Just how bad has today's "popular" music become?

[kennywtelejazz]

Great music involves not only drawing the listener in with a story the listener wants to hear told , the listener also wants to have the song wash over them and bring them to a place where they can feel the full power and emotions the song brings up for them .

It used to be everything came down to writing and performing good Songs . People just don't write that way anymore  .

 

Kenny

[Wibbles]

3 hours ago, Wibbles said:

But the record companies are really run by the Lizard people, whose algorithms are designed to leave middle-aged men howling at the moon.

 

3 hours ago, Tim Smith said:

I'm sure there is some truth to that lol.

I sincerely hope not. 

But it is the role of middle-aged men to moan about how nothing is as good as it was in their youth, when the truth is they no longer feel relevant as the world changes around them.

[Wibbles]

Oscar Peterson had the right equipment but he failed to invent Acid House.

So that's a mark against the old guard.

(Roland used Oscar in the adverts for the TB-303)

[Shane_B.]

3 hours ago, Tim Smith said:

The advantage to the new music is they can look at all the old stuff, pick out what sucked and copy the rest (however poorly in a sequencer). OK that statement might be just a little sarcastic.🤔

That's getting closer to the point. When I said we can't compare the digital age to the pre-digital age of recording, it's not an insult to people who use electronics as instruments or the ones who sit in front of a computer and peck out every single note, instrument, and beat with a mouse.

It is an observation that there is a huge difference between a group of musicians using whatever instrument they have at their disposal to perform a song as a group and a guy or two in a control room piecing together audio snippets (aka samples/VSTi's) in a computer to create a performance or editing a bad live performance to make it good.

You can't compare the two. They are not the same. It's like comparing a carving done by hand to one done by a CNC machine. Both can be awesome but one doesn't carry the same feeling, weight, and respect. That said there will always be a large group of people who don't know and/or don't care and accept it and like it and that's ok too.

For those of us who know the difference though and see what has happened to the music industry, it's a hard pill to swallow.

I just read an article by David Crosby who recommends people don't become musicians anymore. The industry has died. I'd post a link to it but he goes off on a tangent about other crap, but he's right about most of what he said in it. "When asked what advice he'd give to the younger generation, he said: “Don’t become a musician.”

[Tim Smith]

On 3/2/2022 at 11:03 AM, Wibbles said:

I sincerely hope not. 

What? Are you saying you don't believe in lizard people then? 😲

On 3/2/2022 at 11:03 AM, Wibbles said:

But it is the role of middle-aged men to moan about how nothing is as good as it was in their youth, when the truth is they no longer feel relevant as the world changes around them.

While I see the truth in that, I still trust what I see when I look at what's happened to music.

"Not as good as" is probably too relative a term here. I see the tech as creating different ways to approach music, manyof which seem to leave out creativity in certain genres. Not an always sort of thing or a never sort of thing, but I think it has definitely had an impact of people playing instruments.

But we can't stop it, so why am I even talking about it? 😮 Feels good to observe and comment.

 

Edited March 15 by Tim Smith

[Kurre]

We have the loudness war. Bad or not. Music seems to be louder nowadays. Could have to do with the studies that say louder music is experienced as better sounding.

We have the overuse of voice. Bad or not. Wailing, wobble, warble and glides singing technics wasn't used that much back then. Could have to do with room to come up with new good songs isn't that easy nowadays. Seems that the new in a song isn't the song itself rather the technics and performance.

[Adalheidis Daina Aletheia]

My very long edited, two-dollar-cent bill thoughts....

 

This is such an interesting topic, and something that has been on my mind lately. Especially since I quit music for over ten years and just now re-embracing it.

With emerging online apps and smart phone beat makers I wonder if the younger generations have ever experienced grade school band, piano lessons with old ladies that make you hold tennis balls, a mother that was a music teacher, and if they know what I am talking about when I say "Supper's Ready", "JC-120", and "Suitcase Model". 

From my recent observations, it seems electronic and hyperpop are the two steady flowing genres that keep the attention of the younger generation, and these styles are way too easily created with a touch of few buttons. Some are overly redundant with the lack of creative composition.

But not all. I have heard many electronic artist that put more intricacy and thought into compositions than most. There is both allot of electronic and hyperpop artist that have created some amazing pieces, and some emerging and unknown artist that will never be known that really know what they're doing.

But in a way, this same scenario is not much different than that of the late eighties and early nineties when the alt rock grunge monotony was flourishing like crazy. It all sounded the same after a while, and my ears still ring today after seeing Jane's Addiction in the basement of an old vegetable cannery on the Nothing Shocking tour. But not all were bad, it just turned into a fad, just like the fads of other generations.

But that right there is the same place the younger generations are today. The experience is what we all wanted at 17. And it is the same thing 17 year old's want today. What is cool with all their friends, what's popular. And what’s popular now is really caused by main stream media and the equipment and software companies that are marketing and catering towards that touch and go electro-kid.

It's like all the other problems in the world, it’s main stream media and the corporation’s fault, they did it, because they want to make money with their own agenda and could care less about our musical and intellectual experience. If they could kill off everyone that was over forty they would, because they are just evil. And the electro-kid that will believe anything is more prosperous to their monetary motives. Then they will kill off them next for something new. Just like I was shammed in the eighties by Guitar Magazine, flaunting that I would never be as cool as that guitarist on the cover, walking down to the guitar shop everyday as a kid, wishing I had all the cool stuff marketed in the magazine.

I'm not even that old yet, but at least had the exposure of a wide range of musical styles from jazz, classical, actual Christmas Carolers coming to the front door(Mom? Why are people singing at our front door?), and my personal interest of prog rock in high school. I just ignored most of the eighties and went back to the seventies. But I did get to see that religious furber of the eighties like at a U2 concert where you don’t actually hear the concert, just the girl next to you screaming Bono over and over as if she is having a two hour long orgasm in your ear. It must have been that "show" experience. And what's hot at the moment seems to be the experience younger folks want. I know I was caught up in the experience mess in 1989, not knowing if I should listen to the emerging 90's music, catch up on the eighties, or just keep learning about the 60's and 70's. So much thrown at me from every angle I didn't know what I really wanted to listen to.

 

I like toying with the “spirit of the age” somewhat, but don't want to just quit music again because it's all just too overwhelming. It's just sad that smart phone music apps are now more accessible than a corner music stores and dive bars. And that Suitcase Model Electric Piano is easier to get through a VST plugin. The real thing is now such a collectors item, the price tag makes today's software look cheap.

Edited March 6, 2022 by Adalheidis Daina Aletheia

[Tim Smith]

I guess we all had different experiences back in the day. In reading some of your experiences, I see some similarity to the way I see the younger generation and their music. To be fair, there are very talented people in every generation, and like you I see many good musicians buried in anonymity in both theirs and older generations. We have session musicians here who played in bands and are really good at their craft ,Kenny and  Batsbrew to name just a few. There are others who come here even though they don't use Cakewalk much. We once had more of those people but they have moved on or they don't come by as much.

I wasn't raised in any area where there was any kind of a serious music scene happening. I was in the rural south east US, and you had to invent something there or it wasn't happening.  I'm glad I wasn't anywhere near some of it TBH. We still had the music playing from those other places. I came from early music education and  played with a bunch of instruments. Not necessarily wonderful at any of them. My mother had me in a Baptist church early on and I think it was a good thing. The music was in contrast to anything else.  I am still on violin as torture for my character building. I even hired a skinny German teacher who likes pain and suffering, and who could really care less about humans.

I caught the Irish music bug but had a teacher beat the interest right out of me. I also met a person who had a siren voice that attracted people. You think I'm kidding. I think there was a spell on her which might have worn off. The music I was going into then was probably most like "New Age" music because that was what she sang and I decided I liked things about it. After some introspection I realized I wanted nothing to do with "new age" or any "spirit" of this age because I know too much about all of that. I know where it originates and I know where it leads.I know what it claims to be and what it isn't.

The tech can surely benefit everyone.

65 year olds with Vienna all loaded up composing symphonies isn't a bad thing. Anyone who ever dreamed of composing their own symphony, have at it. You could attempt to sell it even.

I don't chase after any fads. At my age I have realized I can still make music for people my age, and I do, and I get comments they like it. I get more out of that than chasing what's in and trying to copy it. It is getting a little more difficult to find good fairly priced hardware because the manufacturers are making teeny little electronic keyboards and hit boxes. And if that's where it's all going I'll be taking another route. And if my channels all get buried in social media I don't care. I really don't.

Edited March 3, 2022 by Tim Smith

[sarine]

On 3/1/2022 at 5:40 PM, Tim Smith said:

I'll say it. No, Most of the music today really is worse than older music. No matter how you cut it or slice it ( pun maybe intended). The MIXES are better.......until the get squashed down into a compressed format.

I'm  not going to apologize for bad music that leans too much on computers. 

The biggest problem with this assertion is that agreeing or disagreeing depends on so many unspoken presuppositions which, when made explicit, tear down everything. So I'm not sure we even know what we actually want to talk about, and why it concerns us.

When we talk about "the good old music" it usually means music from the later half of the 20th century, and for most of that time music industry as we now know it didn't exist, and generally speaking your music had to pass a certain quality threshold to get aired on radio stations or get a record contract to be widely distributed. All the good music of the past made it through that filter into our consciousness. Both good and bad music was caught in the filter, but I'm willing to bet the curating skewed the average in favor of good. Because the mass culture phenomenon that rock'n'roll initiated was still raging forward and music was evolving rapidly, the developing music industry probably didn't have the foresight into future trends and hadn't yet homed in on the lowest common denominator. While I think they picked up on the "spirit" of the masses and successfully experimented with targeted manufacturing of music as early as 70's, it wasn't until the 90's that the industry tipped the balance of power in their favor by getting to define demand by exploiting the youth's need for validation by inclusion (in the collective consciousness of mass culture).

Efficient commercialization of music gradually turned it more and more into a commodity and an exploitable product, and as the advent of television and cinema had just demonstrated the power of streaming imagery and people with mind-massaging interests quickly saw the potential power it could wield in selling products or ideas, as a natural continuation MTV cultivated music into wholesome audio-visual experiences that delivered narratives with the backing of music, imagery, personalities, attitudes, and other extra-musical content, and at some point the market feedback must have made it clear for the manufacturers that this new packaged experience is the product, and music is a trigger for the "user" to recall rest of the experience and its associations.

So if this one facet of the larger package is what we're talking about, then you may well be right in calling it out as musical garbage, but I'm not sure who your audience is - unless you actually want to criticize culture or capitalism, in which case fixating on music seems to make as much sense as complaining about the style of sneakers or how they hang their pants these days.

Regarding music itself, I'll simplify and suppose that the "quality" of music measured in any imaginable metrics follows normal distribution, i.e. the vast majority of music is recognizably average and deviations from the mean become progressively rarer towards both extremes (of good and bad). I don't think there is a real reason to think we've somehow managed to drag the whole quality curve towards the bad end - rather we have more tools for creating/performing music, the tools have become more prevalent due to advancements in technology and higher standards of living, which means more people are expressing themselves musically and publishing their creations without obstructions, so we have more music.

To test this hypothesis, I would expect to find more bad music than 30 years ago, and more good music than 30 years ago. Turns out that's exactly the case. There is a greater quantity of good music being performed/written/composed/produced/doodled at any given time in the current era, than at any point in the past. Note that while I'm weasel-wording with "good" and "bad" to make a point, and I'm actually aware that the two-minute track that DubStepBro2k22 finished just now that barely makes the low end of "good" isn't necessarily comparable as an achievement with J.S. Bach's Passacaglia (because nothing is or ever will be), I think it's also an inevitable truth that many geniuses who could have made history slipped through the cracks into oblivion only because they weren't fortunate enough to discover or gain access to means of cultivating their musicality, because it used to be the norm that you had to either be born with the privilege or be hit with incredible luck and find a benevolent master or a patron. Just like DubStepBro's older brother - who made that one track that no-one liked on SoundCloud and that caused me 27 seconds of great anguish once - never became a musician, yet managed to produce an insignificant but annoying amount of aural pollution in the little time he was testing the waters.

Even if it was the case that we've somehow gotten less competent at music, then who could detect and quantify it? You would have to be "in" in the hundreds of subgenres innovated in the last decades and familiar with the most relevant material of tens of thousands of artists that can be considered definitive in their style, as well as with everything that came before - and those are just the pre-requisites.

The thing is, the good stuff doesn't come to you (or does it, I don't use Spotify) - you have to go digging for it. The stuff you happen to like may be buried under twelve dozen layers of anything from "slightly intriguing" to "acceptable" to "pretty good" to "please revoke this human's right to musical expression".

Somebody said there will never be another Led Zeppelin or the Stones - or something to that effect - and that's right. But there never was another Muse either.

 

 

On 3/1/2022 at 6:10 PM, pbognar said:

Part of the problem is many create a production and a vibe and then try to twist it into a "song".

Very good observation.

 

On 3/1/2022 at 7:45 PM, Wibbles said:

Sometimes the real instruments being played by real musicians happen to be drum machines and synthesizers and samplers and computers.

Quoted for truth.

 

On 3/2/2022 at 4:27 PM, kennywtelejazz said:

Great music involves not only drawing the listener in with a story the listener wants to hear told , the listener also wants to have the song wash over them and bring them to a place where they can feel the full power and emotions the song brings up for them .

QFT.

 

On 3/2/2022 at 4:27 PM, kennywtelejazz said:

It used to be everything came down to writing and performing good Songs . People just don't write that way anymore  .

Yes, they do. You just don't hear them.

Also, for me personally, lyrics are secondary. In fact, I suspect processing music cross-inhibits language processing in my brain, as I seem to be deaf to lyrical content unless I consciously focus on listening to words. If I don't, most of the time I have no idea what the song was about, even after I've heard it ten times.

 

On 3/2/2022 at 6:03 PM, Wibbles said:

But it is the role of middle-aged men to moan about how nothing is as good as it was in their youth, when the truth is they no longer feel relevant as the world changes around them.

Ah, yes, the youth's biggest fear; feeling irrelevant, i.e. "outside" - and their defining feature of relevance; having hip taste in music and being in-the-know on the latest buzz.

No, the thing is, you stop giving a crap. You don't care about their culture, and you loathe it, because you think it is ridiculous and they are ridiculous. That's how it's always been, and it's true; the new generations are ridiculous. Always.

 

On 3/2/2022 at 7:53 PM, Kurre said:

We have the loudness war. Bad or not. Music seems to be louder nowadays. Could have to do with the studies that say louder music is experienced as better sounding.

We have the overuse of voice. Bad or not. Wailing, wobble, warble and glides singing technics wasn't used that much back then. Could have to do with room to come up with new good songs isn't that easy nowadays. Seems that the new in a song isn't the song itself rather the technics and performance.

Loudness war is bad because it has practically coerced the use of dynamics as a powerful means of musical expression out of electronic music and desensitized listeners. You and I both know they don't do it to serve us, but themselves. Stupid and bad.

When you use the word "overuse" it already says you think it's too much. Bad, then.

I don't personally appreciate any sort of self-gratuitous effects. If it serves a musical purpose then it's fine.

 

On 3/3/2022 at 3:05 AM, Adalheidis Daina Aletheia said:

Yes the ease of access to electronics and computer programs that can now wipe your butt for you have seemed to dumb down the younger generations [ ... ]

I don't know how you arrived at that conclusion, and I think it's completely false. The "dumbed down" electronic music producer probably wouldn't become much smarter if given a piano and a pencil with empty sheet music, but he would certainly become less productive in short-term. Did you consider the possibility that the computer software environment is just the right thing for his genius to flourish?

[pwal³]

this vid seems relevant here

 

[pwal³]

and another, i suspect he feels done over by the industry, which makes sense as it's the industry - -only interested in selling products - that gives us this homogenous pap of today, a bit like how all modern cars all look the same

 

[Adalheidis Daina Aletheia]

On 3/4/2022 at 7:15 PM, sarine said:

I don't know how you arrived at that conclusion, and I think it's completely false. The "dumbed down" electronic music producer probably wouldn't become much smarter if given a piano and a pencil with empty sheet music, but he would certainly become less productive in short-term. Did you consider the possibility that the computer software environment is just the right thing for his genius to flourish?

Of course it is the right thing for some. That is why I said after that statement that it doesn't apply to all and that there is plenty of art and music created with software and digital equipment that is actually really good. And all of us use modern technology as well by using cakewalk or whatever software and hardware we use. And it is a definite upgrade from using an old Tascam cassette tape 8-track recorder for sure.

A better explanation of what I meant would be right here on BandLab, just look at the new BandLab SongStarter page, which is a form of software. Ok, so sure, it could be helpful to some, but it seems it is a bit to "here is a web page to do it for you" kind of thing. So yes the software environment can help peoples creativity flourish, I think I meant more specific types of software and hardware that I should have been more specific about. Another example of what I was referring to would be Roland's ZenBeats app. Ok, so yes it could be useful in some cases, but, if that's all anyone ever needs for now on is ZenBeats and BandLab SongStarter, then I would start to wonder. But those are the things being marketed now, all accessible with a smart phone, which brings it into question. So the future of musicians is having nothing but a smart phone? Hope that makes better sense as to what I was trying to say.

I edited the original post to correct the wording, that it is specific apps, software and hardware I was referring to, not all of it. And I understand that even criticizing those could offend people since those could in some cases be a valuable learning tool for some people.

Edited March 6, 2022 by Adalheidis Daina Aletheia

[TW5011]

To add another angle of perspective here (meaning I'm not arguing with what was said before but there are multiple sides to this topic), I saw a study that showed that most people's preferred musical tastes are set when they are 13-14 and don't change after that.  Personally I'd include the entire teenage years, but the point is true for a lot of people (not all, of course, but probably most).  So there's the style / genre we prefer, but like someone said, there's the experience -- and the resulting nostalgia.  That's a very real effect.  We can even find ourselves enjoying a song from our teenage years that we didn't really enjoy back then, just because it takes us back to a simpler time, when we had more free time and less burdens of life.

Also, when we revisit past music eras, the music is often the "best of" or "greatest hits" version.  But back in that time, there was a lot of crap, even on the radio.  Modern music hasn't been filtered like that yet.  And if we're listening to modern radio, it might be more likely to sound the same, because so many stations decide on one small niche to play, without much variety.

And to go with what someone said, our version of "real music" or "good music" is based on what we like, and that discussion happens with every generation.  At one point parents complained of kids with their distorted guitars...    Bands that are now classic were once controversial, even The Beatles, Elvis, James Brown, etc.

I find the whole discussion interesting, but honestly my approach to music my whole life has been "if it's good, it's good", meaning it doesn't matter if it's new or 20 years old or 200 years old, nor does it matter what genre it is.  I've found songs in all genres that I enjoyed (although some are more difficult than others to appreciate), and I continue to search for new music (when time allows).  I still occasionally go back to the music of my teenage years, which can bring back good memories, but I also try to make new experiences with music that's new to me.  There's a lot of great music out there, still being made even, but you have to either search for it or find a curator (blog/forum or playlist creator) that has similar tastes.

[pwal³]

4 hours ago, TW5011 said:

To add another angle of perspective here (meaning I'm not arguing with what was said before but there are multiple sides to this topic), I saw a study that showed that most people's preferred musical tastes are set when they are 13-14 and don't change after that.  Personally I'd include the entire teenage years, but the point is true for a lot of people (not all, of course, but probably most).  So there's the style / genre we prefer, but like someone said, there's the experience -- and the resulting nostalgia.  That's a very real effect.  We can even find ourselves enjoying a song from our teenage years that we didn't really enjoy back then, just because it takes us back to a simpler time, when we had more free time and less burdens of life.

then there are the rest who continually seek out new music - here's my timeline:

age - artist/style
4 - abba
8/9 - status quo/rainbow/saxon
11/12 - stranglers/punk
13 - -blondie/new wave
14/15 - reggae/dub/ska
16/18 - space rock (hawkwind/here&now/pink floyd) and new psych (spacemen 3, loop, etc) and robyn hitchcock/flaming lips/mercury rev/noise rock
18/22 - psychedelia old (13th fe, nuggets, etc) and new (ozric tentacles, butthole surfers, a bunch of bands nobody heard of), some grunge bands
mid-20s - -electronica (trance & ambient mainly)
30s - country & folk
40/50s - singer/songwriters

most of the later stuff i like is psychedelic in some way or another, and i rarely listen to the pre-teen stuff these days

i was lucky enough to work stage crew late80s/early90s while a student, so saw pretty much everyone passing through leeds/bradford around that time

great thread!

[Wibbles]

1 hour ago, pwalpwal said:

then there are the rest who continually seek out new music - here's my timeline:

age - artist/style
4 - abba
8/9 - status quo/rainbow/saxon
11/12 - stranglers/punk
13 - -blondie/new wave
14/15 - reggae/dub/ska
16/18 - space rock (hawkwind/here&now/pink floyd) and new psych (spacemen 3, loop, etc) and robyn hitchcock/flaming lips/mercury rev/noise rock
18/22 - psychedelia old (13th fe, nuggets, etc) and new (ozric tentacles, butthole surfers, a bunch of bands nobody heard of), some grunge bands
mid-20s - -electronica (trance & ambient mainly)
30s - country & folk
40/50s - singer/songwriters

most of the later stuff i like is psychedelic in some way or another, and i rarely listen to the pre-teen stuff these days

i was lucky enough to work stage crew late80s/early90s while a student, so saw pretty much everyone passing through leeds/bradford around that time

great thread!

That doesn't show in any way whatsoever in the Song Association thread.

[Jesse Screed]

Just how bad has today's "popular" music become?

 

[Tim Smith]

On 3/4/2022 at 7:15 PM, sarine said:

The biggest problem with this assertion is that agreeing or disagreeing depends on so many unspoken presuppositions which, when made explicit, tear down everything. So I'm not sure we even know what we actually want to talk about, and why it concerns us.

Well yes I would agree with that. I knew my comments going into this would probably provoke  comments like this. I think I mainly did it to show that we can still hold our own absolutes. What we feel personally to be absolutes in a world that is constantly trying to shape everything into something relative. There are absolutes and then there are things which are only absolutes to us. 

I think art has always been predominantly about opinion or solitary experience, so when someone comes along with such a firm statement as this it will surely be challenged. 

To say something is or isn't requires proof. Not just proof but the kind of proof a biased person can live with. 

If we go WAY back to before recording, we had some amazing musicians like Bach and Mozart. Now we have rock guitarists play some of that old music. This is a testament to the staying power of the music itself. Copying is the greatest form of flattery. I have listened to compositions that the composers intentionally patterned after a particular composer in an open admission of respect for their work.

Most of us tend to look back on only maybe the last 50 years or so when we have a much richer history. Bad motives promoted good music on many occasions.

Ecclesiastes says there is really nothing new under the sun. We tend to think something better is always up and coming, but we go back to primal beats for our compositions.

Music has always been built on foundations. Those foundations have essentially remained unchanged and are expressed as different systems in an attempt to give order to them all. This is why we have so many types and kinds of scales and modes in an attempt to classify all of it. 

This is why I will always say the older music was better, because without it there would be no foundation for anything. What has come from the older music has been simplified for the most part recently. Songs that once had in depth lyrics that were most like poetry are being replaced with simple little repetitive phrases. Something that might have taken a hard working musician a lot of time to make is now replaced with some dude who was making beats and came up with something in 5 minutes that became a hit.

If music is writing then these last several decades have been shorthand. It's as if we have stripped away the detail and traded it for simplicity. Where music was once a diamond ring in a jewelry store, now it's plastic ring in a 5 cent dispenser. Driven by the next big thing or the thing those who pull those strings are after.

It can painful to look in the mirror sometimes and to take a reasonable inventory of where we have been, where we are, and where we are going.

[PhonoBrainer]

On 3/2/2022 at 8:07 AM, Wibbles said:

Oscar Peterson had the right equipment but he failed to invent Acid House.

So that's a mark against the old guard.

(Roland used Oscar in the adverts for the TB-303)

He's now my favorite heretic and I hope he got paid.

If he really really played that thing as only he could, the machine would be smoking in two minutes.

[marcL]

On 2/28/2022 at 10:21 PM, Michael A.D. said:

I didn't watch the video... but isn't this a timeless expression (why is today's music so bad?) that has been used by generation after generation?

There were probably complaints about Bach and Mozart...

 

 

You should have watched the video!

[Wibbles]

2 hours ago, marled said:

You should have watched the video!

To watch some idiot talking bollocks for 20 minutes?