How music evolves

So music really HAS gotten shittier since I was in high school.

But seriously, using the "Billboard Hot 100" is pretty unscientific, that list says more about mass media than it does about musical styles. For example in the early 90s there was a lot of independent radio stations fueling that boom that were gobbled up a few years later. MTV was also huge and was getting pretty weird with 120 Minutes and Yo MTV Raps. The music being produced hadn't necessarily changed but more people were suddenly hearing it.

And now because of how schizophrenic everything is, the Hot 100 is a list of names most people have heard of but nobody actually listens to: http://www.billboard.com/charts/hot-100 Okay maybe not NOBODY, but since radio airplay is a key consideration that list has all kinds of problems.

In 1991, around one of their "revolutions" the ADAT was released[0]: "While synchronization had been available in earlier machines, ADAT machines were the first to do so with sample-accurate timing - which in effect allowed a studio owner to purchase a 24-track tape machine eight tracks at a time. This capability and its comparatively low cost, originally introduced at $3995, were largely responsible for the rise of project studios in the 1990s"

Technological revolutions that have lowered the costs of recording and distribution have often precipitated changes in the music itself. Not to mention the new capabilities introduced by new technologies like electric guitars, magnetic tape recording, sampling, digital recording, and whatever that robot-death-sounding thing that they keep doing in Dubstep is :)

[0] - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ADAT

Restricted article.

ps: for a reason, printfriendly manage to extract the content http://www.printfriendly.com/print/?source=site&url=http%3A%...

Funny because a quick inspection of the DOM got me nowhere near that content.