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I disagree with the premise, and the article author’s attempt to convince me of it is weak.

I can equally claim we’re living in a golden age of music, both in terms of accessibility and of the diversity of music being made.

There’s likely some truth in the idea of mindless consumption, but I’m not sure that’s any different now than it was in the past. There have always been people who didn’t explore much beyond listening to the top singles chart in the car. That’s fine, not everyone has to have some abstract notion of good musical taste. Meanwhile, there are still vast communities of highly motivated music appreciators willing to travel the world to seek out the best music experiences. Too many, arguably, based on how expensive and crowded festivals and gigs have become.

Personally, I think the 90s-00s were the weakest decades in pop, but taste is subjective.

Absolutely correct. It starts kinda hilariously;

  The convergence of computers and music production is now complete, making any sound theoretically possible at virtually no cost. But
I mean… lol. Cmon. Let’s run through the facts:

1. More music is being made now than ever before, both in terms of genre diversity and absolute amount.

2. The average consumer can access an effectively infinite range of that music, which is up from “a few records a year and whatever’s on the radio”, which in turn is up from “whatever’s on the radio”, which in turn is up from “whatever live music might be played at the local pub on Saturdays, plus church hymns.”

3. Across cultures, people think that the music that they listened to in their formative years — say, 15-25 - is the best music. The mechanisms are fairly obvious to back that up: emotional vulnerability, novelty, and number+quality of peer relationships are at life-long highs. In short, nostalgia.

I would happen to agree re:pop (other than em!) but I think the scientific facts are all we need here. The article (and, presumably, the original video) is well written and in good faith, but I think they’re lacking some serious self-awareness.

As the optimists always say regarding macro timelines: the world is much better than it was, the world is gradually getting better, and the world can be much better. This article would be covered under the first clause!

> in terms of accessibility and of the diversity of music being made.

neither of those addresses music being "worse." There's no "objective" measurement of quality. If you have bad taste, you have bad taste, and you can always find someone to say you don't.

> I’m not sure that’s any different now than it was in the past

Beato explains how it's different. Look at some Top 100 song lists from 50 or so years ago. Here are a couple:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Billboard_Year-End_Hot_100_sin...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Billboard_Year-End_Hot_100_sin...

Ask yourself this, if you walked into a record store to buy a vinyl. Are you walking out with a BTS record?

There's tons of great indie music out there atm, but the radio 'mainstream' has turned to trash.

But it was probably always like this. Old man yells at cloud etc.

it is a mixed bag. I think distribution for new artists is easier today with social media etc. Go on Spotify, there is such a huge spectrum of music available. There is literally something for everyone.
The most notable things that he touched upon are:

1. Music is cheap, you can get access to vast catalogues of music for 10dollars a month

2. Music creation is widely accessible, cheap (laptop, a microphone and some software) and in lots of ways easier.

Nobody will ever convince me that prices of goods going down is a bad thing. Or that it's bad that people can get more for less.

What you won't get is the same feeling of having to save money to go to a record store to buy an album, go home and have a whole dedicated listening session. Obviously music collection you worked your ass off to buy and collect and share with your friends will have way more meaning compared to just typing in the artist in spotify or youtube.

The music can't get worse... because all the great recordings of the past are readily widely available. And loads of good music is still being made, maybe the "mainstream" popular music has become worse, but it has never been "good" to begin with.

Sadly, I think that the technical reason that music sucks today will never get the exposure it needs. Even catchy music today is fatiguing and quickly tiresome because of dynamic compression. There have been plenty of good songs over the last couple of decades that are basically intolerable because they're a wall of noise.

The "loudness war" has ruined popular music. Not only everything that has come out since the late '90s, but everything "remastered" since then as well. It's probably the greatest crime against art in history, because of its scope and insidiousness. And when we lose original recordings (as in the Universal fire), we may be left with ruined trash.

good points.

We can't put the genie back in the bottle -- music's been digitized and things that used to be expensive and difficult are now cheap and easy, as Beato says.

Out of anyone, Apple seems to be doing the most to fight this. They have been pushing producers to provide high quality recordings via their digital master programme, and have loudness normalisation enabled by default.

I often find the quality available on AM to be superior to other platforms.

> “the overreliance on similar tools” brings about “a lack of diversity”

> making any sound theoretically possible at virtually no cost

> “music is not as valued by young people. There is no sweat equity put into obtaining it, having it be part of your collection, having it be a part of your identity, of who you are.”

> The ease of creation has caused “an oversaturation of music, making it harder to find really exceptional things.”

> Music, in short, has become both too easy to produce and too easy to consume.

So breaking it down:

- everything sounds the same because it's all made with the same technology

- the technology that everyone is dependent on is capable of producing anything you can imagine

- nobody works hard enough to make music

- there's too much music

- finding good music is too hard

- nobody works hard enough to find good music

> It would be easy for anyone ... to dismiss Beato’s argument as that of a middle-aged man reflexively insisting that things were better in his day, when we knew the value of an album.

I recently finished Francis Schaeffer's "How Should We Then Live?" and found his conclusions quite timely, considering the book is approaching its 50th anniversary. The latter half of the book specifically dwells on the effects of postmodernism on culture, especially the arts. Watching Rick Beato's criticism of modern music, I can't help but notice how eerily similar it is to Schaeffer's criticisms.

Personally, I've struggled to understand whether I'm suffering from nostalgia or if the era of good music is truly coming to an end. I wasn't able to afford college when I was younger, but I did have an opportunity to take a university level class on music appreciation later in my life. It's what still has me going to the symphony every year. Perhaps if such courses were more affordable/accessible, we might seem some improvements in this area?

It's never coming back. People back in the day used to spend hours at music stores. Now music stores don't even exist. They couldn't spend that kind of time anymore, even if they tried. YouTube, Instagram and TikTok aren't set up for the promotion of musical appreciation but those are the tools we have today, for better or worse.

Humanity prospered through tens of thousands of years without any music at all. So we'll be fine. It's a different world but it isn't the end of it.

Music isn't getting worse. Popular music has always been mostly garbage, and the further back in time you go the less garbage gets remembered. There's always been enough music for the good stuff to still make up a large body of work once you filter out all the trash and so music seems to get better the further back in time you go (until you go far enough back that recording quality was bad.)

Combine that with everyone of course always having the most nostalgia and exposure to stuff that was around when they were teens and you get everyone saying (time when they were a teenager) was when music was good.

All you need to do is stray a little outside of the top music charts, check out local gigs from lesser known artists, explore specific genres you like and you will find so much good music you won't be able to listen to it all.

There's no historical thought there. "everyone likes what was popular when they were 18" is a tired, mindless old canard.

Look at some Top 100 song lists from 50 or so years ago. Here are a couple:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Billboard_Year-End_Hot_100_sin...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Billboard_Year-End_Hot_100_sin...

The obvious reason is that the best music ever produced happened to coincide with my own youth. Right?
No way, My father, his friends and I all listened to Metallica, Nirvana, RHCP, etc, when I was in my teens and they were in their forties. We all loved it.

I think the age thing you talk about is a meme from the 50s or something, it hasn't applied for decades.

I just think there really is a lot of crap around now.

This has become a knee jerk reaction to a possibly flawed opinion.

And unfortunately we may not get clarity for many decades.

But I think it’s worth thinking about what makes a piece of music classic? Why will it stand the test of time where others don’t.

And when producing music is easier than ever, does the proportion of good musicians increase proportional or do we just get more rubbish?

It always seemed that my generation, at lease where I lived, listened to our parents’ music - Led Zeppelin, The Stones, The Eagles, Pink Floyd, and the like. We hated the music pushed on us at the time, e.g. Madonna and Huey Lewis, and oh lord, Starship.
That's a thing, but for the most part I don't think is the main driver here.

I agree with Beato's angle, but it needs some expansion. Twenty years ago the music industry was cut off from its main revenue source by internet sharing. It has somewhat recovered through streaming but the money they spent on artist development has not. Why?

My speculation—combine the continued availability of classic acts (hello never-ending copyright) with the deluge of the cheap, mass produced content and there's just an incredible amount to choose from. It should be cheaper just from an economics standpoint, and since profit is down that necessitates less investment into excellence.

Also, all the good pop chords and melodies are probably already taken as well, the music is pretty simple.

The other angle to the problem is discovery, and that makes it very hard to get noticed. This article was pretty great on the subject:

https://www.billboard.com/pro/new-music-tiktok-artist-develo...

To get back to an older era when we were younger... I remember iconic albums/singles dropping every single week in the eighties. The machine was incredibly well-oiled and running. Today I hear something big maybe once or twice a year. Part of that is the discovery problem I know-radio and mtv were killed by the internet star.

How to invest in quality, and how to make people aware of it?

That's not what he's talking about. He's a music producer. He likes a lot of today's music because he's producing it. He's talking to the youth who are producing it and he's helping as much as he can. There's not enough people doing it, and what there is isn't getting enough attention because youth are spending a lot of their spare time on social media. Music isn't the primary focus of youth attention like it used to be. Social media is the primary focus now.

Social media can be used to spread music like radio/CD/MP3 used to, but it isn't as effective at that task.

I'm not sure if this is good or bad. I mean, kids back in the 70's & 80's got relationship advice from random song lyrics heard on the radio, a horrible way to make life decisions. Now kids have much better access to information & advice so who's to say that the decline of music is an entirely bad thing? We'll see.

IMO part of what attracts to works of art, as humans, is the humanity behind those works of art. My love for the Beatles is probably equally due to the love of their story - the rivalries, highs & lows, their journey as musicians - as it is the wiggly air tickling my brain in the right ways.

The quality and novelty of music used to, in some ways, be a proxy for that humanity. It was hard to make interesting sounds, and that means something to us. I don't think AI will kill creative endeavours, but it also means we have to look harder to find the humanity in the art we consume.

I agree with the sentiment that it’s a lack of discernment. Mindless consumption of mediocre music starves great talent of the sunlight it deserves.
If you want good music you can't sit around hoping the radio will bring it to you. Outside of some college radio stations, your typical Radio stations have incentives that are at odds with that.

You have to go out and find it. I'm big into the Doom/psychedelic rock genres, and there's so much good stuff out that I actually don't have enough time to even sort through even a fraction of what's available. I'm drinking from a firehose (https://weedian420.bandcamp.com/) of music filled with top tier gems.

I really need some kind of self hosted solution that integrates with bandcamp and allows me to to do 5 star ratings of songs as I listen to them so I can create and share curated playlists (via QR code). "What music do I like? Here's my 5 star playlist. If you loved that, then my 4 star list is right here for active listening. For passive listening, here's my 3 star and up list"

> You have to go out and find it.

How do you discover them? Any workflow or platform?

Music is worse because the incentives have changed. There is less money and attention so fewer talented young people make a career out of it. Now they turn to TikTok, Instagram, YouTube et al instead. Music, film, literature — it has all been reduced to “content”.
Music being easier to both create and consume hasn’t made it worse. Thinking about why it would for more than about 5 seconds makes this obvious - there is no logical causal link. If anything, logically a lower barrier to entry means more creativity by more people, and invariably some of those people will be very good. It sounds like the author just hasn’t figured out how to find good music in the current ecosystem.

In other words, skill issue.

Exactly what I have commented on some of Beato's diatribes. He's so fixated in finding good music on what's popular that he misses that ship has sailed, popular music is supposed to be popular, not great, and as in every endeavour when you cater for a bigger audience you have to shed some of your uniqueness, and weirdness, to be palatable and approachable to be consumed by more people.

There's an absurd amount of great music being made, they're just coming from smaller acts/artists. Those have managed to attract a following around the world through the internet.

In the before-times those artists would struggle a lot to find an audience for their niche in local areas, and wouldn't be able to jump-start a career. They would hit dead-ends unless they lived in very specific areas which could foster a forward looking music scene, that scene is now spread all across the globe.

I agree it's a skill issue, as well as a "keeping with the times" issue, Billboard Top 100 doesn't matter anymore for finding great music, to my taste in music it's actually an anti-signal. It takes as much skill nowadays to find good music as it took by scavenging through vinyl crates at music stores before, it takes knowing people sharing similar taste and who are great at finding tunes to break through the noise.

Is this a global thing ?

The music/culture scene in my state Karnataka in India has gone from high-culture to gang-wars and glorifying gangster-life. The culture has similarly declined from dealing with amazing themes from India's epics to moronic low-class shit... to the point that one of the top-actors was recently caught for homicide.

(For context, the southern tradition of Indian Music is named after the state; and I'm a millennial.).

As someone who has spent the last 50 years encountering the song "Yummy Yummy, Yummy (I've Got Love in My Tummy)", which charted at #4 in the US in 1968 and has regrettably never really gone away, I'm hard-pressed to think of literally any song I've heard that's worse.

No, I haven't convinced you? 1969 #1 hit "Sugar, Sugar" by the Archies.

1969. The Beatles. The Stones. Jimi. Aretha. Otis. Leonard Cohen. The Kinks.

No. Turn on the radio. Yummy, Yummy Yummy I've Got Love in My Tummy. When you get to my age, and you hear that damned song for the thousandth time, you just want to give up. No amount of Katy Perry or Justin Bieber or whoever is going to be worse. Ever.

I liked both of those tunes when they were on the radio, and still do. I also like the Partridge family songs. So sue me.

P.S. Led Zeppelin is the greatest band ever. It's not even close.

I don't know what radio station you listen to, but I haven't heard Yummy, Yummy is god knows how long.

On the other hand, Hotel California and Go Your Own Way both refuse to die.

Isn’t most pop music written and composed by committee anyway? People can smell insincerity a mile away.

Meanwhile Apple Music seems to deliver me several new bands a week. Generally smaller and they have to write their own stuff. It feels a lot like my golden age of music right now.

Maybe popular music is getting worse, but music in general is not. The main downside of good, modern music is that's its next-to impossible to share with other people in real life because everyone has different tastes due to genre fragmentation.
Every generation says that music is getting worse, but I think it's actually getting better. While in the past people were confined to whatever music was played on the radio, or available in the local record store, now it's possible to stream music in literally every conceivable genre. In the past, I wouldn't be able to access some terrific works created by small artists due to the difficulties in distribution.

The life of a musician is difficult today, but this has also always been the case. Musicians make money by playing live and selling merchandise; this was true in the past and still is true now.

This is an old whine. Jaron Lanier wrote along similar lines at least a decade ago. Part of it is nostalgia for the days when being a Musician in a Band was a Big Deal. That ended around the time Myspace got their millionth band.

How did we get stuck at rap and house? Big band came and went. Jazz came and went. Rock came and went. Disco came and went. House ought to be over by now, replaced by something totally different, like Balinese temple bell music. But no, house is still around after forty years, as various subgenres.

"Music is getting worse" for the same tired old reason that people have always complained about how "<category> is getting worse": they're getting older.

I've heard that studies show people stop listening to new music around age 30: https://www.iflscience.com/we-stop-discovering-new-music-at-...

The biggest reason why there is ostensibly more "junk" now is availability heuristics. We're seeing more junk because there's more music now than there ever was in the past. Both globally and in the local music scene - you can get to nearly any music at any time thanks to streaming services.
Depends on the genre, but the music sucks today because of the many distractions.

Back then as a kid, there was not much going on but listened to cassette tapes or the FM radio, and hung out with friends. Or just listen to music over and over, just staring at nothing, no internet and smartphone in hand.

If you ask me, over the last few years it's actually getting better. Of course, music taste is entirely subjective. A medieval peasant would say that Beethoven and Mozart are unlistenable trash, and you won't find many fanatical lute listeners these days.

But when I look back, my opinion is that the average mainstream radio music was worse around 2016-2019 than it is now. Back then, hiphop was ubiquitous and even a lot of pop songs would have hiphop elements in them. It was overplayed. It was like rock in the 2000s, everywhere and same-ish. Now that seems to have died down and mainstream music sounds more diverse, which it will be until the next trend comes around.

I feel like games are in a similar rut for similar reasons. Why record a drummer when you can just quantize it? Why build your own game engine when you can just use unreal?
I dunno. You can find lots of low tech live music on youtube. Look up Billy Strings live for one random example. The U2 tiny desk concert for another.
I disagree that no effort is spent getting music. Picking your favorite song from an album takes an hour. Editing songs take minutes each.
The ideas and implications of greater access to music, and a lower barrier to creation IMO are interesting.

Though, "worse" is utterly subjective. There is no way to rationally consider the sentiment until it is quantified in _some_ way. It would be interesting I believe for that to be attempted, at which time we could evaluate the point based on a proposed set of metrics that demonstrate "the music is worse." Then we might consider why.

My take is that this (and similar effects in other media) is the consequence of the rise of targeted advertising. Prior to the advent of surveillance capitalism, there was a vested interest in the development and refining of subcultures.

Someone in the media would identify a new nascent subculture, invest in catering to it, and in the process create a new demographic that advertisers could pump money into to address a specific audience. Ugly and capitalist, sure, but on the flip side, if you were a member of one of those subcultures, there'd be a steady flow of investment into the community you considered yourself a member of. If you listened to the Grateful Dead, someone would be there to sell you peace signs and tie-dye shirts. If you listened to emo punk, well, Hot Topic. The money the advertisers paid would go back into the magazines, critics, studios, etc. that would then further promote, develop, and refine the subculture--a virtuous cycle of sorts.

Google et al. negate the need for any of this. If you want to sell tie-dye shirts, you buy a slot on the "tie-die shirts" keyword. It's (arguably) more efficient for the advertiser, but, it eliminates the economic incentives for subcultures to exist. So they don't. Everyone is their own one-person-addressable subculture, which is essentially identical to one sprawling morass of culture.

What little money remains flowing into the media system chases the spontaneous flash-in-the-pan meme hits that broadly appeal, because that's all that's left.

Sorry, I'm old, but you all just sound old.

Put on an album by SZA, boygenius, Oliva Rodrigo, Chappell Roan, Mitski, Laufey, Anohni and the Johnsons, Lana Del Rey, Billie Eilish, Lizzo, Kendrick Lamar, Everything Everything, Jordan Rakei, Beyoncé, Charlie XCX, English Teacher, Maggie Rogers, Shaboozey, Chris Stapleton, Vistas, St Vincent, Vince Staples, Waxahatchee, Tems, Vampire Weekend, Anderson .Paak, Tank & the Bangas...

If you're have trouble finding stuff, just subscribe to NPR's Tiny Desk channel on YouTube and go from there.

Honestly, the complainers are coming across as out of touch.

it's about meaning. there was a great HN post once about how "meaning is cohering information forward in time." the things music represented 30 years ago were durable for several years probably because it took a while to permeate the culture. now, a new song or a band passes through relevance in a few days because, yes it's instant, and there's an ocean of stuff coming up behind it.

maybe as a culture we've largely ceased to produce new meaning and the old meaning is just being consumed and used up by people hungry for it. after a certain age we stop producing we anyway. most of what's being produced now is just from scraps of retro and sure, the lives of younger people can seem like a meaningless pastiche of contrived tropes and simulacra, but nobody knows that their first time through.