informative response to the observation that "GenZ and Millennials show a much smaller preference for their own decade's music."
Also, there has been a lot of corporate consolidation in the music industry, the film industry, in almost every industry.
I was in the car with an older Gen-Z'er last year and they expressed jealousy at me having grown up in the 80s because they "like the music so much" and were shocked to find out I didn't.
*yes this is hyperbole
Why not?
> if that's what keeps you listening.
That's the key, though. Kids are generally biased toward new music. This phenomenon is perfectly natural and consistent over the generations, as shown in the article. In the 1980s, it wasn't particularly hard to "discover" 70s or 60s music, and indeed parents might want their kids to listen to their music, but that's not necessarily what the kids want to listen to, because it's not cool. Parents are uncool. Kids want their own music.
What's interesting, though, is that GenZ and Millennials appear to be less biased toward the new music and less biased against the old. The fact that every song ever is available for streaming doesn't mean that people want to listen to every song ever. My understanding is the streaming plays are very top-heavy toward the top artists, and smaller artists are struggling mightily under the streaming payout system.