5 ms·

Interesting how some themes changed completely. You would never expect to hear "ballad of green berets" as top song anymore. I think there is noticeable deteri

by vlehto 10y ago

Interesting how some themes changed completely. You would never expect to hear "ballad of green berets" as top song anymore. I think there is noticeable deterioration in music quality of the top hit during the past millenia. I guess it's combination of several factors: music getting cheaper, youngsters getting more money. And people in their thirties having more and more options on what to listen, so they are less likely to herd the record store on any one given single. I'd say music was still good in 86. (I was born then.) From 2001 onwards it seems the teens started to swarm billboard social 100 or something. Boybands are out and music is suddenly OK again.

pazra 10y ago
I think a big part of the deterioration of musical quality is connected to three major factors: 1. Recorded music has meant less need for such large numbers of musicians, as a result the pool of potential talent is lower. Much less live music is performed as a result, as a result the pool of musicians with great live musical abilities has gone down. 2. Multi-track and then computer recording has made it possible to make much more 'effects' based music, which wows the ears sonically, but requires less musicianship to back it up. The large producers of pop music has largely clung to using these techniques to give their music a unique 'modern' sound, largely fueled by the latest developments in technology. 3. The ever progressing corporatization of the music industry.
- CPLX 10y ago
  4. Lowered attention spans. It's true across all media, our culturally induced ADHD rewards novelty hits, least common denominator styles, and especially demotes things that require more than 15 seconds to process and understand before moving on. It's not just music it's clickbait headlines and superhero movies too.
  - icebraining 10y ago
    Superhero movies? They seem quite long to me. In fact, the average length of the most popular movies has been increasing.
    - mdk754 10y ago
      One could argue it's more about the "thrills-per-minute" counts going up. I'm not saying I totally agree, but it is at least evident to me that movies from past decades spend a little more time between "thrills" than your average modern film.
    - CPLX 10y ago
      Of course. But the cognitive load required to be made aware of one and then process and make a decision to watch is nearly instantaneous.
- vlehto 10y ago
  I think all of these could be used to justify why music has gotten better: 1. Only the most passionate musicians do it as a profession. 2. A producer doesn't have to chase that perfect accordion sound and manage to record it withouht distortion anymore. Which means it's increasingly about musical ideas and less about mechanical skill. 3. Corporatization always has element of specialization. Which has yielded lots of good on on other fields.
creshal 10y ago
Interest has diversified (and globalization has made access to foreign music easier), and the "top" sales don't really matter any more, because between hundreds of sub-genres, "pop" music is an artefact that doesn't represent any useful audience any longer. Teens aren't really swarming billboards, they're using social media to discover artists and… acquire music in ways that rarely impacts sales metrics.
ptaipale 10y ago
>I think there is noticeable deterioration in music quality of the top hit during the past millenia. Just to nitpick, I think most of us know too little about the hit music of 1016 to tell. The English top 10 probably included coronation songs for Edmund Ironside and then Cnut, but apart from that, we don't know much. But I agree that much of the hits I've heard since 2000 are mostly crap. I bet it is because I'm getting old.
- Grishnakh 10y ago
  No, it's not. It's because they're crap. Go back a decade or three before that point in time, and the radio stations were all independent and not owned by a single big corporation (ClearChannel). The entire music industry is very different now (or in 2000) than it was in 1970 or 1980 or even 1990. Finally, if you have an ear for music, you should be able to listen to music from other periods before you were born and find stuff that's really high quality, even if it's not a genre you normally listen to. Not so for post-2000 stuff (unless maybe it's some indie stuff or something obscure, not radio pop). Now as for 1016, music was really different in the days before recorded music. The classical stuff like Brahms and Beethoven was paid for by rich patrons (nobility usually) and played for richer audiences. The common people's music isn't very well known, since no one recorded it. The music that the King in 1016 listened to was surely not the same as what the peasants listened to.
  - Symbiote 10y ago
    Beethoven wrote music from the 17th-18th century, and Brahms in the 18th. That's essentially modern music, when the comparison is with the 11th century. It's recorded on paper, and we can reproduce it easily. "Summer is icumin in" is from the 13th century (I can't find a reasonable recording). This is older, and was on HN 5 days ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11607392 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11607392 / http://www.cam.ac.uk/research/news/first-performance-in-1000-years-lost-songs-from-the-middle-ages-are-brought-back-to-life-0 http://www.cam.ac.uk/research/news/first-performance-in-1000... In addition to peasant and court music, there was religious music. But I have no idea how common it was.
lake99 10y ago
> I think there is noticeable deterioration in music quality of the top hit during the past millenia. Despite being one whose personal preference is for music that's over a couple of hundred years old, I think your comment comes across as elitist. It's fine to have personal preferences, but I don't know how you'll justify such a claim.
- vlehto 10y ago
  To me 90's top of the charts simply sounds more one dimensional and less skillfull than music before or after.
  - lake99 10y ago
    But that's just it. The "top of the charts" has always sounded like crap to me. For exmaple, The Beatles has some pretty good songs, but their chart toppers annoy the fuck out of me. If you're singling out the 90's, I suspect that's got something to do with your age, i.e. your musical tastes developed at a different period. Were you a teenager in the 80s?
    - vlehto 10y ago
      I was born in 86
justsaysmthng 10y ago
> I think there is noticeable deterioration in music quality of the top hit during the past millenia. Maybe the top hits, but not music in general. The main reason is, in my opinion, the diversification of styles and the more varied tastes of the listeners. For example, a lot of the music that I listen to would never be played on the radio (partly because this was not the main intention of the artists). The other reason is, of course, the business-ification (?) of music - we have no problem with the term "music industry" it seems. There are bands which are "companies", and they produce "products" which happen to be songs. They invest a lot in PR and marketing, they research and deliver what the market wants, just like a for-profit enterprise would. This is somewhat opposed to "true" artists, who express their feelings and emotions through music. I've always looked skeptically at these "tops", because they are not about music, but about the business behind it. Some of the songs, though, are good and I enjoy hearing an older song because it reminds me of certain time-space points, which is to say, they bring good memories about when I was younger.
leoc 10y ago
Even at the time it seems the success of "Ballad of the Green Berets" was pretty self-conscious, a counter-counter-cultural statement by record buyers.
philwelch 10y ago
> You would never expect to hear "ballad of green berets" as top song anymore. It's very much an outlier--I suspect the "Silent Majority" deliberately pushed that to the top of the charts as a protest against all the hippie counterculture stuff that was in the charts until then.

by vlehto 10y ago

pazra 10y ago

I think a big part of the deterioration of musical quality is connected to three major factors: 1. Recorded music has meant less need for such large numbers of musicians, as a result the pool of potential talent is lower. Much less live music is performed as a result, as a result the pool of musicians with great live musical abilities has gone down. 2. Multi-track and then computer recording has made it possible to make much more 'effects' based music, which wows the ears sonically, but requires less musicianship to back it up. The large producers of pop music has largely clung to using these techniques to give their music a unique 'modern' sound, largely fueled by the latest developments in technology. 3. The ever progressing corporatization of the music industry.

CPLX 10y ago
4. Lowered attention spans. It's true across all media, our culturally induced ADHD rewards novelty hits, least common denominator styles, and especially demotes things that require more than 15 seconds to process and understand before moving on. It's not just music it's clickbait headlines and superhero movies too.
- icebraining 10y ago
  Superhero movies? They seem quite long to me. In fact, the average length of the most popular movies has been increasing.
  - mdk754 10y ago
    One could argue it's more about the "thrills-per-minute" counts going up. I'm not saying I totally agree, but it is at least evident to me that movies from past decades spend a little more time between "thrills" than your average modern film.
  - CPLX 10y ago
    Of course. But the cognitive load required to be made aware of one and then process and make a decision to watch is nearly instantaneous.
vlehto 10y ago
I think all of these could be used to justify why music has gotten better: 1. Only the most passionate musicians do it as a profession. 2. A producer doesn't have to chase that perfect accordion sound and manage to record it withouht distortion anymore. Which means it's increasingly about musical ideas and less about mechanical skill. 3. Corporatization always has element of specialization. Which has yielded lots of good on on other fields.

creshal 10y ago

Interest has diversified (and globalization has made access to foreign music easier), and the "top" sales don't really matter any more, because between hundreds of sub-genres, "pop" music is an artefact that doesn't represent any useful audience any longer. Teens aren't really swarming billboards, they're using social media to discover artists and… acquire music in ways that rarely impacts sales metrics.

ptaipale 10y ago

>I think there is noticeable deterioration in music quality of the top hit during the past millenia. Just to nitpick, I think most of us know too little about the hit music of 1016 to tell. The English top 10 probably included coronation songs for Edmund Ironside and then Cnut, but apart from that, we don't know much. But I agree that much of the hits I've heard since 2000 are mostly crap. I bet it is because I'm getting old.

Grishnakh 10y ago
No, it's not. It's because they're crap. Go back a decade or three before that point in time, and the radio stations were all independent and not owned by a single big corporation (ClearChannel). The entire music industry is very different now (or in 2000) than it was in 1970 or 1980 or even 1990. Finally, if you have an ear for music, you should be able to listen to music from other periods before you were born and find stuff that's really high quality, even if it's not a genre you normally listen to. Not so for post-2000 stuff (unless maybe it's some indie stuff or something obscure, not radio pop). Now as for 1016, music was really different in the days before recorded music. The classical stuff like Brahms and Beethoven was paid for by rich patrons (nobility usually) and played for richer audiences. The common people's music isn't very well known, since no one recorded it. The music that the King in 1016 listened to was surely not the same as what the peasants listened to.
- Symbiote 10y ago
  Beethoven wrote music from the 17th-18th century, and Brahms in the 18th. That's essentially modern music, when the comparison is with the 11th century. It's recorded on paper, and we can reproduce it easily. "Summer is icumin in" is from the 13th century (I can't find a reasonable recording). This is older, and was on HN 5 days ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11607392 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11607392 / http://www.cam.ac.uk/research/news/first-performance-in-1000-years-lost-songs-from-the-middle-ages-are-brought-back-to-life-0 http://www.cam.ac.uk/research/news/first-performance-in-1000... In addition to peasant and court music, there was religious music. But I have no idea how common it was.

lake99 10y ago

> I think there is noticeable deterioration in music quality of the top hit during the past millenia. Despite being one whose personal preference is for music that's over a couple of hundred years old, I think your comment comes across as elitist. It's fine to have personal preferences, but I don't know how you'll justify such a claim.

vlehto 10y ago
To me 90's top of the charts simply sounds more one dimensional and less skillfull than music before or after.
- lake99 10y ago
  But that's just it. The "top of the charts" has always sounded like crap to me. For exmaple, The Beatles has some pretty good songs, but their chart toppers annoy the fuck out of me. If you're singling out the 90's, I suspect that's got something to do with your age, i.e. your musical tastes developed at a different period. Were you a teenager in the 80s?
  - vlehto 10y ago
    I was born in 86

justsaysmthng 10y ago

> I think there is noticeable deterioration in music quality of the top hit during the past millenia. Maybe the top hits, but not music in general. The main reason is, in my opinion, the diversification of styles and the more varied tastes of the listeners. For example, a lot of the music that I listen to would never be played on the radio (partly because this was not the main intention of the artists). The other reason is, of course, the business-ification (?) of music - we have no problem with the term "music industry" it seems. There are bands which are "companies", and they produce "products" which happen to be songs. They invest a lot in PR and marketing, they research and deliver what the market wants, just like a for-profit enterprise would. This is somewhat opposed to "true" artists, who express their feelings and emotions through music. I've always looked skeptically at these "tops", because they are not about music, but about the business behind it. Some of the songs, though, are good and I enjoy hearing an older song because it reminds me of certain time-space points, which is to say, they bring good memories about when I was younger.

leoc 10y ago

Even at the time it seems the success of "Ballad of the Green Berets" was pretty self-conscious, a counter-counter-cultural statement by record buyers.

philwelch 10y ago

> You would never expect to hear "ballad of green berets" as top song anymore. It's very much an outlier--I suspect the "Silent Majority" deliberately pushed that to the top of the charts as a protest against all the hippie counterculture stuff that was in the charts until then.