Modern Music Quality Debate

Sounds to me like you've simply stopped trying.When I was 20 I was a music snob into Aphex Twin and weird IDM. I thought all pop at the time was crap, like you seem to. But then I heard, I mean like really heard, "Bye Bye Bye" by *NSYNC and seriously that is a good song!I'm 40 now and I think it got way better even since then. Pop is so varied now! I really don't think music as quirky and weird as, say, Billie Eilish would've made it to the top of the charts i

I have a theory around this.Short version: Music is no longer the center of popular culture.Longer version: the 60s/70s/80s saw a technical revolution in producing and distributing music. Each year, new and even more amazing things were possible, and a steady stream of geniuses came in and produced groundbreaking masterpieces using the new tech. It changed the world, and the world loved it.But now, that's all pretty much done, and the exciting things are happening elsewh

Not really an argument against but perhaps something to consider: more and more people seem to be listening to old music instead of the latest and greatest [1], the why is difficult but it might indicate that it becomes harder and harder to find true quality through the noise, but then again art generation does make it easy for someone like me to make something pretty even though it might not be a masterpiece.[1] <a href="https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2022

Pop is now 'extreme pop' i.e. Taylor Swift - bangers by the same production teams, they are products. So they lack a lot of soul.The rest of music is very exploratory - production tricks, sounds, styles.It seems that most basic melody and rhythm stuff is just to boring - but that is what sticks over the long haul.So I think a lot of music today is too specific, and due to what big-pop is ... never sees the light of day anyhow.We may in fact see a lot of 20-century music lin

I also think that's partly survivor bias. You listen to the best hits of those decades, tricking you into thinking that all music from those decades was like that. In reality, there was a lot of junk in those times too but we don't listen to it anymore. The same will happen with the 10s and the current 20s in twenty years.

I think what you're saying is: Survivor bias. We are comparing the best songs of the past to all songs of the now.That is not a fair comparison. I think that there is a lot of very good pop music being made today. Non-pop as well. Just a lot of very good music in general. But you have to give it a decade or two to really separate the grain from the chaff.I'm 27 and I discover awesome new music I like almost daily. These days a lot of it is pop because pop is

Hmm. You say you can see it, but have we seen that to date?Perhaps I'm assuming too much from your use of "periodic", but I don't think it's too much to expect that if it was going to happen, it would have, after nearly three decades. 20-30 years is usually considered a human generation.For comparison to 1993's Macarena, consider Sting's "Fields of Gold", which is the most covered song released that same year, with 234 versions to date.So, I&

Yes but:1) Chart toppers from previous eras are still listenable. Almost nothing on the charts today will be listenable in 2 years. Out-of-touch grandparents in the 1960s could have been convinced to listen to the Beatles. Nobody of a certain age will put up with Top 40 today.2) It's not quite as democratic as you'd imagine. There are promotions, placements, trends, people sucking kids into clicks in big herds.A major issue is that today music is more global, and there is a mu

I don’t think music is getting dumbed down, just that different aspects are becoming more prioritized than others were in the past.Listen to a 100 gecs or other hyperpop song and listen to some of rhythmic motifs being used. This isn’t a fringe genre either, it’s hugely popular with gen z. It may not have key changes like a rock ballad, but it has lots of musical ideas which songwriters from the last 60 years never even had access to.

I think the article is right and wrong. The top 10 has degenerated as the population consuming music has broadened. Not that there's nothing ever good in there. But it is objectively simpler music, very barebones, a beat, 2 or 3 chords, no instrumental melody, autotune voice, meaningless lyrics (not meaningless as in they don't mean anything, but meaningless as in written to be a song and not written because they had personal meaning to the author(s)).However, it's far easier t