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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 in

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
      If one's musical tastes are easily satisfied, there wouldn't be discovery be happening regardless of what age one lived in. With streaming, you can easily seek out new things, more easily than ever.
- EugeneOZ 5y ago
  It's not so easy to find them - they all are invisible in the huge crowd of hip-hop records.
  - ironman1478 5y ago
    Yeah, but I don't think good new music has ever been easy to find? I think things like spotify's "discover weekly" has made it a lot easier than it used to be though.
    - EugeneOZ 5y ago
      “discover weekly” will consist of rap by 90%, even if I never “liked” any rap song. “If the majority of people love it, you should too - swallow”.
      - sjostrom7 5y ago
        It certainly doesn't for me. Once you listen to things (presumably things you like), it updates your suggestions and offers a lot of more fine-tuned stations and mixes.
  - Apocryphon 5y ago
    The internet has made it easier than ever to find them. There is literally more discoverability in music than in all of human history.
    - EugeneOZ 5y ago
      Really? How do you see it? For example, I need some stream of new jazz/electro-swing music - what should I do? Just entering it into the search engine and manually checking every given result (which will not be songs, but some articles and playlists) will not work.
      - Apocryphon 5y ago
        I use Last.fm which tags artists to similar ones, which is admittedly an older platform, but I also use Bandcamp, Spotify, and YouTube. It's trivial, I just search for bands that sound like whatever I like and sample their tracks. You don't even need music platforms to do this, Wikipedia has copious lists of musical groups for any given genre, or just the influences or affiliated acts of artists I already like. Beyond that, there's always been an ecosystem of music blogs and music journalism web sites since the early '00s, some still continuing today, and whenever they talk about bands they tend to refer to other ones. You really just need a music platform to sample referenced acts, which YouTube is the universal one. It's really not that difficult.
- tablespoon 5y ago
  >> 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. > 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. Sure, but that assertion doesn't actually help with finding those musicians. It could both be true that 1) great music is being produced AND 2) the horizons of the commercial/mainstream music industry have contracted, making those musicians harder for most people to discover. Sort of like how the movie industry is focusing more and more on easily exported comic book blockbusters, at the expense of middle-budget dramas and comedies. Then there's also the fact that the streaming revolution has made crap easier to find, and there's a lot more crap than good stuff, which hurts discoverability. As an example: I've been looking for kids music on Spotify recently, and it's a sea of low-effort auto-tuned garbage from people following the economics of spam. It's pretty much impossible to find a good version of a classic song unless you already know the artist.
  - ironman1478 5y ago
    Spotify's discover weekly has worked remarkably well for me! I've been able to find tons of new music (and old to be fair) that fits within my musical tastes. Combining that with a bit of effort on my part to google for new music and I've been able to find tons of good stuff.
gregoryl 5y ago
I assume you mean music produced for mass consumption? There is loads of choice, and new, creative output if you look for it.
- cassianoleal 5y ago
  Of course. We're talking about volumes of streaming. Surely most of it is mass-consumption stuff, isn't it? Niches barely register when it comes down to the big players making a profit.
  - gregoryl 5y ago
    That's fair, I don't think I was entirely charitable with how I read your initial comment :) On the thread of mass-consumption stuff, I think we all underestimate the effect of "mass" becoming a significant portion of the available market - when you measure your success against the top 100 earners in a space like that, it almost boils down to skinner's box style output.
silisili 5y ago
Yeah, it's an old trope that one generation hates the next's music. I was sure I would be more open minded. But I hear things like most of the past few years popular music, and I'm certain kids are just liking it because it annoys adults. It sounds like...purposefully dissonant noise. Maybe we're just getting old...
- skinnymuch 5y ago
  This does seem like every one falling into the trope. I didn’t listen to music as a sheltered kid. Once I began listening to music in my late teens, I started with Velvet Underground and Joy Division. From there it was all modern music. Like say “indie music” of the times of the 00s was abundant for me. I’m almost 20 years into listening to music now and nothing has changed for me. I still don’t like most of the the top charting songs, but I didn’t like them 15 years ago either. I might actually like popular music more now as I used to not like most of it. While now I enjoy artists like Lil Uzi Vert and especially Playboi Carti. Similarly, Star Wars films appear to be completely mediocre films. I didn’t watch them [properly] until I was older. Some semblance of me not being pushed into the normal popular stuff as an easily influenced young person makes it very easy for me not to yearn for older stuff being better. I just checked the billboard top 100. It appears to mostly be your basic standard pop culture popular music. It seems like what would be at the top decades ago too if zooming out and seeing things as a whole.
mattkevan 5y ago
90% of everything is rubbish. Most old music was rubbish too - it’s just been rightfully forgotten and we’ve only kept the good stuff. Half an hour digging on a site like Bandcamp will prove there’s a vast amount of good new music, too much to comprehend. It only feels like there’s less good music because there’s vastly more music of all quality levels available now. You’ve just got to steer away from the mainstream and look for it.
jmcgough 5y ago
There's an overwhelming amount of good music coming out right now, you just need to put in the effort to explore it. I got deep into niche online electronic artists over the pandemic and there's just so much creativity from young kids publishing stuff on soundcloud with only a few thousand listens.
- cassianoleal 5y ago
  Yep, there's a lot of great new stuff out there! Perhaps with "new music" (as referred in the article) dying and opening up a vacuum, these great new niche artists will find public. One can hope!
- pbalau 5y ago
  When I was younger, my parents got me a dual cassette/radio thing. Every Saturday, there was a show on a Romanian Radio 3, called Top 100. They would play 100 songs, in reverse order, from about 10pm all the way to early hours. I spent many Saturday evenings changing tapes to record as much as possible so I can listen to later. And get really happy when Prodigy was on. Later, i got a PC and a friend of mine was letting me his CDs with mp3s so I can pick songs. I did not have lots of space and he was gone for 6 months at a time to uni, getting new stuff was quite an event and all of it was prefiltered by his taste. Fwd to today, i can listen to my metal or to Two Steps From Hell and get recommended Mecina by an algorithm. I can listen to some old Romanian songs, or some crap i would never understand. I can listen to those nice lads that drink in the same pub as I do or to these other guys from Mongolia. And the best part is that all of this takes 1 click and if I don't like what is currently playing, i can skip because there are so many other options. The music lover in me is very very happy.
  - jmcgough 5y ago
    Spotify has exposed me to some really good bands or musicals that I love now - it even put on an anime OST that got me hooked on the show. It's almost creepy how well it's figured me out, but it certainly lets me enjoy new music without having it be a part-time job to discover it.
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
tenebrisalietum 5y ago
> New music, with a few notable exceptions is ultra-produced cheap beats with overly simplified harmonies and horrible lyrics. This can be said to apply to cheesy rock-pop 60's hits - electronics weren't involved but same difference.

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
    If one's musical tastes are easily satisfied, there wouldn't be discovery be happening regardless of what age one lived in. With streaming, you can easily seek out new things, more easily than ever.
EugeneOZ 5y ago
It's not so easy to find them - they all are invisible in the huge crowd of hip-hop records.
- ironman1478 5y ago
  Yeah, but I don't think good new music has ever been easy to find? I think things like spotify's "discover weekly" has made it a lot easier than it used to be though.
  - EugeneOZ 5y ago
    “discover weekly” will consist of rap by 90%, even if I never “liked” any rap song. “If the majority of people love it, you should too - swallow”.
    - sjostrom7 5y ago
      It certainly doesn't for me. Once you listen to things (presumably things you like), it updates your suggestions and offers a lot of more fine-tuned stations and mixes.
- Apocryphon 5y ago
  The internet has made it easier than ever to find them. There is literally more discoverability in music than in all of human history.
  - EugeneOZ 5y ago
    Really? How do you see it? For example, I need some stream of new jazz/electro-swing music - what should I do? Just entering it into the search engine and manually checking every given result (which will not be songs, but some articles and playlists) will not work.
    - Apocryphon 5y ago
      I use Last.fm which tags artists to similar ones, which is admittedly an older platform, but I also use Bandcamp, Spotify, and YouTube. It's trivial, I just search for bands that sound like whatever I like and sample their tracks. You don't even need music platforms to do this, Wikipedia has copious lists of musical groups for any given genre, or just the influences or affiliated acts of artists I already like. Beyond that, there's always been an ecosystem of music blogs and music journalism web sites since the early '00s, some still continuing today, and whenever they talk about bands they tend to refer to other ones. You really just need a music platform to sample referenced acts, which YouTube is the universal one. It's really not that difficult.
tablespoon 5y ago
>> 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. > 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. Sure, but that assertion doesn't actually help with finding those musicians. It could both be true that 1) great music is being produced AND 2) the horizons of the commercial/mainstream music industry have contracted, making those musicians harder for most people to discover. Sort of like how the movie industry is focusing more and more on easily exported comic book blockbusters, at the expense of middle-budget dramas and comedies. Then there's also the fact that the streaming revolution has made crap easier to find, and there's a lot more crap than good stuff, which hurts discoverability. As an example: I've been looking for kids music on Spotify recently, and it's a sea of low-effort auto-tuned garbage from people following the economics of spam. It's pretty much impossible to find a good version of a classic song unless you already know the artist.
- ironman1478 5y ago
  Spotify's discover weekly has worked remarkably well for me! I've been able to find tons of new music (and old to be fair) that fits within my musical tastes. Combining that with a bit of effort on my part to google for new music and I've been able to find tons of good stuff.

gregoryl 5y ago

I assume you mean music produced for mass consumption? There is loads of choice, and new, creative output if you look for it.

cassianoleal 5y ago
Of course. We're talking about volumes of streaming. Surely most of it is mass-consumption stuff, isn't it? Niches barely register when it comes down to the big players making a profit.
- gregoryl 5y ago
  That's fair, I don't think I was entirely charitable with how I read your initial comment :) On the thread of mass-consumption stuff, I think we all underestimate the effect of "mass" becoming a significant portion of the available market - when you measure your success against the top 100 earners in a space like that, it almost boils down to skinner's box style output.

silisili 5y ago

Yeah, it's an old trope that one generation hates the next's music. I was sure I would be more open minded. But I hear things like most of the past few years popular music, and I'm certain kids are just liking it because it annoys adults. It sounds like...purposefully dissonant noise. Maybe we're just getting old...

skinnymuch 5y ago
This does seem like every one falling into the trope. I didn’t listen to music as a sheltered kid. Once I began listening to music in my late teens, I started with Velvet Underground and Joy Division. From there it was all modern music. Like say “indie music” of the times of the 00s was abundant for me. I’m almost 20 years into listening to music now and nothing has changed for me. I still don’t like most of the the top charting songs, but I didn’t like them 15 years ago either. I might actually like popular music more now as I used to not like most of it. While now I enjoy artists like Lil Uzi Vert and especially Playboi Carti. Similarly, Star Wars films appear to be completely mediocre films. I didn’t watch them [properly] until I was older. Some semblance of me not being pushed into the normal popular stuff as an easily influenced young person makes it very easy for me not to yearn for older stuff being better. I just checked the billboard top 100. It appears to mostly be your basic standard pop culture popular music. It seems like what would be at the top decades ago too if zooming out and seeing things as a whole.

mattkevan 5y ago

90% of everything is rubbish. Most old music was rubbish too - it’s just been rightfully forgotten and we’ve only kept the good stuff. Half an hour digging on a site like Bandcamp will prove there’s a vast amount of good new music, too much to comprehend. It only feels like there’s less good music because there’s vastly more music of all quality levels available now. You’ve just got to steer away from the mainstream and look for it.

jmcgough 5y ago

There's an overwhelming amount of good music coming out right now, you just need to put in the effort to explore it. I got deep into niche online electronic artists over the pandemic and there's just so much creativity from young kids publishing stuff on soundcloud with only a few thousand listens.

cassianoleal 5y ago
Yep, there's a lot of great new stuff out there! Perhaps with "new music" (as referred in the article) dying and opening up a vacuum, these great new niche artists will find public. One can hope!
pbalau 5y ago
When I was younger, my parents got me a dual cassette/radio thing. Every Saturday, there was a show on a Romanian Radio 3, called Top 100. They would play 100 songs, in reverse order, from about 10pm all the way to early hours. I spent many Saturday evenings changing tapes to record as much as possible so I can listen to later. And get really happy when Prodigy was on. Later, i got a PC and a friend of mine was letting me his CDs with mp3s so I can pick songs. I did not have lots of space and he was gone for 6 months at a time to uni, getting new stuff was quite an event and all of it was prefiltered by his taste. Fwd to today, i can listen to my metal or to Two Steps From Hell and get recommended Mecina by an algorithm. I can listen to some old Romanian songs, or some crap i would never understand. I can listen to those nice lads that drink in the same pub as I do or to these other guys from Mongolia. And the best part is that all of this takes 1 click and if I don't like what is currently playing, i can skip because there are so many other options. The music lover in me is very very happy.
- jmcgough 5y ago
  Spotify has exposed me to some really good bands or musicals that I love now - it even put on an anime OST that got me hooked on the show. It's almost creepy how well it's figured me out, but it certainly lets me enjoy new music without having it be a part-time job to discover it.

deleted 5y ago

[deleted]

tenebrisalietum 5y ago

> New music, with a few notable exceptions is ultra-produced cheap beats with overly simplified harmonies and horrible lyrics. This can be said to apply to cheesy rock-pop 60's hits - electronics weren't involved but same difference.