Home taping is killing music! https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Home_Taping_Is_Killing_Music
But the "mainstreamity" (connecting a society and being a central cultural focus) is also a desirable attribute from music (from art in general), that is lacking today.
That is, there's music that's great but not mainstream and music that's mainstream but not great. The sixties and seventies (up to the nineties maybe) had both.
Modern good music has lost that, and everyone listens to good or even excellent music oblivious on his own little world and niche.
(Oh, and I'm not waxing because I'm some Beatles-loving older guy -- I'm much younger and in fact I listen to tons of new music most people wouldn't even touch, from Nobukazu Takemura to Mount Erie, Four Tet, etc.).
For me it's like great modern music is like some excellent Social Media site, with tons of features, great layout, speedy backends, nice UI et al, but where there are very few people using it. Yeah, in itself it might be a great web app, but where's the conversation and the social aspect?
When looking backwards, you have an especial temptation to compare whatever is popular right-this-instant to whatever from back then has stood the test of time, even if it wasn’t the most popular thing in the world.
I’d compare Justin Bieber to The Monkees, personally.
Yeah, but both were in the top charts.
Not that good stuff in the charts nowadays.
>I’d compare Justin Bieber to The Monkees, personally.
That comparison would also make my point, though. Bieber is for teenage girls, period, and bad at that.
60's music for teenage girls were the Beatles or at worse Petula Clark and the like.
The recording industry's "good old days" were mostly before my time but producer and musician Steve Albini, who was around back then, called the record industry out in 1993 in an essay succinctly titled The Problem With Music http://www.negativland.com/news/?page_id=17
Here he talks "about the advantages of the internet, the death of the major label system, copyright law and that ‘purple dwarf in assless chaps'" http://www.theguardian.com/music/2014/nov/17/steve-albinis-k...
Article and video here... http://www.theguardian.com/music/2014/nov/17/steve-albini-at...
An excerpt: In contrast to what almost anyone else will tell you, Albini believes there has never been a better time to be involved in music – as a fan and as a musician (excluding, perhaps, the megastars): “I see more bands and I hear more music than ever before in my life. There are more gigs, more songs available than ever before, bands are being treated with more respect, and are more in control of their careers and destinies.
“I see them continuing as a constellation of enterprises: some big, some small, most small but all of them with a more immediate response from their audience and a greater chance to succeed. It is genuinely exciting.”
For one thing, the quality of recording interfaces and the accessibility of such hardware is really really great at the moment. I play in a few bands and being able to record practices in clear quality and listen back to them would have been unheard of 15 years ago.
As for the quality of that music, that's entirely subjective.