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For people in their mid-30s and beyond I think a big factor in them commonly perceiving that today's popular music sucks compared to the popular music of their

by tzs 3y ago

For people in their mid-30s and beyond I think a big factor in them commonly perceiving that today's popular music sucks compared to the popular music of their teens and twenties is that when they listen to music from their younger days now it is a small subset of what they were actually listening to back then. For example my teens and twenties were in the '70s and '80s. If I decide I want to listen to music from those times now I would probably mostly listen to Cat Stevens, Neil Young, The Who, The Ramones, The Dickies, The B-52s, Devo, Queen, The Urban Verbs, The Beatles, The Beach Boys, Bob Dylan, Pink Floyd, The Grateful Dead, The Moody Blues, Kansas, The Clash, The Dead Kennedys, Kate Bush, Synergy, Jean-Michel Jarre, Talking Heads, and a few I'm forgetting. If I decide I want to listen to some current popular music I might listen to something the the Billboard Hot 100 playlist on Spotify. Of course I'm going to find that nearly everything on there is not nearly as good as the music from artists listed above. But I'd find the same thing if instead of today's Billboard Hot 100 I listened to a playlist of a Billboard Hot 100 list from the '70s or '80s, or listened to a recording of a random day's broadcast of a '70s or '80s popular music radio station. And I'm sure that in 2040 if I ask someone who is 37 to make me a playlist of music from 2024 (when they were 21) that playlist is going to sound a lot better to me than the 2024 music I hear now when I decide to check out current music. Just like my list above is the '70-80s artists that I'm still listening to 50 years later, that 37 year old's playlist will be the 2024 music that he's still listening to 16 years later.

listenallyall 3y ago
The more time passes, the fewer relics from earlier eras survive and stay relevant, like a funnel.
- grugagag 3y ago
  Or like a sieve. What’s timeless stays and the rest filters out with time.
48864w6ui 3y ago
Are you including Tom Tom Club in Talking Heads?
LegitShady 3y ago
a lot of this is your choices. You may be choosing to engage less with new music. I spend at least an hour each week doing something that I can also listen to new music at the same time, and I add it to my favorites, so that those dark AI recommendations start adding similar recommendations to my listening mixes. I don't listen to top 100 because by and large I don't like it. In modern music my taste has shifted away from prog rock and classic into techno/psytrance/etc. All it took was spending a bit of time looking, every week, to enrich my taste in music and make sure I wasn't repeating the stuff I heard on the radio growing up forever. It's up to you to do it. It's your choice to make.
acdha 3y ago
> it is a small subset of what they were actually listening to back then. I think there was also more variation on that than there is now. Music cost a fair amount of money to buy so what you heard as a kid depended on what people around you were spending hundreds of dollars on, and radio stations were far more diverse in the era before ClearChannel bought everything and consolidated onto a handful of choices. My wife and I had relatively similar suburban upbringings in many ways but there are a ton of 80s and 90s bands I was more familiar with because I happened to live within range of two different college radio stations at different points, and she basically had only very big commercial options. There’s still variety these days but I think it’s undercut a lot because every teenager with a smartphone has access to pretty much anything, and the social media pressure to like the big names has never been stronger.
RobKohr 3y ago
SXM satellite radio has channels based on decades, and they often do top 100 countdowns for this day in that decade, and for the most part the selection is absolute crap until they get to the top 5-10. So, yeah, survivorship bias is what you are seeing here, and only the best 0.1% of songs of any decade will be played decades later.

by tzs 3y ago

listenallyall 3y ago

The more time passes, the fewer relics from earlier eras survive and stay relevant, like a funnel.

grugagag 3y ago
Or like a sieve. What’s timeless stays and the rest filters out with time.

48864w6ui 3y ago

Are you including Tom Tom Club in Talking Heads?

LegitShady 3y ago

a lot of this is your choices. You may be choosing to engage less with new music. I spend at least an hour each week doing something that I can also listen to new music at the same time, and I add it to my favorites, so that those dark AI recommendations start adding similar recommendations to my listening mixes. I don't listen to top 100 because by and large I don't like it. In modern music my taste has shifted away from prog rock and classic into techno/psytrance/etc. All it took was spending a bit of time looking, every week, to enrich my taste in music and make sure I wasn't repeating the stuff I heard on the radio growing up forever. It's up to you to do it. It's your choice to make.

acdha 3y ago

> it is a small subset of what they were actually listening to back then. I think there was also more variation on that than there is now. Music cost a fair amount of money to buy so what you heard as a kid depended on what people around you were spending hundreds of dollars on, and radio stations were far more diverse in the era before ClearChannel bought everything and consolidated onto a handful of choices. My wife and I had relatively similar suburban upbringings in many ways but there are a ton of 80s and 90s bands I was more familiar with because I happened to live within range of two different college radio stations at different points, and she basically had only very big commercial options. There’s still variety these days but I think it’s undercut a lot because every teenager with a smartphone has access to pretty much anything, and the social media pressure to like the big names has never been stronger.

RobKohr 3y ago

SXM satellite radio has channels based on decades, and they often do top 100 countdowns for this day in that decade, and for the most part the selection is absolute crap until they get to the top 5-10. So, yeah, survivorship bias is what you are seeing here, and only the best 0.1% of songs of any decade will be played decades later.