8 ms·

I find it interesting that GenZ and Millennials show a much smaller preference for their own decade's music. https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/f_auto,q_auto:g

• detourdog 3y ago
  I certainly have plenty of biased but late 70s early 80s seems like a really good era. Especially because it was so diverse and not dominated by a single sound.
• redwall_hp 3y ago
  Music has become more stratified. The 90s through the present have been an ongoing escalation of music being democratized more and more, from the rise of the DAW in the late 90s to iTunes and P2P sharing to YouTube and music streaming. So there is vastly more music now, and people have more opportunity to find things that suit their tastes. People listen to a wider variety of music and the same Billboard notion of popularity doesn't really paint a useful picture anymore. What plays on the radio or in TV ads is the lowest common denominator corporate waffle, and is played heavily, but it doesn't represent what people listen to overall. I have personal playlists of everything from House music and 90s Eurodance to all kinds of J-Pop to 19th century folk music to early 2000s rock to 80s synth pop to orchestral music. I couldn't name a single Taylor Swift song offhand, but apparently she's pretty big.
  • detourdog 3y ago
    This seems like a really good take on the situation. I usually disagree that discoverability as a problem. Discoverability could be why my tastes have stagnated.
  • racked 3y ago
    Care to share a playlist?
    • tpowell 3y ago
      Try anything with a cover photo https://open.spotify.com/playlist/0KIAnFKMUOzSahATUBlR5f?si=MT9TeOc7QwWkoNMC_ggwWw&pi=u-NeXoh4PWRiy0 https://open.spotify.com/playlist/0KIAnFKMUOzSahATUBlR5f?si=...
      • goosejuice 3y ago
        Lots of good stuff in there!
  • steveBK123 3y ago
    I enjoy music but its not a hobby or anything for me. There's tons of music out there and I find the plethora of niche subgenres now fairly overwhelming and don't even know how to classify the stuff I enjoy listening to. Recommendation engine feedback loops do not aid in discovery, just repetition.
  • Hugsun 3y ago
    On that note, to me, the current year has been the best year for music for a long time. Simply because of volume and variety.
• deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
• deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
• js2 3y ago
  > Look at Hollywood now too: everything is a sequel, prequel, remake, reboot, or adaptation. There’s hardly anything original anymore. Vs: > This may surprise some, but since 2000, just over half of all movies released have been original screenplays. https://stephenfollows.com/are-movies-becoming-more-derivative/ https://stephenfollows.com/are-movies-becoming-more-derivati... The problem is they aren't blockbusters, so you don't remember them. From the same link: > While the number of movies based on original screenplays has been increasing since the late 2000s, their box office share has continued to fall. In 1984, 73% of the box office were original screenplays, whereas forty years later in 2023, that figure was just 30.6%. And that’s despite their production share being similar (i.e. 60.4% vs 55.9%). And from a separate post: > Sequels were twice as frequent in the late 1980s than in the 2010s, if we use production figures as our measure https://stephenfollows.com/are-there-more-movie-sequels-than-there-used-to-be/ https://stephenfollows.com/are-there-more-movie-sequels-than...
  • lapcat 3y ago
    I wonder who's producing those movies though. My comment did specify Hollywood. The indie film scene, most of which consists of original screenplays, is very active, and now it's easier than ever both to shoot a film—on a smartphone!—and to distribute a film—over the internet. (Likewise, it's easier than ever to record and distribute a music album.) However, those films aren't getting mass marketed, getting seen by the majority of people, or making a ton of money. Unfortunately, the linked articles didn't specify the producers, or even the absolute number of movies produced each year, which is also relevant. Whatever the cause, the public's appetite for sequels, as reflected in box office proceeds, has indisputably increased. Those are the movies getting seen the most. Is that a "natural" desire of consumers? Is it a result of marketing? Something else?
    • deleted 3y ago
      [deleted]
    • js2 3y ago
      Here's an older post (2015) by the same guy about Hollywood films: https://stephenfollows.com/how-original-are-hollywood-movies/ https://stephenfollows.com/how-original-are-hollywood-movies... > 39% of top movies released 2005-14 were truly original, i.e. not an adaptation, sequel, spin-off, remake, or other such derivative work. I don't know, I watch most of my movies at home (I have a nice setup) and watch as many old movies as new. I never feel like I have any trouble finding an original film. The blockbusters may soak up all the ticket sales, but there's just no shortage of original films to me.
• Phurist 3y ago
  > Corporatized, consolidated, computerized. wtf, pick a word and say it. Stop spewing nonsense
• atoav 3y ago
  I am not sure about the whole thing. When I was a teenager (so roughly the decade from 2000 to 2009) I hated my guts of any contemporary music, most of what I liked was from the 90s, 80s, 70s, 60s etc. Nowadays I have quite some things in my record collection from my teenage decade, some of which I discovered only a few years ago, some of which I knew and liked back then, but it wasn't popular music back then. I always liked to think of this as some kind of survivor bias. There is trash music in everybtime period, but the good music will be listend to more often and thus shape the collective musical memory of a decade. The time we're in hasn't had the chance for that to happen yet, so it seems arbitrary and random as it happens and more defined in hindsight. It also matters where you look. The 80s have a very recognizable pop music, but it also has Punk and multiple other things.
  • anthk 3y ago
    In my case, I'm from 1987 and pop music from the early 90's was as bad as the one from 2000's, because I remember it well from my parents (and, well, by age 9-10 I was more than aware of the Spice Girls, as every girl in my Elementary school was into dances). Later, in 2000's, with P2P and streaming radios, I was astounded by some music genres. And, a bit further, with Jamendo and Magnatune, I found incredible gems not found anywhere.
  • wittierusername 3y ago
    As someone constantly seeking out new music (recently for example, I've been working backwards through the 1001 albums you must listen to book), I inherited some of my family's old vinyl collections including stuff that was like 60 years old. So so much of it is awful. It's interesting granted, but people ignore that the charts were filled with bland covers of other popular songs even in the 60's. Hip Hop is a great showing of survivor bias. Sure, Tupac, Biggie, Beastie Boys etc are classic but people are rarely listening to the bland safe music from that era. So so many songs where the rapper couldn't think of anything more inventive than "oh you're having FUN well wait till I go and get my GUN I'll shoot you dead and you'll be DONE" In 30 years, people will hear Kendrick's discography and think "god no one makes meaningful hip hop anymore" while forgetting about the "pop music but instead of a guitar solo, it's a bad rap verse" or the vast amount of emo/trap/SoundCloud stuff where the good stuff is rare. The exciting thing about living now is the ease that someone can send a link to me. Constantly my friends and I are finding recently released or decade old music that we can simply message the other and say "you'll love the production on this" - whereas for years, you saved up your pocket money and bought one album and that's all you had until you could afford another. People who say modern music is rubbish rarely make any effort to actually find any. You've kids now talking about bands like Arctic Monkeys but they don't realise the indie landfill of shite guitar bands that all had the same look, same twangy sound, same trajectory. For every Panda Bear/Animal Collective - there was 100 bland animal based bands all copying the same formula in the hope of being as big as Pigeon Detectives lmao
• goosejuice 3y ago
  Music is absolutely not getting worse unless you're only considering top charting music which is such a small fraction of what's out there. Even then it's highly subjective and behind almost every one of those songs or albums is a handful of brilliant writers, producers and session musicians you probably never heard of. I'd say it's never been better. Music is more accessible which means more folks get exposed to it earlier and in more variety and in turn we get more musicians. It's only going to get better.
  • deleted 3y ago
    [deleted]
  • hnbad 3y ago
    FWIW most of the top charting music of the 90s, 80s and so on were also "worse" and have mostly been forgotten. Few songs remain popular or regain popularity. A lot of chart hits are really just springboarding off "you had to be there" cultural moments or experiences or simply a general "vibe" that are fleeting and trivial enough not to stick around even in nostalgia. As an extreme example, I'd argue the popularity of David Hasselhoff's I've been looking for freedom in Germany is almost entirely a result of "retconning" (if not fabricating) its supposed popularity at the time of its original release. It would have probably been forgotten entirely if it hadn't been rediscovered "ironically" in the context of ridiculous claims about its influence on the fall of the Berlin Wall. Heck, I remember owning a casette of the album as a kid only because "it's the guy from Knight Rider". For adult women his claim to fame was co-starring alongside Pamela Anderson in Baywatch as one of the few men regularly appearing bare-chested on daytime television - I'd say his musical talents played a very small role in his original popularity and it's telling nobody remembers any other songs than the one he performed on a TV show. He was never considered good, he was just a familiar face (and body) and made a catchy tune.
    • suoduandao3 3y ago
      I recently encountered the term 'Tempoflavanoids' - the flavour of a particular moment in time. I love the concept, it speaks to the artist in me. Though I thought David Hasslehoff's 'True Survivor' music video for the Kung Fury kickstarter was a banger. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZTidn2dBYbY https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZTidn2dBYbY
• npteljes 3y ago
  The return of the 80s is, or rather was, just a current trend. Next up will be the 90s/00s, which can already be seen in make up and fashion, and I'm sure media will follow soon as well. Wrt/ Hollywood: I think they are not the monopoly they used to be, because the powers are shifting by streaming, and short video services. Similar to how AAA games are more stagnant than the indie gaming scene. "Music" is too broad to "get worse". There are trends in music that can be considered bad, such as the lessening dynamic range of the recordings - the Loudness War[0]. But there is more music than ever, computerized or not, so if you find that some source of music is bad, you just need to look elsewhere. Music production is easier than ever, so even very niche sounds are kept alive, like the lofi sound of post-punk decades ago[1]. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Loudness_war https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Loudness_war [1] https://desmonddoom.bandcamp.com/album/doom-and-bloom https://desmonddoom.bandcamp.com/album/doom-and-bloom
  • lapcat 3y ago
    > The return of the 80s is, or rather was, just a current trend. Next up will be the 90s/00s, which can already be seen in make up and fashion, and I'm sure media will follow soon as well. Is it a "return of the 80s", or is it a rejection of newer music? Again, "GenZ and Millennials show a much smaller preference for their own decade's music." This is a difference from previous generations, which tend to hold on stronger to the music of their times. The current trends of current pop culture have always had a much stronger influence on young people than any "nostalgic" trends. When I was young, nostalgia from earlier decades had almost no influence on myself or my peers.
    • npteljes 3y ago
      I believe that music's role changed a lot first with the wide spread of the internet and then smartphones and streaming. The internet gave rise to a global culture, and a new channel where culture can form, and then streaming completely changed how people consume music. I see rejection, disappointment and disillusion as a general theme that's going on in culture, but I can't say that these weren't present in the past cultures as well - going back some decades, the popularity of punk and its offshoots show just how much these feelings resonated with the audience back then. I think that with the widespread access and nonexistent barrier to entry to past cultures via streaming, attention just spread over the existing cultural palette, resulting in lower average consumption of the new and current. It's not that the new and current is rejected - it's rather that long tail is longer and taller.
• pyinstallwoes 3y ago
  Music is certainly getting worse.
• pawelk 3y ago
  I think it's the opposite of corporatization and consolidation. Computerization? Yes, of course, but it gave everyone the possibility to make music at a very affordable cost. A $100 MIDI controller comes with a license for a full blown music production software and literally anyone can record, mix, master and release an album. I know several people who are not professional musicians, not even formally trained - just happen to like making sounds - who have their albums on Spotify and/or Soundcloud.
• erikbye 3y ago
  Nirvana and early Linkin Park seem to be much more popular among GenZ and Millenials than their own music, and lasting, not just trending or being a fad.
  • deleted 3y ago
    [deleted]
• SiempreViernes 3y ago
  Be aware that grouping things by the respondents "generation" is actually meaningless[1] and likely to make you combine several real processes into random "effects". Trying to explain these arbitrary aggregations with a single story is obviously fruitless and mostly a good way to make up nonsense arguments. [1] https://familyinequality.wordpress.com/2021/05/26/open-letter-to-the-pew-research-center-on-generation-labels/ https://familyinequality.wordpress.com/2021/05/26/open-lette...
• kjkjadksj 3y ago
  Music was always like this. It used to be even more like this 100 years ago. How many twelve bar blues songs use the exact same chord progression? Maybe thousands if you managed to catalog them all. Maybe hundreds with the same lick between verses. As music started being recorded you had people writing dozens and dozens of songs a day to be owned by a label. They’d find some starlet with a voice and give her a book of these songs from the basement to record on the album and market her for a few years. If anything we are reverting to this model more today, as bands are no longer in vogue as much as individual artists whose material they perform has probably 20 writers credited.
  • lapcat 3y ago
    > Music was always like this. This is not an informative response to the observation that "GenZ and Millennials show a much smaller preference for their own decade's music." Also, there has been a lot of corporate consolidation in the music industry, the film industry, in almost every industry.
• aidenn0 3y ago
  I was born in 1980, so it would be before my musical "peak" so to speak, but I dislike pretty much anything from the 80s popular enough to have been on the radio in the 80s. Right now the 80s style is so popular, I find myself even disliking a lot of modern music that has that "80s retro feel" I was in the car with an older Gen-Z'er last year and they expressed jealousy at me having grown up in the 80s because they "like the music so much" and were shocked to find out I didn't.
• drngdds 3y ago
  It's the opposite - we're way less centralized now. No one cares about what's on the radio or MTV anymore. We have infinite access to every song ever* for $11 a month, and the recommendation algorithms will happily show you music outside the mainstream and outside the current decade if that's what keeps you listening. *yes this is hyperbole
  • lapcat 3y ago
    > No one cares about what's on the radio or MTV anymore. Why not? > if that's what keeps you listening. That's the key, though. Kids are generally biased toward new music. This phenomenon is perfectly natural and consistent over the generations, as shown in the article. In the 1980s, it wasn't particularly hard to "discover" 70s or 60s music, and indeed parents might want their kids to listen to their music, but that's not necessarily what the kids want to listen to, because it's not cool. Parents are uncool. Kids want their own music. What's interesting, though, is that GenZ and Millennials appear to be less biased toward the new music and less biased against the old. The fact that every song ever is available for streaming doesn't mean that people want to listen to every song ever. My understanding is the streaming plays are very top-heavy toward the top artists, and smaller artists are struggling mightily under the streaming payout system.