24 ms·

Is old music killing new music?

• namose 5y ago
  Sorry, but why is “total album consumption” the metric here? The vast majority of people listening to contemporary music don’t have the attention spans for full albums (I include myself here).
• mberning 5y ago
  I think the absolute glut of new music available makes it hard for me to seek out and find new artists. Even with the help of spotify and pandora. Also driving to and from work was where I sampled a lot of new music, and that has gone away with covid. It’s just easier to jump into something I already know.
• PaulHoule 5y ago
  I get the worst resistance when I say it but I think music died when autotune became ubiquitous. Curiously this happened at the same time that Napster hit so piracy got a lot of the blame. Personally I think autotune sucks all the emotional connection out of music. It is one thing that Miku Hatsune sings like that, it's another thing that Miley Cyrus does. (Not to pick her out as a particularly great musician but she is a competent singer with a beautiful voice that stands on its own without processing.) Autotune music just washes over people without having any effect. When there is autotune music on at the gas station people can't tell you who the artists is sometimes they aren't even sure if it is rap or country music. Ask people on the street to actually name a Kanye West song and most of them struggle. I'm almost tempted to say that "Kanye West doesnt't exist or that he's just famous because his wife is famous."
  • detaro 5y ago
    There exists a lot of music outside a few extremely popular names you mention. Far, far from dead.
  • mysecretaccount 5y ago
    > Ask people on the street to actually name a Kanye West song and most of them struggle. I am highly skeptical of this assertion.
    • dave_sid 5y ago
      I only know the one where he talked over the top of a Daft Punk track. I already had the CD with the Daft Punk track which was really the same song so I just kept that one.
    • paleotrope 5y ago
      I am highly skeptical that if you stopped a random person on the street that they would be able to identify who Kanye West is.
      • deleted 5y ago
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      • lghh 5y ago
        I doubt the person who could not identify Kanye West could also identify nearly any other musician. Do you think they'd be able to identify John Lennon?
        • paleotrope 5y ago
          I have no idea. The scope of music seems so fragmented today. It's so big now. People can burrow into a specific small set of bands and music styles and never ever need to move outside of it now. It's seems quaint that 20 years ago my primary source of new music was SNL and late shows. Now, spotify/pandora will give you entry to exactly what you want and keep giving it to you, forver.
      • deleted 5y ago
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  • halpert 5y ago
    Regarding Kanye West, I think that might just be your social bubble. I know multiple people who seem to randomly start talking about Kanye West songs totally unprompted. And similarly, your dislike of auto tune likely reflects your cultural upbringing more than anything else.
    • azemetre 5y ago
      I miss the old kanye.
      • amch 5y ago
        straight from the go kanye
        • kbelbina 5y ago
          chop up the soul kanye
          • Zababa 5y ago
            set on his goals kanye
            • mrtnpwn 5y ago
              I hate the new Kanye
              • Apocryphon 5y ago
                the bad mood Kanye
    • mikeyouse 5y ago
      Kayne's in the top 20 of most albums ever sold.. OP saying he basically doesn't exist because some hypothetical people hypothetically wouldn't be able to name a song is hilarious. And chalking that up to autotune?
  • cassianoleal 5y ago
    There's a reason why DAWs usually have a "humanizer" knob. Turns out humans relate better to imperfect things that feel like were created by other humans than they do to overly perfect things obviously created by machines.
    • whiddershins 5y ago
      But those imperfections are incorrect as opposed to correct variations
      • cassianoleal 5y ago
        No, it's about tiny and usually unnoticeable delays in hitting a note or a beat. There's nothing incorrect about them. They are not variations either, just tiny mistakes that happen to _all_ humans when they play an instrument.
        • whiddershins 5y ago
          The assumption that these variations are mistakes is the incorrect one. There is even research showing the variations in timing follow large macro cycles. None of this is random or mistakes when we are talking about high level players. Some is deliberate. Some is totally unconscious. But not mistakes.
  • aidenn0 5y ago
    Autotune is just one of many tools that were used to (IMO) overproduce music in the early '00s. I think DAWs in general give producers enough rope to strangle the life out of any recording.
  • _jal 5y ago
    I don't think I listen to anything that's autotuned. But I also don't think music is dying, so there's that.
    • ratww 5y ago
      “Autotuned” doesn’t necessarily mean the T-Pain effect, it can be used in a quasi-imperceptible way. Most mainstream music today uses it. Whether GP’s thesis has merit, I have no idea.
      • deleted 5y ago
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  • dec0dedab0de 5y ago
    You're talking about mainstream music, which is essentially mcdonald's and starbuck's. There are millions of other coffee shops and burger stands out there that are only serving thousands of people instead of billions.
  • Miner49er 5y ago
    Kanye West is one of the most listened to artists in the last two decades, and is widely considered one of the most influential artists of the last two decades. If you haven't at least tried to listen to My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy with an open mind, you can't really trash on his music. If you have, and still don't like it, that's fair.
  • throwawayboise 5y ago
    I think that is part of it, also the way that mass-market music is mixed today. It's very loud all the time and has no dynamic range. This has been a problem for a while TBH but it certainly isn't better in 2022. It all combines to make a very artificial sound.
  • Apocryphon 5y ago
    Is autotune ubiquitous? Other than the trend of artists like T-Pain who used it for stylistic effect (who actually has a great natural singing voice- https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CIjXUg1s5gc https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CIjXUg1s5gc), I don't think it was ever overwhelmingly used except in certain genres such as EDM. Any ignorance of Kanye West song names may simply be a reflection of his more avant-garde new albums not having the same memorable hooks as old ones, but I can at least think of one recent song by him ("Donda").
    • TylerE 5y ago
      Yes, it's nearly ubiquitous. It usually isn't used in an OBVIOIOUS way, just to make up for less than perfect takes. The go to software is Meloldyne. It's...crazy capable. It can even return single notes in polyphonic music. Watch this from about the 3:00 mark on: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=smOmTZWddrE&t=185s https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=smOmTZWddrE&t=185s (Note this video is very extreme editing, it absolutely possible (in fact easier) to use Melodyne in a way that sounds utterly natural)
    • ratww 5y ago
      Autotune the special effect a la T-Pain is not ubiquitous, but Autotune, the process, definitely is. The software itself (or its cousin, Melodyne), or the rack unit are still used in most pop music. Even bedroom studios will have it. Not using it today is pretty much a stylistic statement. It can be set to be very subtle to the point of imperceptible, keeping the vibrato and the portamento, to the point it is impossible to pinpoint its usage. But it kinda has a sound: vocals that go trough it sound absolutely flawless. Whether regular people can perceive it, I have no idea.
      • Sebb767 5y ago
        > Whether regular people can perceive it, I have no idea. If the singer is somewhat good (so that the correction is small) and it's applied well, you have no chance. Even musicians will have a hard time. But you can definitely notice it in sum - everything sounds pitch-perfect and all the little misses, which might be stylistic in and by itself [0], just go missing. [0] A good sound engineer will of course know when not to use it, but the unintentional characteristics go missing.
  • melissalobos 5y ago
    > Ask people on the street to actually name a Kanye West song and most of them struggle I think Kanye may be a terrible example for your point since people tend to listen to his music for the lyrics, which are often well crafted. Your point makes more sense for mass produced pop music where the lyrics for almost every major song are written by ~6 different groups. In that case most of the lyrics tend to have similar tone and themes and so it matters much less who is singing them.
  • lghh 5y ago
    This feels like the same argument you'd here when electric guitars became ubiquitis. Or synthasizers. Can you not create emotionally resonant music without vocals? You'd be hard pressed to find someone who doesn't think you can. What about with no vocals and only electronic instruments like synths. You can. So why does adding a level of "electronic" feeling production to vocals do anything different? Sure, there's _bad_ autotune. There's also bad singing without it. But there's nothing inherently wrong with autotune.
    • ratww 5y ago
      I agree that there isn’t anything inherently wrong with autotune, but electric guitars and synthesizers were very expressive instruments that generated new possibilities for musicians to express themselves: guitars with more sustain allowing for legato playing, for a different kind of vibrato, synthesizers allowing change of different parameters that traditional instruments can’t, etc. “Autotune the T-Pain effect”, is also a new sound… But Autotune/Melodyne being used to make vocals flawless is sort of “removing” flaws from vocal tracks. This would be similar to replacing an orchestra with Gemeral MIDI instruments. It is technically perfect, but there’s less expression. Whether this is good or bad I don’t know, but part of the charm of old recordings is the infinite variations of tuning and timing.
  • rogerclark 5y ago
    Are you talking about Antares Auto-Tune? Or are you talking about pitch correction with Melodyne or in-DAW pitch tools? Or do you mean finer-grained pitching with vocal track slicing and pitching? Or do you mean splicing together tons of different takes to create the perfect vocal track? As a producer, my sense is that people who refer to "autotune" generally don't know what they mean when they say it, but they really want to identify some point in the history of music where things became "artificial". That's not how it works. Plus, people don't just throw a vocal track through some magical automatic tuner and get a perfect result. There is an unbelievable amount of manual work involved to produce a high quality vocal track. This stuff has been going on since the beginning of pop music. Most pop hits since the 70s have had spliced vocals where ideal takes are combined. Since advanced sampling began in the 80s, we've had manual pitching and adjustment of tiny vocal clips. That became easier in the 90s with computers. In the 2000s, when full-featured DAWs and plugins became practical, we've had more automatic pitch correction, like the auto-tune vocal effect you heard from T-Pain and others. But there's always something manual involved, and there's a lot of work from the vocalist to make this happen. Max Martin, the producer of countless pop hits starting in the 90s, has detailed many times that he combines dozens of vocal takes and corrects pitch throughout the entire vocal tracks. This is normal. People actually want this.
    • Apocryphon 5y ago
      Speaking of Max Martin, I had wanted to reference the Weeknd's new album Dawn FM into the discussion somewhere, which was coproduced by Martin. That is a heavily produced album, a lot of influence from '80s New Wave and Michael Jackson pop all the way to obscure internet retro syntwhave, yet the vocals were very human and soulful and not at all unemotional. YMMV, as always.
    • l33tbro 5y ago
      They clearly mean the shitty vocal artefacts from pitch correction software pushed to the extreme. That's really not in the same paradigm as multi-take / double-tracked vocals. While pitch correction software is used subtly in a lot of recordings, OP is obviously meaning the sound that started with Cher snd Daft Punk in the early 2000s, and is now ubiquitous on modern radio.
  • dntrkv 5y ago
    If you think music died or is dying, you're probably just not exposing yourself to enough new music. Or you're just living in the past. Or a combination of both. Not sure what autotune has to do with anything. It's over-use in the top hits can be annoying, but who gives a fuck. You don't have to listen to that music. The vast majority of music I listen to, across a wide spectrum of genres, doesn't use it.
    • CuriouslyC 5y ago
      Usually when people say this, they mean mainstream music is dead or dying.
      • barbecue_sauce 5y ago
        But thats a good thing.
      • dntrkv 5y ago
        Tale as old as time. Mainstream music has been "dying" for many decades at this point.
    • Sebb767 5y ago
      There's a huge amount of survivor bias when thinking about old music. All the crap that never made it far is mostly lost by now; what's remembered and what's on the 80s playlist is basically the top pick from a whole decade, readily discovered for you and sprinkled with nostalgia from your childhood. Also, in different decades, different styles were mainstream. Today you can find music for any genre that was popular in any decade and the best of it will also sound great; it's just not present everywhere or readily picked out for you. It's quite likely that you don't like the decade, you simply like the music style and didn't find the niche that is still producing it.
      • rodgerd 5y ago
        > All the crap that never made it far is mostly lost by now; The Monkees were more popular than the Beatles, but you'll never get the Mojo magazine audience to admit that.
  • Blahah 5y ago
    > Ask people on the street to actually name a Kanye West song and most of them struggle. I'm almost tempted to say that "Kanye West doesnt't exist or that he's just famous because his wife is famous." Not a great example - whilst Kanye is undeniably a vacuous prat these days, he was one of the most influential music producers in his generation and has two, arguably three, albums that are widely regarded as having raised the bar for hip-hop. He's won 22 Grammys. Have you heard "Jesus walks"? The man was brilliant. He has certainly contributed more creative talent to the world than Kim Kardashian. They were both extraordinarily famous before they married.
  • nineplay 5y ago
    You don't think people on the street could name "Golddigger"? It was in the first episode of "Glee" for Pete's sake. I think you'd have more luck getting people to name a Kanye West song than whole lot of other artists. It'd depend on the generation of course. Maybe GenX/Boomers would struggle with Kanye ( and I say this as a GenXer ) but I'd guess a lot of millenials/genZ's would struggle a bit with the Rolling Stones. I'm not sure what either proves.
    • crtasm 5y ago
      I know Golddigger but couldn't have told you who it was by.
  • barbecue_sauce 5y ago
    This only applies if you somehow are only exposed to music that is played on the radio. The same type of people who don't connect with current popular music probably didn't connect with previous popular music. Many people largely disengage with seeking out music once they enter adulthood, if they even did to any meaningful degree at all. They might still listen to music they liked when they were younger regularly, but they aren't going out of their way to discover it. My parents are in their 70s and were never that into music. My dad kind of liked the Beach Boys, but if I asked either of them to name a Beatles song they would struggle as they were pretty much out of school by the time they reached superstardom. I, on the other hand, listen to tons of new music, but if you asked me to name a random song on the radio, I probably wouldn't be able to name the artist primarily because I don't give a shit about the kind of music they play on the radio. I don't think new radio music is any better or worse than old radio music. It's always been corporate-driven pablum, autotune or not. As for autotune itself, it can be effective when used appropriately as a texture, and not necessarily as something to pitch-correct a bad singer.
  • omnicognate 5y ago
    I'm with you on autotune. It's an effect that was briefly musically interesting and then almost immediately massively overused. I can't stand the sound of it now. I entirely disagree on music dying, though. The bland stuff that washes over people is made to be bland and wash over people. You don't have to listen to it. We're living in a golden age of music production if anything, with every conceivable taste catered to. The challenges are on the consumption side: finding the music you like and forming a meaningful relationship with it can be challenging in a time of such excess.
  • cookie_monsta 5y ago
    Gold digger was an amazing song when it came out. After that I would struggle to name one. I know that the Ye is talented and influential, I just don't think as much as some people make out.
  • mrweasel 5y ago
    That’s an interesting idea, but I believe your right that much modern music have the problem that it all sounds similar. Once in a while some artist stands out, but so much modern R&B, pop and rock is so simular that you can switch songs between artists and no one would know. It might be survivour bias and was always the case that most music sounded similar within a given time period, but it could also be a result of high prompted and manufactured artists. The article does sort of touches on this subject when talking about which artists get promoted. That’s really what we’re seeing in movies, TV, design and much more. The risk is eliminated and only the safest option is push forward.
  • nemothekid 5y ago
    Your perception of Kanye only being famous "because his wife is famous" is something that is influenced by your own media consumption. I'm not sure if you actually asked people that they would struggle - Kanye has been big for a long time. I think if people struggled to know the names of the songs it would probably just be because Kanye isn't radio friendly. The reason music "died" around the time of Napster, is that editorial distribution died. Before Napster, if you wanted to listen to music you either had the radio - which played the same thing for everyone, or you really had to dig record crates. Now it's completely possible to exclusively listen to hyperpop-house-vaporwave artists and not know who is charting. In short if you were expecting someone to curate your music, that mechanism no longer exists; likewise if the algorithm of your streaming service of choice is never playing Kanye for you, you might be confused to why everyone thinks he's so famous.
  • marcodiego 5y ago
    What autotune did to music, filters in smartphones photo apps did to photographs. Photos of people now show a perfect, clear, soulless and uncanny skin. It is the same thing when I hear autotuned artists.
  • rodgerd 5y ago
    > When there is autotune music on at the gas station people can't tell you who the artists is As opposed to the 1960s, when nearly every popular album was actually recorded by the Wrecking Crew, not whatever muppets happened to be on the cover.
  • chefandy 5y ago
    A coworker 10 years my senior when I was 20: When did MTV start sucking and VH1 get good? MTV used to be good and VH1 used to be for the boring older crowd. It's way better than MTV, now. Me: Hate to say it, but I don't think it's VH1 that's changed. ::pregnant pause:: Him: Ouch... My youth.
  • deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
  • monkeynotes 5y ago
    Do you think that Beethoven would feel the same way about rock and roll, or 1900s folk feel the same way about vinyl killing sheet music and so on through the history of music.
  • rhizome 5y ago
    I once heard a saying, "the future of music is not music." All through history, most recently with Autotune and previously with rap music (and further back in other ways), we hear people saying, "that's not music!" Invariably, these styles establish themselves and time moves on. I mean, if you want to talk about antipathy and outright-racist music criticism and hatred being thoroughly demolished, let us look at how rap has taken over Country music, because it has. 30 years ago half of everybody didn't consider rap to be music. Do you remember people saying "(c)rap" or "hippity-hop?" It wasn't that long ago! You say music died not when Buddy Holly and the Big Bopper went down, but with the advent of one musical effect among many in the recording signal path (and I bet a lot more of your favorite artists use Autotune than you realize). Emotional connection is just what you like about the music. Many people think Death Metal has no feeling, or that Yacht Rock is dead-eyed pablum, or that any toddler could make a dance music track. After all it's just a drum machine, or cocaine, or screaming, and where's the love? >Ask people on the street to actually name a Kanye West song and most of them struggle. It's been a long time since my phone set on shuffle allowed me to memorize the title of anything. There just isn't the repetition that fixed-format radio and "I can afford one 12-song album per month," gave people. That's how you memorize song names, or you hum it into Vocaroo and hope an internet stranger helps you out. It's absolutely irrational to blame Autotune for this state of affairs, and if anything it made songs more identifiable! It just so happens that people and song titles aren't as tightly connected anymore. I don't know how you can say that without knowing a song's title the music doesn't even exist. >it's another thing that Miley Cyrus does. (Not to pick her out as a particularly great musician but she is a competent singer with a beautiful voice that stands on its own without processing.) That's funny because my way of dismissing her is to call her a Brenda Lee ripoff. Thus, emotion gets sucked out in many different ways. There's no accounting for taste. My free advice is to check out the stuff people don't think is music, because not-music is the future of music, and I feel there's probably always something valuable in evolution. If you don't like it, that doesn't mean you're closed-minded, but if you reject everything about it out of hand, you might be. Not that there's anything wrong with that.
  • bambax 5y ago
    There was a great post on Reddit about this a couple of days ago: https://www.reddit.com/r/WeAreTheMusicMakers/comments/s6l9tk/if_youve_ever_wondered_how_did_that_singer_ever/ https://www.reddit.com/r/WeAreTheMusicMakers/comments/s6l9tk... Not about autotune per se but about what makes a great singer is not the perfection of their voice but the imperfections, that make it recognizable. Autotune irons out imperfections; so does the grid. A big problem of new music is it's too perfect, which makes it sound dead.
  • dehrmann 5y ago
    > they aren't even sure if it is rap or country music To be fair, "Old Town Road" is sort of both.
• cassianoleal 5y ago
  I kind of hope it is. New music, with a few notable exceptions is ultra-produced cheap beats with overly simplified harmonies and horrible lyrics. The music industry has been feeding us this crap more and more since the last 2 or 3 decades. Shoving it down everybody's throats is easy when they have no choice, but I guess people are getting tired of the sameness and looking for things with more nuance. Streaming gives us control over what goes into our ears and it seems that we like good things even if they are not as well produced. Also, there's JoJo's Bizarre Adventure teaching kids about great music!
  • ironman1478 5y ago
    This just isn't true? There is tons of new amazing music out there in every genre. You can find amazing new jazz, metal, electronic, bluegrass, etc. You name it, there is somebody out there making good music in that genre today. You just have to look beyond what is talked about on TV.
    • dntrkv 5y ago
      Half of this thread is literally: old man yells at cloud. How do people continuously fall into this trap? "New X sucks" No, it doesn't. You just don't make an effort to seek out new things and wish everything stayed the same as when you were young.
      • cassianoleal 5y ago
        That's kind of missing the point though. In the context of the article, streaming, "an effort to seek out new things" is mostly out of the table. This is about things that are shoved in front of us. Before streaming, we would simply get fed stuff on the TV or the radio, and that's how we discovered music. This has been widely abused to feed us ever worse quality stuff. With streaming it's easy to skip the crap and look for stuff that we like better (within limits), and if the article is right, people are not just sucking up anymore.
        • Apocryphon 5y ago
• rootusrootus 5y ago
  I'm not sure how big a factor it is, but I have for a long time wondered if music produced in the 70s (perhaps late 60s) and later would have more staying power than earlier music. That was about the time that really high quality masters could be made which sound good even today. Used to be that old music sounded as old as it was, but now you can listen to music from the 70s with the same quality as if it were recorded today.
  • vzidex 5y ago
    Anecdotally, recently my dad got me a Tidal subscription (which has masters at supposedly higher quality than CDs) and an entry-level DAC. The two put together have blown me away and I've been having a blast the last couple of weeks re-listening to all my favourite records from as far back as the 70s. I think the 70s are also around the same time that a lot of familiar genres started to emerge, while music from before then is often dismissed as "oldies" or saved for special occasions - e.g. old crunchy recordings of Christmas songs.
    • PaulDavisThe1st 5y ago
      > a Tidal subscription (which has masters at supposedly higher quality than CDs) Alas, this is BS. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pRjsu9-Vznc https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pRjsu9-Vznc https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NHkqWZ9jzA0 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NHkqWZ9jzA0 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hf-UGPXpqJ4 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hf-UGPXpqJ4
      • vzidex 5y ago
        It might very well be the DAC doing the work then, or maybe the placebo effect is just making me pay more attention to music I first heard years ago and I'm picking up more :) Thanks for the information though, I'll do some A/B testing to see if it makes any difference to me.
        • redisman 5y ago
          Just the Hifi level is probably enough for almost any system. I also noticed a huge difference coming from YouTube and Spotify on the Hifi setting in Tidal. I didn’t bother with Master as my ears aren’t that magical
• madsbuch 5y ago
  I guess, when you curate your own consumption you pick what speaks to you? Music is not like a new phone. There are no "upgrades". Maybe it is futile to conceptualize old / new music? We have music, and then just an expansion of the catalog.
  • mihaaly 5y ago
    Correct. There are millions and millions of old music made throughout many many decades. Thousands and tens of thousands stood the test of time and people like to listen to those regardless what the calendar shows. Others got mostly forgotten. New songs are from a much shorter period and so those are in the thousands and tens of thousands only. And perhaps hundreds or more will stand the test of times and will be listened to many many years from now too. This is how it is when people can pick their music more freely instead of fed by the industry and from a seemingly endless list not just from those stamped as 'new'. No killing is going on here. Music that people like will be listened to still, regardless of their age. It is just much much more out there from earlier than now, due to longer period and more people throughout the history.
  • dehrmann 5y ago
    > Music is not like a new phone. There are no "upgrades". Disagree. Listen to "I'll Be" by Edwin McCain, then "You and Me" by Lifehouse. Ed Sheeran upgraded "Thinking Out Loud" with "Perfect." "Girlfriend" by Avril Lavigne is an improved "Hey Mickey."
    • masklinn 5y ago
      There’s also tons of covers which can suit you better than the original (or even suit you at all where the original definitely did not). For me “stories” (acoustic covers by the Scary Pockets crew and the same model of rotating guest singers & musicians — without the fixed members though Lerman is generally on guitar) is a daily with a 95% hit rate, but about half the originals I wouldn't listen to at all.
      • dehrmann 5y ago
• bsedlm 5y ago
  I choose to read this as a ever more pressing need to explore music beyond 12-tet. and not just in a niche microtonal fashion. computers can take us there but not so long as MIDI is the standard. the 'problem' (which is really more of an opportunity to improve and go beyond) is not MIDI but the conceptual theoretical framework of the 12-notes keyboard underlying all 'western' traditions. but don't get me wrong, it's no coincidence that this 12 notes system is so widespread, it really is very well made. anything that attempts to take music beyond it needs to be even better, which ain't easy as it's quite something already. in summary, computer technology has so far just made cheaper and easier to do the same things that were already possible. no new things have been tried yet regarding the choice of notes to use.
  • sosuke 5y ago
    Sounds like a topic that would make an interesting blog post. If you do expand on the subject please share it!
    • deleted 5y ago
      [deleted]
  • PaulDavisThe1st 5y ago
    I'm actually a big fan of this idea, and am slowly doing work to get my DAW (Ardour) more capable of supporting non-12TET and non-western tunings. However, putting on my devil's advocate hat for a moment, this leans heavily on the idea that humanity didn't already explore non-12T music already, which is a difficult argument to make. It is false that the 12T model originated on keyboards. Finally, it also fails to note the reason why we have 12TET. Western music is relatively unique among world music cultures in the dominant role that harmony plays (contrast with the highly evolved classical musical forms from India, which are incredibly rhythmically and melodically sophisticated but lack almost any notion of harmony (let alone harmonic movement) at all). If you want to make music that is rich harmonically, it is likely that at some point you will want to be able to modulate between similar relationships (call them "scales" if you like) but starting from different initial tones. Doing this without it all going horribly wrong requires ET.
• les_diabolique 5y ago
  I think this is due to the relationship with music changing. I'm in my early 40s now, but when I was in my teen/early 20s, I would buy a 1 or 2 CDs a month and I would listen to those CDs over and over again. I would study the linear notes and the cover. Music is too disposable now. With my spotify subscription, I can still listen to those albums from the 90s/early 2000s over and over again, but there's just so much new music. Even new albums that I really enjoy, I'll listen to them a handful of times and forget about them.
• shae 5y ago
  I find new music I love on bandcamp, perhaps that's outside the data used for this analysis? Anyway, I spend thousands of dollars on amazing music on bandcamp, and the artists get a higher percentage from bandcamp than a studio, so I'm making the best choice for me and the future of my music.
  • dutchCourage 5y ago
    I'm late to this thread. I'm shocked that I had to scroll past an entire page of "music is dead" to find something about Bandcamp. Producing music is easier than ever so there's more music out than ever. Listening to music is easier than ever. If you're relying on mass media (tv/radio) and big labels to find music you'll enjoy, you're doing it wrong. The curators nowadays are Youtube channels and Spotify playlists and indie labels on Bandcamp, I'm following music subreddits, finding stuff on Soundcloud. New music isn't dying, it's striving.
    • shae 5y ago
      Any recommended music subreddits? I'm especially interested in finding links to good stuff on bandcamp.
      • dutchCourage 5y ago
        I use reddit for electronic music, my go-to's are /r/TheOverload/ and /r/electro. For Bandcamp, I follow artists and labels there. Whenever an artist I like has a release on a label I don't know I check it out. There's also this tool from the Hype Machine that finds Bandcamp links from a Spotify playlist. https://hypem.com/merch-table https://hypem.com/merch-table Are there some specific kinds of music you're looking for?
• callamdelaney 5y ago
  Old music is just better. Try listening to the UK/YS top 40. I dare you.
• Lammy 5y ago
  > The radio stations will only play songs that fit the dominant formulas, which haven’t changed much in decades. That’s even more true for the algorithms curating so much of our new music—the algorithms are designed to be feedback loops, ensuring that the promoted new songs are virtually identical to your favorite old songs. "Programmed by a sucker in a suit — a slick back hair / And he don't even live here" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iiGOXmSmf9E https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iiGOXmSmf9E
• EugeneOZ 5y ago
  What new music? Everything is hip-hop, rap, or r&b nowadays. I just can't turn on the “new songs” radio station in Apple Music because 90% will be hip-hop & rap. I imagine how modern music producers are fed up by an endless stream of demo records from ‘new hip-hop stars’ - my condolences. If streaming services will add the button “Do not propose music of this genre”, then new music will be more discoverable. But right now the only two things I saw in Spotify and Apple Music are “I like this genre” and “I love/hate this song”. I hope it will become a killer feature of some new startup.
  • themadturk 5y ago
    I was hesitant to chime in here, because I'm in my mid-60s, which puts me solidly in the boomer generation that grew up with classic rock. But I have to agree with this. I have some faves in the realm of "old" music, but also like a lot of current/newer musicians, a few of whom are R&B but none of whom are rap/hip-hop. It's just not something I enjoy, and I agree that too many new songs radio stations are full of it. Looking for new music doesn't occupy much of my time, so my tolerance for the choice presented to me is fairly low.
• boringg 5y ago
  With discovery being AI driven and no credibility connoted by knowing bands - the music industry is in trouble as it has become commoditize to a certain degree. Listeners no longer have as much value or identity to who they listen to as there isn't any real effort to find music (by the majority of people). That and artists needing to make big singles too monetize their work - so the approach to making music is different. Getting a movie/show themesong or leveraging another artists popularity to drive song plays Musical instruments becoming quite inexpensive increasing the competition while the market place is increasingly fragmented. Former gate keepers don't have that much cloud [record labels]. As a former music head it really sucks to look at music from a business market perspective - but it really does frame what's going on. There's a confluence of forces making new music difficult that and you would also think a lot of the items i posted above would make there being more higher quality music.
• nautilus12 5y ago
  I agree with the thesis here 100% but isn't this argument prey to temporal bias? Its easy to compare the current moment with a much longer period of time (all other past moments), and have the current moment fall short.
• not2b 5y ago
  The people who buy music, as opposed to just streaming it, skew older and what is bought reflects that.
• YATA0 5y ago
  Welcome to the post-album era.
• asow92 5y ago
  Maybe the newer music just isn't as good? New != better.
  • yetanotherloser 5y ago
• shevis 5y ago
  This is just a symptom of the cultural zeitgeist moving out of the mainstream distribution channels. People are still listening to new music, it’s just not happening the way it used to (e.g. labels, records, radio, or even streaming services). A lot of new music is discovered/distributed through social media which makes it much harder to quantify what even counts as a “listen”.
• yetanotherloser 5y ago
  I don't mean to be nonconstructive but... my gut response is "naaah". A generation of wealthy nostalgics overspends on the same old music. A generation of hard-up youth (and there's nothing wrong with that in strictly origin-of-media-cultures terms!) won't pay anything the "music market" can easily measure, for what they actually value. Musicians aiming for commercial appeal really seem to be scraping the barrel now. There are people with new ideas but the profusion of barrel-scrapers makes "try to sell big" a poor use of an inventive musician's time. Where do we go from here? No idea, but it probably needs to involve inventing (or reinventing) some different kind of engagement. I don't think my preferences for what kind stand much of a chance, but no matter.
• Zababa 5y ago
  > The reasons are complex—more than just the appeal of old tunes Are they so complex? Personally I can listen to popular music from up until 2015 and "get it", but after that, what's supposed to be popular music starts to sound more extreme than what I listen to alone. And it's not just a "me" thing, we have a wide variety of tastes in the family, and we agree that most of that plays on the radio these days is not what any of us would listen to. I don't know what niche this music is optimizing for, but I think that most people are out of it. In parallel, lots of less-known artists continue putting out great stuff.
• zzzeek 5y ago
  all those years spending $17.99 just to have ten songs I can play, the chickens have come home to roost. if there's not as much money to be made selling new music I think it's mostly because there is so much new music. anyone can record an album now, or whatever, release it, do the whole nine yards, without having to go through that ridiculous hurdle so many years ago of "getting a deal with a label". if you're into a whole genre of music, that's great, but there's like 18 thousand other genres that are all just as valid now, unlike in the 1980s when there were something like five. All the bands that you think are great and have changed your life listening to are not anyone else's in your town. it's as though the music industry has spread across the whole galaxy to millions of planets and it would be impossible for there to ever be some artists that are as important as names like the Police or Madonna were in the 80s. It was widely understood that even then, while "getting a record deal" was the only way you'd have a career, the publishing companies were generally in it to rip the musicians through a shredder and extract as much cash as they can before discarding the talent, except in the very unlikely case that said talent did well enough to still be viable for more albums. I'm sort of amazed that industry hasn't just thrown in the towel at this point, they were basically gatekeepers on recording and distribution technology.
• teknopurge 5y ago
  yes.
• bee_rider 5y ago
  They define new music as from the last 18 months, so every recording is solidly inside the pandemic. I wonder if people just aren't going out as much. I dunno -- would anyone care if superstars vanished? A much better result would be for lots of artists to make, like, middle class wages on Bandcamp or whatever (not saying this actually happens, just thinking about possible better end results).
• arduinomancer 5y ago
  I feel like this is probably just more and more older people adopting streaming platforms as their way of listening It was likely unbalanced in the beginning when these platforms first came out
• pjerem 5y ago
  To me it’s like there is nothing new anymore. Sure, we still have good tracks here and there. Good artists are still there but it’s pretty hard to compose something « new » without being « strange ». It’s mostly impossible to do better than the masters of your musical genre because most genres exists for more than 60, sometimes 100 years so, statically speaking, they may have been mastered by one or multiple artists since then. Even if an artist managed to be greater (for what it could mean) than his masters, well, he could never have the advantage of novelty. I don’t think it’s an issue (except maybe for the industry), after all, there is already enough music to enjoy an entire life, and still pretty good new artists.
• brentm 5y ago
  I agree with this sentiment and it feels right to me personally but I think to know how much consumption is changing we'd benefit from seeing this broken out by age demographics. If the teens are listening to older music at the same rate as the late 30s/40s then that is certainly a problem for the music industry. Otherwise this might just be driven by the streaming adoption. We couldn't quantify this stuff before when everyone was listening to music on CDs, mp3s etc.
• fastaguy88 5y ago
  Have you listened to the radio? To background music at the mall (ha ha). Hard Rock, Classic Rock, Soft Rock, almost nothing from the last 30 years. It is weird to be 50+ years out of college, and have a choice between talk radio, religion, and college music while driving.
• zwieback 5y ago
  There's another explanation why old music's share of total music is growing: old farts like myself and older are letting go of their CD and vinyl habits and have totally converted to streaming. I won't argue that streaming is totally transforming the music industry but whining about it won't change a thing. Make something people want to hear or shut up.
• kraig911 5y ago
  Honestly I think this is just society en masse is suffering from nostalgia for novelty. Listening to music now is so easy. It used to be you'd have to listen to hours to make a mixtape on the radio. The artists capitalizing on the novelty that's left (live production, remix's, mashups) are the ones that are making money.
• fullshark 5y ago
  Speaking for myself, once i had access to spotify, and basically every bit of pop music that ever came out post WW2, I stopped listening to newish music and started listening to all the artists my favorite artists were ripping off.
• magicalhippo 5y ago
  > The declining TV audience for the Grammy show underscores this shift. Rick Beato had a recent video[1] ranting over the quality of the Grammy entries this year. Now I'm fast approaching the get-off-my-lawn age, but I have to agree. Surely there must be way better songs made in the last year, regardless of category, than what ended up on that list. Personally I find lots of great music being released on places like Bandcamp. I love listening to their Bandcamp weekly[2][3], even though not everything might be up my creek. It's not hard to find great new music. I guess the issue is one has to care to look for it. [1]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fLB2FSLp4Ec https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fLB2FSLp4Ec [2]: https://bandcamp.com/?show=518 https://bandcamp.com/?show=518 [3]: https://bandcamp.com/?show=513 https://bandcamp.com/?show=513
• A4ET8a8uTh0 5y ago
  I know that it is hard to judge art, because, well, beauty is in the eye of the beholder and all that, but is it maybe that new music is not really that good ( https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IJilkMPqvs0 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IJilkMPqvs0 )? I might be biased, because I was raised on 90s music and most stuff today seems so tame by comparison.
  • skinnymuch 5y ago
    I’m curious what’s tame vs the 90s about artists with recently released albums like Yves Tumor, Snail Mail, Mitski, Beach House. I only listed a few with albums during the pandemic. Or say a band like Radiohead who can be considered a 90s band. Their 00 and 10s albums are brilliant as well.
• Crastlon 5y ago
  I'd go one little step further: Recorded music has killed new music. Thanks for the fact that the sieve of time has basically left us with only the best of the best of the past we have become so pretentious regarding new artists. Also the fact that music can be injected 24/7 into our brains everywhere we are with a simple internet connection has totally separated us from the reality of music making. Why go outside and listen to some guy in the street or go at a concert in an abandoned factory if you can just lazily put on a pair of headphones and have hundreds of years worth of genius compositions impeccably recorded ready at your fingertips? Some of you may say that taking inspiration from other artists is a big part of making new music, so the fact that any young lad can access such a catalog must mean he can get creative right away, right? Nope, because before recorded sounds if you took inspiration (and maybe lessons) from a matured and acclaimed musician you would then go back to your town and do your own thing. Few people would have known the original artist and after his death maybe a few sheets of music would be all that remained of him. Having learned from him you would have killed it after his death and your creative endeavor wouldn't get buried just because people have a better record playing at home
  • nkingsy 5y ago
    Commented down thread I agree recorded music is the problem, but it’s more direct. Recorded music is one of the very first automations, and it has slowly automated 99% of professional musicians out of a job.
    • yetanotherloser 5y ago
      My 1910 player piano nods smugly. This trend has taken a long time to, as it were, play out. Many of the things that are a mess about music reproduction copyright today are actually artefacts of that era too...
  • Apocryphon 5y ago
    That is contradicted by how this phenomenon isn't happening to any other mediums- books, movies, shows. Why should music be any different?
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• mensetmanusman 5y ago
  Digitization means winner take all for new music, it also means the value of new music relative to the corpus of all music approaches zero with every passing year.
• drawkbox 5y ago
  Good music will organically get more rotation. Great product experience wins, old or new. Lots of this is just people getting into streaming and able to access anything they want. Ultimately they are making playlists of what they want to hear, not is what is pushed. From the mix tapes days to the streaming days, people will choose what they like when they have the ability to. Music enhances moments in work or play, and nostalgia is a hell of a drug.
• nkingsy 5y ago
  The sound system killed music. Before clubs had ubiquitous sound systems, these were provided by live, working bands everywhere. The number of hours played by working bands has never been lower in history.
  • jjulius 5y ago
    >The number of hours played by working bands has never been lower in history. Are you referring to a decline as a result of the pandemic, or a larger trend that was occurring even before ~spring 2020? If the latter, I would be curious to see any data you have to support that.
    • Apocryphon 5y ago
      Yeah, going on tour and having concert shows are the chief breadwinner for modern musicians, would make no sense for them to stop playing.
    • nkingsy 5y ago
      Total hours paid to be a musician, like as a job compared to doctor or construction worker, across the global population. Per working musician, they may gig more, but there are just vanishingly few now.
    • nkingsy 5y ago
      The 1900 Census counted 92,264 musicians or music teachers in the United States. In 1950, 166,000 people identified as "musicians" or "music teachers." In 2010, there were 182,000 musicians, singers, and related workers in the United States https://www.census.gov/history/www/homepage_archive/2017/april_2017.html https://www.census.gov/history/www/homepage_archive/2017/apr... My guess is that the “music teacher” ratio has gone way way up. I think that’s broken down elsewhere.
• ricc 5y ago
  And I can observe, albeit in my own little bubble, that current pop songs that have that staying power tend to be those that sound "old"; think Dua Lipa, The Weeknd, and Bruno Mars with their 80s sounding hits (although Bruno Mars can sound anywhere from the 70s to early 2000s). I personally like the effects of this trend, specifically the rediscovery of forgotten artists like the band Fanny[0], which arguably can be considered as the first major label all-female rock group. They already faded into obscurity but became popular again when one[1] of their old live recordings became viral. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fanny_(band) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fanny_(band) [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=imZUqkPlUaQ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=imZUqkPlUaQ
• Miner49er 5y ago
  I'm surprised to see this getting upvoted. I find it rather unconvicing. There are many problems with it. > The current list of most downloaded tracks on iTunes is filled with the names of bands from the last century, such as Creedence Clearwater and The Police. Well yeah, younger generations, who are much more likely to listen to newer music, have moved on to streaming, for the most part. > Just consider these facts: the 200 most popular tracks now account for less than 5% of total streams. It's easier then ever for people to find different music to listen to now. Not everyone listens to the same hits anymore. It doesn't mean people are listening to less new music. Their listening is likely just more distributed across more new music. > Just consider the recent reaction when the Grammy Awards were postponed. Perhaps I should say the lack of reaction—because the response was little more than a yawn. As the article showed, people don't watch the Grammy's anymore. This doesn't mean people don't listen to new music anymore. People look more towards things like The Needle Drop[0] or streaming playlists then the Grammy's for music recommendations. Honestly, the Needle Drop's channel growth alone, should be enough to show that new music isn't going anywhere. Overall, the vast majority of the points here can be attributed to the lower barrier to entry of making music, and to the new ease at which people can find the niche they like in new music. [0] https://www.youtube.com/user/theneedledrop https://www.youtube.com/user/theneedledrop
  • yunwal 5y ago
    Yeah this strikes me as someone who is vastly out of touch with how the music market has developed over the past decade or 2. Are we really using "album consumption" as a metric for how much people are listening to music? The increase in investments in old music catalogues strikes true to me, but this is more a reflection of who is willing and able to pay for music, rather than who's consuming it. I think these metrics are all indicative of real trends in music, but "the death of new music" is absolutely not one of them.
  • nfw2 5y ago
    In addition to all these good points, I was surprised a couple other issues weren't discussed at all in the article. - Playing live shows is a huge part of how bands and artists grow their following and get discovered. COVID has had a pretty significant impact on people's ability to do that. - The amount of high-fidelity music in circulation is continually growing. I would say the "modern era" of music (when record labels figured out how produce and distribute decent-quality songs at scale*) didn't start until the late 60's. All that music is still in circulation, and each subsequent decade there is another decade of "modern era" music to compete with. * To clarify this point, I mean there is a huge gap in the sound-quality between the early 60's and the late 60's. Compare the difference in sound quality between the Beatle's first album and the Beatle's last album. Earlier music (like big band stuff) is even worse-quality, and there is much, much less of it
• sgspace 5y ago
  new sound never comes from obvious places. get outside your bubble. I always manage to find a couple new good artists each year who's albums I'll play on repeat for years.
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• wolverine876 5y ago
  My very personal experience: The mass reactionary trend permeates and defines the perspectives of most people I know, even if they reject the political aspect. People have transformed: Creative, open-minded people now reflexively scorn creativity; the power of individuals and freedom (including their own power); learning, knowledge, and original thought. They actively promote despair and depressive outlooks, and I am a non-conformist to say anything that even indirectly challenges that. The first requirement for any idea is not to attract ridicule. As an example of many, when I suggested to a college student that they could do something about a local problem they objected to, they mocked the idea of anything being accomplished by people acting voluntarily (so much for democracy, FOSS, and much else!). All of that is antithetical to innovation and creativity. Artists and innovators don't thrive by avoiding ridicule - in fact, it's commonly experienced that 'first they laugh at you', etc. - or by conforming. They thrive, I think, in environments where challenging, non-conforming ideas are prized and encouraged, and where innovative individuals are prized over powerful ones. I think it may kill SV too.
• bhk 5y ago
  > ... old songs now represent 70% of the US music market. > ... the 200 most popular tracks now account for less than 5% of total streams. I often hear it said that "new music sucks", and suspect it to be true, but now I have empirical evidence to back it up.
• karaterobot 5y ago
  > So the problem isn’t a lack of good new music. It’s an institutional failure to discover and nurture it. I read Gioia's book, and respect his opinions on music. I think he is missing at least one point: This finding makes complete sense if you assume there is nothing fundamentally better about new music than old music, but that there is much more old music, and that it is better curated. There are many more of what we could call "great songs" from the last 100 years than in the last 18 months, not because music was better in the past, but because there was so much more of it. It's also really easy to find this old music now, because everybody knows about it, has written about it, has put it in lists, has included it in soundtracks, and so on. So, if you only cared about quality, and you picked your playlist more or less at random from a collection of "great music", you would expect the vast majority of what you listened to to have come from the past. Which is what we see. That's even setting aside recommendation algorithms, which give you more of what it thinks you want. How many songs from the last few months are there that are similar to the one I said liked? A few, probably. But, compared to the number of songs from the last 50 years, it's probably a small number. So, if you catch me randomly listening to music Spotify thinks I like, it's going to be mostly older music, even if I have no preference regarding the age of what I listen to. The relative prevalence of new music makes sense in the past, when you got all your music from a few sources, and those sources were incentivized to push your toward the latest products. MTV, radio stations, record stores, current bands: all these people want you to listen to new stuff, so as gatekeepers, they're going to push you toward it. Now, those pressures aren't as strong, so we're seeing more like a "fair" distribution of listening behavior. To be clear: I don't think people listen to music at random, but I think recommendation algorithms tend to unlock more of music history as a side effect of needing to keep giving you more things to listen to.
• tasha0663 5y ago
  Despite the algorithms, listeners have more choice now instead of having it dictated to them by radio DJs and record labels. There are also deep, numerous niches to dive into. Music making itself is more accessible now than ever with the software, computing power, and educational resources available. This results in a much different landscape: rich, egalitarian, and diverse, but with less obvious landmarks and different ways to make money.
• tenebrisalietum 5y ago
  In the very late 80's to early 90's is when I feel music as a monolithic cultural force started diverging. You had major veins of music that were able to stay in their own lanes to develop and had the music industry/radio support to do so - rap/hip-hop, pop, and alt-rock. Early 90's is also when various underground styles and genres--house, techno, rave, jungle, industrial, were a thing enough to be easily discoverable even without the Internet. It was also then when 70's music was old enough to be called classic rock. Then: - Rap, techno, and other electronic-based styles of music showed that one-person music groups could be a thing. - Music production technology started a trend of getting cheaper and cheaper as PCs became capable of real-time audio processing and non-band genres proved themselves viable. Combine that with the Internet and it's not surprising we have an oversupply problem. Then you have the Internet's effects on any type of media - almost costless to distribute, streaming and mp3 players enabling people to listen to exactly what they want anywhere they want, and social media's bubble effects. So it's not surprising we have a problem with things attaining cultural significance. It wasn't like this in the past so music from the time when it wasn't has a special nostalgia. It has never been a better time to get new music if you are willing to escape your bubbles and look, though. > So the problem isn’t a lack of good new music. It’s an institutional failure to discover and nurture it. It really looks like the music industry as an institution is failing, and I'm fine with that. It's not needed anymore.
• poulsbohemian 5y ago
  I couldn't tell you the date, though I sort of feel like it was somewhere in the late 90s, music shifted from music to entertainment. Sure there had been boy bands prior, there had been musicians that were more schtick than music, but something palpably changed. Yes, many will call out "autotune" but it feels more like that was a symptom than the disease. My gut feeling is it came down to money - music producers / distributors realized they could separate the working musicians from the pretty face. As far as I'm concerned, this is the basic problem with movies too - the majority of movies are just a vehicle for whatever flavor-of-the-month pretty face they need to splash on a billboard. There's very little artistic about either music or movies, they are just "new" and industry expects us to eat what they feed us. That isn't to say there isn't great music out there, and I'd argue it is the golden age if you are someone who wants to produce anything creative and take it directly to an audience. It just means that there's a breakdown between the "mainstream" and the "good".
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  • redisman 5y ago
    Totally agreed. The amount of interesting and novel mainstream-ish movies in the last decade is probably like 10.
  • mellavora 5y ago
    Or maybe "video killed the radio star"? (1979, a bit before the late 90s). When suddenly it wasn't about the music any more, it was about the video showing the music?
    • LegitShady 5y ago
      but then video died, for the most part
    • poulsbohemian 5y ago
      I think ironically you might be on to something - it wasn't when MTV came onto the scene that music changed, but rather when they stopped being about music...
• emptybottle 5y ago
  I think this is just one component of the general information overload that exists today. There used to be a few genere based radio stations. It was easy to find new music, because there weren't many places to look. Today we have an infinite number of places to find new music. Far more than any person could ever hope to actually listen to. And to complicate that, music creation as a whole has become something that anyone can do with a laptop and distribute into the mainstream platforms (e.g. spotify, etc.) SO, the hours of music that exists keeps increasing exponentially, while the number of hours in a persons lifetime stay the same.
• LordEthano 5y ago
  I don't think this is really a reflection of any sort of quality of new music vs. old music, but rather the structure of how people listen to music. If you listen from a main playlist on Spotify and add 100 songs a year and you listen to it generally on shuffle, you'll progressively listen to less and less new music as a proportion of your total listening. This is despite you being interested in the same amount of new music each year. This seems like a likely culprit particularly considering the 18-month limit this infograph seems to consider as new music. In ye olden times one had to actively choose music to listen to, lending itself to the newer albums, and a relatively weakened aggregate power of one's back catalogue. Spotify and similar services lend themselves to a very passive means of listening however (shuffle and go) that will naturally give more listening to the music which has greater quantity (old music of course).
• annoyingnoob 5y ago
  A lot of that old music was curated a developed by people in industry. A lot of new music is made on computers and anyone can produce it. I think we have a quantity over quality issue. Of course tastes change, when I was younger if you wanted to get radio play you had to be able to sing or create great music - now I hear a lot of loops of break beats and someone with a raspy voice growling out of the radio. Also, consider how compressed music is now, with every sound at the same max volume - I honestly find it hard to listen to. I think there is more nuance to this story that relates to curation and production of music.
• mr_tristan 5y ago
  I'm not convinced the arguments in this article are really the cause. We're in an era where musicians have to build a following by means other than their music. I'm just not sure how an aspiring musician would connect and build a young audience outside of social media. I doubt they could consistently build engagement in a streaming platform alone, it's just too hard. They're just one recording along with decades of other recordings. The social media era hasn't really included musicians very well. I can't really think of a single case where I discovered music via social media. And I'm not even sure how I'd go about finding it. A lot of this is just that the music industry itself is kind of small and insignificant to big tech. And it's not like any of these platforms want to send people to streamers like Spotify or Apple Music.
• indymike 5y ago
  There's a lot going on to kill new music. Competition for distribution is hard because yeah, every year since 1973 (when the more bass, more full range style of recording became the norm), the catalog of songs people love gets bigger. At the same time, there isn't the kind of universal distribution that existed prior to the late 90s where MTV and radio drive the playlist. Now Youtube, iTunes, and Spotify's music's algorithm drive discovery... Throw in all-inclusive subscriptions and I can listen to my favorites all the time... and not have to turn on the radio ever and hear anything new. So what do you do? One, pull a Weezer and release a lot of covers of favorites. Remake Toto's Africa... etc... Do this, you give up the composer's royalty but you sneak in the playlists. The other solution is to focus on an increasingly small market for new music which seems to be less and less appealing to the larger market or genres, but appeals more and more to people who like "new music". A lot of people are pointing out that a lot of new music is autotune or genre bending stuff that is kind of hard to love. Music has always been full of stuff made to ride a trend, or enabled by new instruments or new tech. It's the search spam of music. It catches on for a minute. Some of it sticks and becomes part of "the catalog".
  • redisman 5y ago
    There are also more competition for what used to be the youth mindshare. Now it’s YouTube, vidya games, social media like TikTok that are all audiovisual experiences targeted at being interesting to the youths. When I was a kid I would have to listen to the radio or watch MTV to be reached by youth culture.
• _vertigo 5y ago
  This comment section has some major boomer energy. Anyway, my take on this is different from the author's. He cites the following as (anec)data: 1) According to MRC Data, old songs now represent 70% of the market share 2) The 200 most popular tracks now account for less than 5% of total streams. 3) The current list of most downloaded tracks on iTunes includes CCR and The Police etc. Not going to touch 1), because I don't feel like going hunting for that data. But a single data point is useless. Let's see the trend, please. 2) has nothing to do with old versus new. The average music consumer today has so many music discovery avenues open to them on a level that is completely unprecedented. Should we really be surprised that people are listening less and less to the top 200 songs when the sheer catalog of music accessible to (and actually discoverable by) them has grown by orders of magnitude in the last 10 years? This data point tells us nothing about old versus new, because there's so much new music that is never going to hit top 200 that people can find and easily listen to now. 3) I mean, really, are you surprised? You're looking at music people bought on iTunes. _Of course_ that would biased towards people old enough to actually pay money for tracks. This is equivalent to trying to figure out the most popular porn categories by looking at DVD rental data, ignoring the fact that 99.99% of porn consumption has moved to online streaming platforms..
• ilamont 5y ago
  The declining TV audience for the Grammy show underscores this shift. The declining TV audience is not just a Grammy issue, it's affecting all kinds of live awards shows, including the Oscars, as well as broadcast/cable television in general which has been hammered by shifting audience preferences and viewing habits (https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2021/03/17/cable-and-satellite-tv-use-has-dropped-dramatically-in-the-u-s-since-2015/ https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2021/03/17/cable-and-s...). The author should take a look at the social media/YouTube followings many new artists have, and not just the superstars. That's where the engagement is taking place.
• Spivak 5y ago
  I'm really sad to see this thread just shitting on new music because you all are nuts. We are legit in a god damn golden age of music right now. There is so much amazing new music dropping constantly I can't even keep up. It's never been easier to put music out into the universe, and incredible small bands that never made it out of their local venues waiting for a record label recruiter are able to find their audience on Bandcamp, Soundcloud, YT, TikTok, and Spotify. The future of music is bright folks.
• crazcarl 5y ago
  I think the 70s and 80s pop hits have had staying power because those songs were the pop music of the people with the power to choose the content of mass media as media became more massive in the 90s and 2000s (further television/radio station standardization and the internet).
• dfxm12 5y ago
  The reasons are complex—more than just the appeal of old tunes Does the author explore the reasons at all? Should we just guess? One jumping out at me is the share, population and disposable income-wise of boomers, who might just be buying music that was popular when they were growing up. Are people rebuying their current collection of old tracks in new formats? Does the current lack of a mono-culture around music mean that new music can't get the same traction old music had enjoyed? Do fans of new music spend less time/money enjoying music compared to other things that fans of older music don't like, like twitch subs, games, whatever?
  • yetanotherloser 5y ago
    I think you hit on something I missed, and much of this thread missed: there is one weird generation that was sold the daft idea of rebuying its music as format shifts - the 45, the LP, the cassette for the car, the CD remaster... - who also have economic advantage and so the commercial stats just don't reflect what lots of people enjoy because the metrics measure that generation's interest and vice versa. Thanks. that was useful. Combine that with new or rescued recordings meaning a greater range of _really old_ music is available to people prone to falling down musical-history rabbit-holes... and you really do have a recipe for it becoming hard to spot the evolution of music happening vs. the surrounding (pardon me) "noise". Yet it is still happening...
• yeetaccount4 5y ago
  I’ve heard about how music is written by labels these days. They get a bunch of writers in a hotel for a few days and brainstorm song themes and lines, then mix and match what works. Writers will get paid for a couple of words. It’s no wonder the songs these days say nothing, to anyone, unless you’re a brain dead teenager or emotionally stunted adult. The tastes of which have driven the industry for decades now. I just want something that’s relevant.
• wolverine876 5y ago
  There's a great 2004 documentary called Kill Yer Idols that explains it all. It follows the bands that inherited the mantle of seminal New York bands such as Sonic Youth. For the most part it's what you expect, with some great historical cuts, interviews, the new bands reflecting on and praising their predecessors, etc. *SPOILER* But it has a surprise ending. Suddenly there's a different tone from the old bands. They disparage the newcomers: The older bands completely rejected what their predecessors did; they destroyed it. The new bands that copy their music completely miss the point; what they are doing is antithetical to the art. And I agree: We still have people playing rock'n'roll and hip-hop generations later. Are you kidding me? How shameful! How boring! Heck, someone play big band at least. Rock and hip-hop were revolutionary artforms; they didn't try to sound like Frank Sinatra or (for hip-hop) the Beatles - in fact, they tried to sound completely different, to demonstrate their rejection of the prior generation, to throw it in everyone's faces. Until I hear someone completely reject rock and hip-hop, burn them down to ashes (artistically), and piss me off, it's all bullsh-t. (And I mean it; I haven't listed to this crap in years.)
  • listenallyall 5y ago
    > Until I hear someone completely reject rock and hip-hop Isn't that electronic music? No recognizable instruments, often no lyrics or song structure.
    • BeFlatXIII 5y ago
      > no song structure Just because there are no lyrics and it is no longer technically a song does not mean that the music has no structure. Saying so is needlessly pedantic.
      • TomSwirly 5y ago
        "Song structure" has a very specific meaning in music that has nothing to do with lyrics or lack thereof. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Song_structure https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Song_structure
    • 5y ago
• spicymaki 5y ago
  > So the problem isn’t a lack of good new music. It’s an institutional failure to discover and nurture it. These days it seems investors are focused on rent seeking, they are not looking to build. Why nurture new talent when you can sell an NFT of some classic music cover art. Please don't blame the young artists, they are doing what they need to do to survive in this situation, we should blame our own greed.
• rapht 5y ago
  This debate about 'new' vs 'old' music can be approached through many angles, just a few on the top on my mind: * Extrisic quality: does it sound "better" as a production, autotune, analog vs digital recording and play-back means, etc. -- I personnaly have mixed feelings about this one, as autotune and programmable drums are probably the worst thing that happened to contemporary music by taking away their human components (but that's mostly an unsubtantiated opinion), and on the other hand, so much progress in the recording and play-back hardware/software that reduce the gap between live and recorded performances * Intrisic quality: is the music "better" in an absolute sense, covering mostly philosophical questions such as the nature of musical beauty, its objectiveness or subjectiveness, the existence of music as abstract compositions, etc. -- I'm firmly of the opinion that there are such things as 'beautiful musical compositions' and 'well-written music', and though I'm barely able to describe what that means in words, I can certainly say that I have heard less and less such pieces in mainstream music as years have passed, and that in non-mainstream music, most attempts to create original things end up in pieces that may be well thought but rarely in 'beautiful musical compositions'. * Discovery bias: a topic that is well covered by the OP * Acquired taste: despite everyone claiming that they look for something new and exciting and original, tastes do become ingrained with age, and I believe this is all the more true with music given the kind of physical feelings that it generates, which can sometimes be very powerful -- the 'feedback loop' that also ends up in the discovery bias above is probably reinforced by the fact that our tastes in music vary little after a certain age, and that we rarely seek something that is 'that much' different from what we like.
• 4ec0755f5522 5y ago
  This is such an interesting problem. I do think that new music that is competing with old music has an advantage in its newness, which humans tend to prefer. But it needs to be as excellent as the music it is competing with. If you as a musician are not writing music as compelling or interesting as, say Sgt Pepper, you are doing it wrong. You need to bring your AAA game if you are going to compete with the GOATs, yeah? That said, the absolutely killer bit of this article is: I learned the danger of excessive caution long ago, when I consulted to huge Fortune 500 companies. The single biggest problem I encountered—shared by virtually every large company I analyzed—was investing too much of their time and money into defending old ways of doing business, rather than building new ones. [...] But senior management hated hearing this, and always insisted that defending the old business units was their safest bet. After I encountered this embedded mindset again and again and saw its consequences, I reached the painful conclusion that the safest path is often the most dangerous. If you pursue a strategy—whether in business or your personal life—that avoids all risk, you might flourish in the short run, but you flounder over the long term. This is sage advice. For your career, for your business, whatever. I'd spin it as this: When an industry is on a downswing, it becomes cluttered. Market demand is falling so existing players are fighting for share of a shrinking market. For new entrants, there's no opportunity. So for example if you are trying to get a job in this industry, you won't find openings. If it's a market you're trying to enter as a business, you won't find demand/customers. Whereas in a growing market the opposite is true. Therefore we can say it is a truism that any opportunity is more likely than not to be a good one, because opportunities only exist in an upswing, and are pushed out in a downswing. There's more to it, of course. Bubbles, for example. But the fact remains: opportunities signal a rising market and in general you should seek them out as the payoff, over time, is likely to be worth it.
  • wolverine876 5y ago
    > You need to bring your AAA game if you are going to compete with the GOATs, yeah? The Beatles and Grand Master Flash didn't bother to compete with Duke Ellington or Bach.
    • BeFlatXIII 5y ago
• efitz 5y ago
  So there is a lot of cool music being produced today; much of it is not mass market/chart topping/etc and so it doesn’t just get dumped in one’s lap like pop music did in the era of radio. That said, a lot of music today is over produced- levels set too high, etc. Also, a lot of pop and r&b music today doesn’t seem very creative to me- pounding bass line, trivially simple melody, chanted, simple, explicit lyrics, and then depend on production to try to make it interesting. This obviously appeals to a lot of people but maybe not so much to others. Mass market music is intentionally formulaic; search the web for “Doctor Hook”. On the other hand, there are some super creative things out there. I like genre-bending remixes personally like Pentatonix’ cover of Fleet Foxes’ “White Winter Hymnal”, or Steven Seagulls cover of “Thunderstruck”. Point is, that the stuff that will fall in your lap is mass market and not as creative IMO as pop was in earlier generations. However there’s great stuff out there; you just have to look for it. Also the tools to find music you might like are better than ever, eg you can hum or sing into Shazam or Siri a snippet of a song you liked, online you have lyric searches. And all the music services have ML to find songs you might like based on songs you like.
• teilo 5y ago
  Cry me a f*cking river. Their definition of "new music" is to blame. Most of this "new music" is cookie-cutter junk that is artificial, derivative, simplistic, on-the-grid, auto-tuned, four-chord (or less) drivel. The labels intentionally manipulate the "top 200 tracks" so that this is nearly the only thing that makes it to the charts. The young audience has had enough of it. They have streaming. They don't listen to the "top 200" anymore. Their tastes have broadened not only into new music which is not being tracked by the "top 200" but they are mining the music of older eras which is, by almost any measure, superior. It's not auto-tuned. It has a dynamic tempo because it's not beat-matched in a DAW. It often has complex chord progressions and key changes. This is also true of a lot of the "new music" the charts don't track. And this is why the Grammys are also irrelevant. No one cares. We don't listen to that crap.
  • Apocryphon 5y ago
    The Grammys didn't even recognize After Hours smdh
  • nfw2 5y ago
    I love classic rock, but it's hard to argue that it is musically more complex than modern pop. Also if musical complexity was the same as merit then we would all just be listening to jazz and classical
    • teilo 5y ago
      Complexity is but one component. I enjoy a lot of music that uses simple chord progressions. But when you have simplistic music, with artificial vocals, and every human elements digitally normalized out, with uninspiring melodies, it's just empty and tedious. I feel like I'm being spoon-fed by mommy and daddy.
      • nfw2 5y ago
        For what it's worth, I think the current wave of modern pop is much more interesting-sounding than 80's hair metal or the pop from the earlier 2000's that was autotuned ad nauseum. For example, look at the current top of the Billboard Hot 100. 1.) Easy On Me - Adele. Adele's music is always far from empty. She is a true artist. 2.) Stay - Kid Laroi. This may not be your type of music and there are certainly a lot vocal effect here, but there's a lot going on here rhythmically and melodically. The chord structure is also pretty unusual. 3.) We Don't Talk About Bruno - Lin-Manuel Miranda. LMM is a genius, but it's a Disney song, so let's skip this one. 4.) Glass Animals - A rare indie hit to make it to make it to the top, this one is arguable the "simplest" song on this list. It still feels like it has character and that the artist has put their stamp on it. 5.) Shivers - Ed Sheeran. If Sheeran's music feels tedious now, it might just be because his music has been at the top of the charts virtually non-stop for more than a decade. Still it's hard to deny his talent or argue that his songs are simple musical drivel. It's fair to say that MOST of what is produced is derivative drivel, but I would say that's probably true of pretty much any era. There were tedious grunge artists, tedious metal artists, tedius disco artists, tedious arena rock artists, etc.
• teilo 5y ago
  A much better measure: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_most-streamed_songs_on_Spotify https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_most-streamed_songs_on...
• analog31 5y ago
  There's no Moore's Law for music. Why should new music displace old? Baroque music is still great. So is Bebop. I have a thought, which is that modern music production and distribution have blurred the lines between "recorded" and "live" music. I'm a musician. The only way to hear my band is to attend one of our concerts. There's no reason for us to even attempt to commercialize our music. It doesn't need to have any lasting or widespread appeal. If we get an audience of 100 people, that's huge for us. Because of the novelty of our performances (never the same mistake twice), we don't have to be perfect in order to interest the audience. Nothing we play is "produced." Prior to online music distribution, there was a sharp distinction between live and recorded music. If you wanted to reach beyond those 100 people, it cost an arm and a leg to get your music into commercial distribution, so it had to be targeted to a mass audience, or at least a big enough audience of enthusiasts to cover your costs. There was an economic reason to be good in the sense of having that widespread and lasting value. Today, it costs no more to stream your music than to play it live. Maybe less. So it may just be that the financial incentives weigh towards creating throw-away recordings that last long enough to replace them with the next one. Just like with live music, your job isn't so much "the performance of a lifetime," as it is, "get them to come back next time." Today, if you move outside of mass commercial music, there is plenty of great new music just like there always was. That's because, while the economics of popular music have changed, the economics of great new music really haven't. Disclaimer: When I'm not playing jazz, I'm accompanying fiddlers and folk musicians. I've opted out of the popular music scene.
• Kim_Bruning 5y ago
  No one has put forward the hypothesis that this might be caused by ever-lengthening copyright terms (till recently). I mean: surely they must have some effect. The old songs still have a (known) value, while new songs are still an unknown quantity. Since the copyright on the old songs lasts such a long time, there is less of an incentive to invest in new songs.
• karmakaze 5y ago
  I love old music. I'm old so it's just music from my life. At the same time I spend most of my listening time trying to find new good music. This is the problem. It exists but there isn't a good way to discover it. Old music has higher quality by natural selection. Anything that didn't cut it gets left behind and goes unplayed. New music is a firehose and it takes effort to sift through it all.
• iainctduncan 5y ago
  Lots of the usual hacker news comments by people who have not bothered to check the authors bona fides, sigh It is extremely unlikely that anyone reading here knows as much about this stuff as Ted Gioia. He's an award winning music historian, journalist, author, and performer. I personally have five of his excellent books. He knows of what he speaks. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ted_Gioia https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ted_Gioia
• ajkdhcb2 5y ago
  Personally I became alienated from the music industry and don't know how to find new music. I care about privacy, so I opted out from having a youtube/instagram/facebook account. I never used streaming because I listen to albums and want to own my music. The result is that I don't even get notified when my favourite musicians recommend a band or even release a new album. Where is the product for me? I am not in any of their data and just sit here listening to an offline library I built more than 10 years ago, desperate but struggling to find new stuff
  • wruza 5y ago
    so I opted out from having a youtube/instagram/facebook account Oh, you didn't lose much. My playlists are decimated monthly by "video deleted/unavailable" and "not showing 3 unlisted video" or something along the lines. And there is no way to know which video that was. I don't even care to add music to playlists anymore, I just search for it. Also, algorithms stopped delivering new stuff long ago. The right column is full of tricking you into watching some promoted bs unrelated to the video.
    • tribaal 5y ago
      I listen to a lot of "new music" in my particular genres of preference, and that's mostly thanks to Spotify's algorithmic "Albums you might like" (on top of the usual music festivals and friends hot tips, of course) Am I somehow in the minority of people happy with their stuff? I never go to youtube for music. Should I?
      • coremoff 5y ago
        I have a subscription to YtM; I think it's great (though I think the user interface isn't as good as GpM was). Playing a radio based on a track I like is very good for discovering new music and bands - it has consistently given me an essentially endless stream of music that is different, but similar, to the chosen track; my subscriptions have increased dramatically in the last couple of years based on that. Anecodtally, YtM seems to be better for EDM these days; my friends, who are mostly spotify, complain that they're not presented with the same quality and variety of music as I am via YtM. (EDM is just a portion of my tastes, but it's where I have noted a difference in perception between YtM and Spotify). Sounds like Spotify works for you; if you're finding that "albums you might like" is giving you sufficient good new picks, then why change. If you feel that it's not giving you enough, it might be worth trying YtM (I've been using it for years, and don't know how much that impacts its ability to offer me new music I like, so obviously YMMV).
• dusted 5y ago
  Turning on the radio does not convince me that this is true. But to be cynical, there's likely already enough music in existence today that you could spend your entire life quite fulfilled by it. So maybe it's a slight waste of resources to keep producing it (except for the pleasure of making it).
• ezconnect 5y ago
  There are more options today because the music making tools are accessible to almost everyone and there are more new music now than a decade ago. I think his data sample is just limited to make such a titled article.
• AtlasBarfed 5y ago
  A couple big hits seems to make artists really famous and sufficiently rich that they never seem to progress past the album/set of music that made them "big". It's not worth the hard work of touring/recording/creation. Either that, or interconnectedness is suppressing the creation/germination that comes from isolation. It's all just a big cacophony of grey now. A band cranking out four or five great albums/sets of music seems dead. Music tools, processing, remixing, sampling, it's all way more accessible than it used to be. And yet creativity of popular music is far behind, say, the 1980s and 1990s. And publishing/serving tail audiences. That should be producing crossover / surfacing hits, but it is definitely not. But it also could be the reassertion of dominance of the popular channels of music by the big boys. Also, since the 1970s music, it doesn't sound alien to new kids. Elvis sounds old. The 60s is weird and primitive. But Led Zeppelin? Still just awesome. So large catalogs of great stuff, back when better germination and career dedication/craft was followed, makes for a lot of base competition for new music. But it goes in cycles, we'll see.
• fallingfrog 5y ago
  The record industry is failing to seek out new music. But people who love music will find it. They will still play shows in basements that will go unnoticed by the suits above. Music is just going back underground. And, you know, if you want to find it, you can absolutely find new music on any streaming platform. I'm listening to a track right now called "There's a woman at the station" by a band I've never heard of called 20 point buck, and it's amazing.
• fallingfrog 5y ago
  Oh by the way, if you want to know if you're getting old, watch the music video for stupid horse by 100 gecs and tell me what you think..
• WalterBright 5y ago
  Nah. Autotune is killing music. Has anyone else noticed that modern singers can't sing? They have no tone. Autotuning is obvious, along with various electronic manipulations to "sweeten" the tone for singers with mediocre voices. Then listen to an album from the 70's by a great singer, like Karen Carpenter. What a difference!
  • jaspa99 5y ago
    I see autotune more like an instrument that gives the ability to create new sounds.
    • WalterBright 5y ago
      Sure. But it can be overused, and currently it is applied everywhere. Whatever happened to singers with good tone, like Grace Slick and Madonna? You can hear autotune taking away the ability of the singer to play with the sound. It isn't just autotune. It's the electronic modification done, like the color "adjustments" done in modern movies that turn every movie into blue and orange tones.
  • dehrmann 5y ago
    I buy the argument that tracks are often overproduced and lack any rawness, edge, or soul, but there are absolutely popular artists that can sing. Not all of them, but enough of them.
    • WalterBright 5y ago
      Ok, where is today's Whitney Houston? Man, what a voice! Ditto for David Cassidy. I even saw a documentary on autotune where a music executive remarked that they don't look for great singers anymore, because the sound engineers can "fix" it. They look for pretty people. Like the Monkees. I shudder to think what a modern sound engineer would do to "fix" Robert Plant's totally unique voice.
      • deng 5y ago
• dehrmann 5y ago
  > Never before in history have new tracks attained hit status while generating so little cultural impact. I have this theory that by democratizing music through on-demand services, it's harder for music to hit a critical mass where enough people know the song to sing along at a piano bar a decade later. It's great that smaller artists get more attention, but I miss having the cultural touchstone.
  • DocTomoe 5y ago
    I think that started earlier when popular music productions was taken away from musicians, who - maybe because of bigger skills - experimented and found new ways to express themselves, and put in the hands of people who were just able to whip up a quasihit song with the clicks of a few mousebuttons - leading to somewhat popular, but ultimately forgettable songs. Everyone still knows music from the 1970s, but noone in my social bubble could tell you what the big hit of 2017 was...
• denton-scratch 5y ago
  There's more old music than new music. I mean, if you just focus on "pop" (say, 1950 onwards), there's 70 times as much stuff that's old as there is from the last year. Hell, all through the festive season, any shop I walked into was playing tunes sung by Bing Crosby.
• bitwize 5y ago
  New music is self-owning leading people to seek out the old stuff to hear something decent.
• mellavora 5y ago
  Obviously some people here are missing the bluegrass revival. for just one of many examples, may I present Dark Side of the Moonshine by Poor Man's Whisky? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qF_nYQE1K3I&ab_channel=PoorMan%27sWhiskey https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qF_nYQE1K3I&ab_channel=PoorM... or Time/Breath by Greensky Bluegrass? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Uw1bJrFdCjY https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Uw1bJrFdCjY New music is reviving old music. Makes the original Floyd recordings sound slow, ponderous, pretentious, and boring, even to the ears of this old fan.
  • sgaduuw 5y ago
    Holy cow that Time cover is a great rendition of one of my favorite songs. Thank you for sharing!
  • TomSwirly 5y ago
    A bluegrass "revival" is by definition not new music.
• fithisux 5y ago
  Hi-NRG, Eurobeat and Garage House are not produced anymore.
• asiachick 5y ago
  random aside: I don't know what if anything changed but .... if I put on 94.9 SF , they've literally been playing many of the same songs for 8 months now. I can turn it on any day since last May and 30-40% of the playlist hasn't changed. from June to October about 85% stayed the same. And the songs would repeat every 2-3 hours. I don't remember radio having songs that played that many months
• deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
• prohobo 5y ago
  My theory about "old" music: the 60's were essentially the golden age of Western culture, with brand new technology (synths, the electric guitar), and the sheer amount of absolutely new never heard before sounds coming out was insane. The wave kept going for a few decades, and now we're in a place where music is over-commercialized, perfectly produced, and there doesn't seem to be many new places to go with it. There's a lot of good new music nowadays, but you have to look for it, and it doesn't have the same impact as, for example, hearing White Rabbit for the first time. It's nearly all acquired taste. So, I think the problem here is that we lack impactful music because of a decaying culture, over-commercialization of the industry, and a lack of technical innovation. What can we do about it? That's the same question everyone is asking about nearly everything else these days.
  • zwkrt 5y ago
    I’m an amateur musician (29years old, for reference). I can play the piano and the guitar and sing, but ever since I was a child my most innate musical talent was whistling. Something I have noticed about the old radio hits from the 50s-70s is how fun many of them are to whistle. Most contemporary pop, rock, r&b, country can’t hold a candle to the popular songwriters of that era in terms of whistle-ability. What I take away is that the popular songwriting style in that time was very “melody-forward” like in the days of tin-pan alley. Today I can tell that many songs are written in a more “mood-forward” way, and artists are more interested in exploring tambre than to make an absolute ear-worm of a melody. The result IMO is that those mid-century songs will have a lot more staying power.
    • tcbawo 5y ago
      Given the sheer amount of copyrighted music these days, I wonder whether some of the lack of whistle-ability and pure melody might be due to sheer number of melody permutations already taken by previously written music. Given common chord progressions and music scales, it's probably likely that any catchy song your write bears some resemblance to an existing song with a protective copyright holder. There are many examples of lawsuits claiming retroactive ownership of new music.
  • 5y ago
• ZoomZoomZoom 5y ago
  > I hear from hundreds of publicists, record labels, band managers, and other professionals who want to hype the newest new thing—for the simple reason that their livelihoods depend on it. Well, maybe the reason should be the love for music as an art form? > So the problem isn’t a lack of good new music. It’s an institutional failure to discover and nurture it. This is absolutely true. Most of the stuff that's pushed to the top is a bunch of lifeless, riskless, perfect crap. Moreover, everyone involved knows it: musicians playing the parts (if there are any), producers, sound engineers, label representatives, artists and, sometimes, listeners. I agree with the main idea of the article: music is treated is an asset and it does no good.
• periheli0n 5y ago
  Perhaps, Pop/Rock as a genre has peaked. Most of the "song space" might already be explored. In the past, new music has often been inspired by new instruments (e.g. the electric guitar, synthesizers). Strictly speaking, that often was not even new music, but a new sound. Today we can create all sorts of sound digitally, including the "original" sound from the 60s, 70s, 80s. New music productions often adapt a sound from a soecific era. The linked post brings up one important point about old music: it's much lower risk to market than new productions. You know already that the songs work, and you can be reasonably certain about intellectual rights ownership when you bought the catalog. It's the same with movies by the way: Most successful movies these days are sequels or remakes. Seems that conservative mindsets prevail in the mainstream of art. And THAT is not new, either :D
• matthewhammond 5y ago
  Streaming is really just another payday for the winners of the popular music boom of the 60s, and more particularly the IP holders. They got to have their cake with the original vinyl sales, eat it again in the CD era and now they can rent it out permanently via streaming. And they're not interested in sharing any of that out with emerging musicians. In the past, there was enough of a barrier to just getting music onto disc and out on the airwaves that labels would have to invest in 100 acts just to have one breakthrough. So they'd need to take some of the winnings from their biggest selling artists and reinvest them in new acts to stay in the game. But now they can get income from streaming rather than sales - there's much less incentive to keep new records and artists coming through. If anything it makes more sense for them to just sit on their back catalogue and squash anything new. So nobody's going to invest the comparatively large amounts needed to get unknown bands into good studios to record albums any more, let alone fund them through the difficult second and third albums often necessary to get traction. Emerging musicians can only do what they can at minimal cost - hence much more of a move towards electronic and bedroom production. That can have great output now due to tech advances in home recording, but it's not gonna be the same as putting musicians in fully kitted studio. (And things like a shift to high-loudness, low dynamic range are another side effect of the ways that music is distributed and consumed, plus advances in what's possible with digital recording and limiting). The article kinda touches on this stuff but what it doesn't really seem to acknowledge is this is just what's good for the industry. Big labels are perfectly happy picking the winners that blow up on Youtube - it just saves all their development costs. The whole thing just works for them - their interests aren't in having a diverse range of music produced, allowing for a living for artists that aren't their big cash cows, preserving particular genres or recording styles etc.
• throw_m239339 5y ago
  "new music" is too derivative of old music. I'm into EDM. There is a techno revival right now. The problem is that new techno tracks sound exactly the same way as techno track 20/30 years ago. Why should I even bother listening to these new tracks at first place when they just copy what was done before? Before, big labels could rely on ignorance to sell something old as "fresh". It doesn't work today when it's really easy to distribute and share old music. EDM is in need for innovation, yet rely heavily on nostalgia. It's not going to help younger artists if they don't invent something of their own.
• sproketboy 5y ago
• julbook 5y ago
  One of the best leads for discovering songs is made in TikTok. The magic happens when your music starts getting more traction by being viral.
• oversocialized 5y ago
  Two people have created most of the pop songs for the last 20 years. That is the problem, not old music.
• hyperman1 5y ago
  My five year old is some kind of evidence here. I let him listen to all kinds of music while showering, and he likes most the stuff from 70-80-90. Not children music either. He loves hard rock or metal. He recently sang along to queen, running around on the playground singing Beelzebub has a devil put aside for him, which is a bit worrying even if he doesn't understand much English. Things like Arsenal, R.E.M. and K's Choice are also welcome. But he doesn't care at all about more modern stuff, even if there is more of it on the radio. It just bores him. We sometimes let him choose from a playlist, and he always ends up in different genres from the same periods.