I'm surprised to see this getting upvoted. I find it rather unconvicing. There are many problems with it.
> The current list of most downloaded tracks on iTunes is filled with the names of bands from the last century, such as Creedence Clearwater and The Police.
Well yeah, younger generations, who are much more likely to listen to newer music, have moved on to streaming, for the most part.
> Just consider these facts: the 200 most popular tracks now account for less than 5% of total streams.
It's easier then ever for people to find different music to listen to now. Not everyone listens to the same hits anymore. It doesn't mean people are listening to less new music. Their listening is likely just more distributed across more new music.
> Just consider the recent reaction when the Grammy Awards were postponed. Perhaps I should say the lack of reaction—because the response was little more than a yawn.
As the article showed, people don't watch the Grammy's anymore. This doesn't mean people don't listen to new music anymore. People look more towards things like The Needle Drop[0] or streaming playlists then the Grammy's for music recommendations. Honestly, the Needle Drop's channel growth alone, should be enough to show that new music isn't going anywhere.
Overall, the vast majority of the points here can be attributed to the lower barrier to entry of making music, and to the new ease at which people can find the niche they like in new music.
In addition to all these good points, I was surprised a couple other issues weren't discussed at all in the article.
- Playing live shows is a huge part of how bands and artists grow their following and get discovered. COVID has had a pretty significant impact on people's ability to do that.
- The amount of high-fidelity music in circulation is continually growing. I would say the "modern era" of music (when record labels figured out how produce and distribute decent-quality songs at scale*) didn't start until the late 60's. All that music is still in circulation, and each subsequent decade there is another decade of "modern era" music to compete with.
* To clarify this point, I mean there is a huge gap in the sound-quality between the early 60's and the late 60's. Compare the difference in sound quality between the Beatle's first album and the Beatle's last album. Earlier music (like big band stuff) is even worse-quality, and there is much, much less of it
Yeah this strikes me as someone who is vastly out of touch with how the music market has developed over the past decade or 2. Are we really using "album consumption" as a metric for how much people are listening to music?
The increase in investments in old music catalogues strikes true to me, but this is more a reflection of who is willing and able to pay for music, rather than who's consuming it.
I think these metrics are all indicative of real trends in music, but "the death of new music" is absolutely not one of them.
I basically never watched the Grammy’s. It always looked and felt like record labels putting on a show to sell more albums.
Just like what radio turned in to.
In the meantime I listened to more and more music from friends, the library, the internet, and all sorts of live venues. Great music is flowing like water it’s crazy.
instagram and tiktok are full of zoomers lip syncing to songs, with links to the songs in the post
for starters: https://www.tiktokforbusinesseurope.com/resources/how-to-ele...
one wonders if a 20 second clip of a song nets more royalties than a play count on spotify
O'Sullivan v. Markie for the US, and Pelham, Haas v. Hütter, Schneider-Esleben in the EU.
Sampling requires copyright clearance. Flat.
The EU precedence is basically that if a sample can be recognised, then it is copyright infringing. That says exactly nothing about how long it is, and that is obviously an issue that scares the big records into legally checking everything, but just burns all the small ones into not sampling unless they're extremely certain.
The US precedence is that you require the original copyright holder to approve the sample and its size. Which is somewhat worse than the EU rulings.
As long as the sample is recognisably the original piece, you’re technically in violation. Samples of single-digit notes count are supposed to be permitted.
So yes, legally speaking you’re supposed to pay royalties for playing 20 seconds of a song, or even 10, or 5. The only time at which you don’t have to is when there is no way for the rightsholder to confidently state that you’re using the piece they holds rights to.
> As long as the sample is recognisably the original piece, you’re technically in violation. Samples of single-digit notes count are supposed to be permitted.
Bob James successfully sued rappers using a single note sampled from his original songs.
Yeah, some of the evidence he presented is concerning if true, but it was only backed by weak data or anecdotes.
If the absolute number of new streams really is dropping year over year, that is concerning, but a single year's worth of data - a year with massive confounding factors to boot - isn't enough to convince me, and the full report is behind a paywall.
Having the market share of new streams drop as a percentage is completely expected, and nothing to be concerned about. The early adopters of streaming services were younger, listening to what was new at the time. Now as they get older, even if they add new music at the same rate, the are still listening to the streams the created earlier, so the mean age increases. In addition, as the services become more mainstream, wider segments of the population sign up, and bring their listening habits with them. So you would expect a general shift towards older music. And as that occurs you would expect the music industry to invest more in older music portfolios.
That doesn't mean that newer music is in decline, just that the industry has a new way to monetize older music that it didn't have before. Musical preferences and purchasing have always peaked in ones teens and 20s, and as you get older you tend to buy less music and listen to more radio, or the music you already have. Maybe rebuy a tape or CD or MP3 version of the album you already had. But as consumption moves away from radio and towards streaming, the long term revenue for a hit doesn't drop off as quickly as it used to. This isn't a zero-sum game, and increases in revenue for old music doesn't necessarily imply a decrease in revenue for new music.
Likewise, for some of his other supporting evidence. I concur that the rock radio stations around here have pretty much completely stopped playing new music (country stations aren't so stale, can't speak for hip-hop), but that is largely because young people don't listen to radio much anymore, so why cater to them?
And yes there is risk that music industry could focus too much on the old music that is making them lots of money now, and not invest enough in new music that will make them money in the future - but his own testimony is that they are still pushing new music hard.
There might be something here, but the article didn't convince me.
Yeah, whenever I got to my countries "Top streaming" list on Spotify I have no idea who any of the artists are, I did see that new Elton John rework in there but that was the only "old music" in there. Maybe they, the bands and artists, creating the new music aren't paid and doesn't bring in money like their old counter parts and well end up being less important for the music industry as a whole?
Their definition of "new music" is to blame. Most of this "new music" is cookie-cutter junk that is artificial, derivative, simplistic, on-the-grid, auto-tuned, four-chord (or less) drivel. The labels intentionally manipulate the "top 200 tracks" so that this is nearly the only thing that makes it to the charts.
The young audience has had enough of it. They have streaming. They don't listen to the "top 200" anymore. Their tastes have broadened not only into new music which is not being tracked by the "top 200" but they are mining the music of older eras which is, by almost any measure, superior. It's not auto-tuned. It has a dynamic tempo because it's not beat-matched in a DAW. It often has complex chord progressions and key changes. This is also true of a lot of the "new music" the charts don't track.
And this is why the Grammys are also irrelevant. No one cares. We don't listen to that crap.
I love classic rock, but it's hard to argue that it is musically more complex than modern pop. Also if musical complexity was the same as merit then we would all just be listening to jazz and classical
Complexity is but one component. I enjoy a lot of music that uses simple chord progressions. But when you have simplistic music, with artificial vocals, and every human elements digitally normalized out, with uninspiring melodies, it's just empty and tedious. I feel like I'm being spoon-fed by mommy and daddy.
For what it's worth, I think the current wave of modern pop is much more interesting-sounding than 80's hair metal or the pop from the earlier 2000's that was autotuned ad nauseum.
For example, look at the current top of the Billboard Hot 100.
1.) Easy On Me - Adele. Adele's music is always far from empty. She is a true artist.
2.) Stay - Kid Laroi. This may not be your type of music and there are certainly a lot vocal effect here, but there's a lot going on here rhythmically and melodically. The chord structure is also pretty unusual.
3.) We Don't Talk About Bruno - Lin-Manuel Miranda. LMM is a genius, but it's a Disney song, so let's skip this one.
4.) Glass Animals - A rare indie hit to make it to make it to the top, this one is arguable the "simplest" song on this list. It still feels like it has character and that the artist has put their stamp on it.
5.) Shivers - Ed Sheeran. If Sheeran's music feels tedious now, it might just be because his music has been at the top of the charts virtually non-stop for more than a decade. Still it's hard to deny his talent or argue that his songs are simple musical drivel.
It's fair to say that MOST of what is produced is derivative drivel, but I would say that's probably true of pretty much any era. There were tedious grunge artists, tedious metal artists, tedius disco artists, tedious arena rock artists, etc.
Compared to a good 80s track like Jump https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SwYN7mTi6HM all songs you listed sound limp, fake and barely even alive. Maybe it's a matter of taste, but come on, tell me I'm wrong.
You are wrong, in that a lot of those tracks listed have completely different tempos and genres from the song you're comparing. So then you're favoring '80s rock, specifically glam metal, over modern pop. You're not wrong in preferring one over the other, but there's no objective comparison to be made when the songs are playing at completely different speeds with very different styles.
Funnily enough, there is an '80s revival going on with some modern pop right now, but again then you would have to compare the original '80s new wave, synth-pop music to it and not '80s rock.
As far as why there isn't as many modern rock top hits to compare to '80s ones... well, this decade didn't kill rock. That's a historical phenomenon that dates back to the 2000s or so.
Jump was primarily an incredible pop hit, with just a sprinkling of rock as seasoning. I'd say it crushes all those alternatives, with the exception of the Adele tune which was lovely, but agree it is hard to compare those specific two. Just too different.
That doesn't rebut my point at all! "Jump" has a completely different sound despite the synth, it's got far heavier rock instruments than everything else. You're comparing apples to doorknobs here.
Should have picked something more synthy like "I Ran" A Flock of Seagulls or A-Ha. Those are at least similar, and worth conceding their superiority to. But even that's still incomplete. The Ed Sheeran song has certain R&B beats and a sound that wasn't really present until like the late '90s imo. The Glass Animals song is even more R&B and is literally about loss and longing, so would be flattened by any song that's upbeat, completely incongruous from "Jump". Not too dissimilar, "Stay" is a mopey teenage relationship song, and thus would have a certain angsty lower energy.
So, not even the wrong genres, but wrong emotional beats entirely.
Not all pop is created equal. If you want a substantiative discussion about music, you need to go beyond facile comparisons. Genres are immense and myriad, especially in the modern day. Just because pop means popular doesn't mean it's within the genre of pop- most of the aforementioned songs are closer to moody R&B!
There are probably better, higher-energy, modern songs to compare with "Jump." Here are #19 and #20 in the current top 40.
But again, because rock has ceased to be the influential force it used to be, comparisons are going to be very imprecise. And Top 40 itself is a snapshot, not necessarily the best an era has to offer. For reference, here are some pop songs in the past couple years that have been bigger hits both in terms of the charts and the critics:
If you wish to dissent without substantiation, that is your perogative. However, if you wish to substantively compare eras of music, it behooves you to actually examine the music involved. If not, you cede the argument entirely.
It's most ironic that this discussion began with you touting "Jump", yet your reluctance to continue the discussion betrays the spirit of the song: "You've got to roll / With the punches to get to what's real." Eddie would be most disappointed.
You are wrong. Heck, even Jump was criticized to hell and back for being synth garbage instead of the shred metal that Van Halen was known for prior to that song.
There has never been a time in history when more great music was being created and made accessible to the masses than today. And I say that as a crotchety jazz nerd.
VH was never metal, they started before it with hard-blues reminiscent of Led Zeppelin with a party posture, then added piano chords and pop sensibility via synth. They were only in the neighborhood due to EVH imitators.
I had never actively checked out the Billboard Hot 100 until you mentioned it just now. I had to laugh at how blissfully unaware I had been at the amount of country music that comes out of the USA!
Going through those 100 songs, pop music doesn't seem to be noticeably worse than 20 years ago - except when it comes to the sheer volume of mumble rap. It stands out to me as uncharacteristically bad/monotonous/derivative/etc (and I say this as someone who was a big hip-hop fan all through the 80s/90s/2000s).
I don't think it's just a matter of taste, either, because I definitely don't like most of the chart (Adele/country/indie/etc), but I would never say it's lacking in musicality. Mumble rap is just irredeemably bad.
There is always lots of good new music in any generation if you look underground. If your tastes are open to the experimental and unconventional, you'll find an endless supply of great new sounds. But most people's tastes are strongly shaped by the older music they grew up with, so naturally they'll use that as their reference point for "good" music.
I listen to old music because it bangs and it’s real. I feel like this article posits a perceived problem and then makes no attempt to read between the lines to understand why no one is listening to a garbage product.
I agree man, the lame banality of pop music is deafening. Songs are produced the same way, use the same build and drop structure and sound the same. Triplets and shitty bass.
Forget complexity or originality, just use the same patterns as the last 10 years.
Modern production can be good some people pull it off, but not without singers who sing in a similar cadence and timbre. People who want to sound like someone else rather than being influenced by other people's sounds.
I tend to agree, but this is exactly addressed in the article:
> Some people—especially baby boomers—tell me that this decline in music is simply the result of lousy new songs. Music used to be better, or so they say. The old songs had better melodies, more interesting harmonies, and demonstrated genuine musicianship, not just software loops, Auto-Tuned vocals, and regurgitated samples.
In fact the second part of the article (after that paragraph) is much more interesting than the first. It argues that the music industry tries very hard to bury and hide genuinely new music (and ways of making it), by fear of cannibalizing the old (?), and that it is killing itself in the process.
I think that every 50 yo in at least the last 100 years thought that the music liked by the 20 yo is s..t and so will be for the now 20 yo 30 years from now.
There is no particular reason for that except that the 20 yo artists have to try something new and they are the models of the 10 / 15 yo.
What's interesting is that the new models don't seem so hugely more interesting than the best of the old ones. Maybe young people got wiser, maybe the music industry got enough material to play safe, minimize costs and keep advertising and selling the old tunes.
> It argues that the music industry tries very hard to bury and hide genuinely new music (and ways of making it), by fear of cannibalizing the old (?), and that it is killing itself in the process.
I read it a bit more nuanced: that the industry is failing to discover and promote new music because it's too preoccupied with making "safe bets" to profit from old music, and part of that is using lawsuits to defend it against plagiarism, which has the side effect of actively stifling new music.
You lost me when you complained about the number of chords. What a ridiculous argument. I guess Van Morrison, Johnny Cash, Bob Dylan etc better go back to the drawing board.
Bob Dylan was a poet, not musician. He wrote great lyrics, but did not have a shred of musical talent to make them into proper songs. That's why all his songs only became hits after someone else covered them.
> Resembling a cross between a choir boy and a beatnik, Mr. Dylan has a cherubic look and a mop of tousled hair he partly covers with a Huck Finn black corduroy cap. His clothes may need a bit of tailoring, but when he works his guitar, harmonica or piano and composes new songs faster than he can remember them, there is no doubt that he is bursting at the seams with talent.
To be absolutely clear, more people preferred Dylan's songs as a cover because, from that same 1961 review, "Mr. Dylan’s voice is anything but pretty. He is consciously trying to recapture the rude beauty of a Southern field hand musing in melody on his porch. All the “husk and bark” are left on his notes and a searing intensity pervades his songs." Or from his Wikipedia entry: 'Many early songs reached the public through more palatable versions by other performers, such as Joan Baez'
That you don't recognize it as talent seems therefore more a matter of personal taste. That same review ends with "But if not for every taste, his music-making has the mark of originality and inspiration, all the more noteworthy for his youth."
Your reference is to a 2016 recording of 'All Along the Watchtower'?? Surely you should juxtapose Dylan's performance with that of Hendrix, recorded only 6 months later than Dylan's.
But even then, when I think of "Mr. Tambourine Man" and "The Times They Are a-Changin'", I think of Dylan, not The Byrds or another cover.
In any case, the comparison seems rather pointless. I like Disturbed's cover of "The Sound of Silence" better than the original. That doesn't mean Simon and Garfunkel didn't have a shred of musical talent.
I don’t think it’s a ridiculous point, especially taken with the other elements mentioned. There wouldn’t be that much to the artists you mentioned if their lyrics were also banal, and they were deemed artificial or derivative. It’s a good idea to rely on a constraint of simplicity in some aspects, it’s just a problem when applied to everything at once.
I'd go one little step further: Recorded music has killed new music.
Thanks for the fact that the sieve of time has basically left us with only the best of the best of the past we have become so pretentious regarding new artists. Also the fact that music can be injected 24/7 into our brains everywhere we are with a simple internet connection has totally separated us from the reality of music making.
Why go outside and listen to some guy in the street or go at a concert in an abandoned factory if you can just lazily put on a pair of headphones and have hundreds of years worth of genius compositions impeccably recorded ready at your fingertips?
Some of you may say that taking inspiration from other artists is a big part of making new music, so the fact that any young lad can access such a catalog must mean he can get creative right away, right? Nope, because before recorded sounds if you took inspiration (and maybe lessons) from a matured and acclaimed musician you would then go back to your town and do your own thing. Few people would have known the original artist and after his death maybe a few sheets of music would be all that remained of him. Having learned from him you would have killed it after his death and your creative endeavor wouldn't get buried just because people have a better record playing at home
An interesting aside is that I was looking through a music history textbook belonging to one of my kids. The book chose the invention of movable type for printing sheet music, as the beginning of music as an "industry." I've also read that as early as the 19th century, sheet music was a huge industry, and had many of the characteristics that we associate with recorded music, such as "stars," musicians getting ripped off by publishers, and so forth.
It was reasonably common for people to have a piano in the parlor (if you were affluent enough to have a parlor), or some other instrument, and to entertain yourself by playing the latest "hits" from sheet music.
Yup, and you can still find quite a bit of that "popular" sheet music on IMSLP if you search around for it. The nice thing about sheet music compared to recordings alone is that it makes music into a truly literate artform; it becomes quite easy to read what the composer expected to be played, and to recreationally engage with the music on that level - perhaps even by performing it yourself! (It's of course a far more intellectually and audiatorily meaningful engagement than just passively listening to a recording.)
There's also a flip side in that when comparing what we read with a heard performance, we become far more intuitively aware of the additional improvisation-based elements that a good, 'inspired' performance can bring to the music. The sheet music itself is a bit like a structural sketch, a blueprint that ought to be suitably "ornamented" in a good performance.
Indeed, IMSLP is such a phenomenal resource. Both of my kids are classical musicians, and they enjoy getting together with friends to play chamber music. Besides being able to get so much material, they both have Apple tablets and page turning pedals, so they're largely paperless.
(I suppose I should point out that IMSLP is a crowd-sourced resource that could always benefit from new contributions. Even if you don't have scans or transcriptions of old music to upload, there's a lot that can be contributed by just curating information about the existing content. For example, lots of large collections of pieces have been uploaded that have no detailed listings of their contents, and are not cross-referenced from the wiki pages for their individual pieces. Fixing this will make things easier for users who are looking for stuff to play.)
i learnt about this from watching the 'jeeves and wooster' tv series - there was an episode where bertie got the latest hit song as a piece of sheet music and proceeded to the piano to check it out.
My 1910 player piano nods smugly. This trend has taken a long time to, as it were, play out. Many of the things that are a mess about music reproduction copyright today are actually artefacts of that era too...
I don't know, I don't think I'm listening to a lot of "genius music" and the things I like most are usually not played by some guy on the street. (Metal and EBM, or electronic).
Also in my experience the correlation between "likes music" and "likes to go to concerts" for people is not direct.
One more point, I'm one of those people who are not heavily into improv, so if the band is performing a version of a song I like that is very different from the album version there's a good chance I might dislike it. I'm not proud of that and of course they're free to do what they wnat with their music, but I like "a live version of the song" and not "a live reinterpretation with everything different", maybe that's also why I dislike jazz.
There are vocaloid concerts, and I would not expect the live to diverge from the recording, so people don’t attend for different takes on the song they know.
> I would not expect the live to diverge from the recording
EDM was quite possibly the biggest genre for live music this past decade, and it came with many memes of Skrillex "performing" by pushing a single button on a MacBook at concerts.
Of course it's happening to all other media. When is the last time you got together with your friends and recited an epic poem? When is the last time you acted out one?
Writing (and copyright) has been snuffing out oral traditions for thousands of years. Music was the last bastion of folklore for a long, since reading and writing sheet music has never been a widely taught skill, and recording technology only appeared very recently.
But today we are essentially living in the first era where there is no folklore, no art of and by the people. The way this will impact culture moving on is extremely hard to predict, but scary.
There’s folklore everywhere, they’re just in disjointed and perhaps vulgar (as in common) throwaway places you wouldn’t expect. Forums like Twitter or Reddit. YouTube comment copypasta. Viral videos. Memes. It’s dystopian and the lowest of low art, if it can be called art, but how is it not folklore?
Comparing the arts is something I've never understood. Literature, music, cinema, etc. are all different things.\n
Music is different because it can exist without it being recorded, literature, cinema, etc. can't. Non-recorded cinema is live theatre, non-recorded literature is live storytelling. Recorded and live music should be considered as two different things
> Recorded and live music should be considered as two different things
There is ample evidence you are simply wrong. Recorded music is replacing live music in every possible way. People play recorded music at their weddings and parties - once a staple of live musicians. People play recorded music while working - one of the main places where people used to hum and sing themselves. Where once one might pull out a guitar, today they are more likely to pull out a phone.
Sure, live concerts still exist - but this is more like the difference between going to cinema vs watching a movie at home, or eating out at a restaurant vs cooking at home.
Literature preexists media in the form of oral tradition. Your arguments about the exceptionalism of music would invalidate the Odyssey.
Your argument of recorded music vs. live music also doesn't make sense- why is a record more recorded than sheets music? If a piece of music is literally written down and can be replicated, it's no less recorded than the most pristine lossless sound file.
The big difference is you read a book once or maybe twice; same for a movie (maybe three times if it's "cult"); but you listen to a song hundreds of times.
Maybe dozens of times. The novelty of songs wears off after twenty or so replays- heard about this from a pop psychology podcast somewhere. Certainly good feelings towards a song with a personal emotional connection might linger for longer, but there’s still a neurological limit to the novelty.
Maybe, but recorded music became widespread 50 years ago, and what you're describing has been true for the last 20 years at least. Yet something feels different now.
My theory about "old" music: the 60's were essentially the golden age of Western culture, with brand new technology (synths, the electric guitar), and the sheer amount of absolutely new never heard before sounds coming out was insane. The wave kept going for a few decades, and now we're in a place where music is over-commercialized, perfectly produced, and there doesn't seem to be many new places to go with it.
There's a lot of good new music nowadays, but you have to look for it, and it doesn't have the same impact as, for example, hearing White Rabbit for the first time. It's nearly all acquired taste.
So, I think the problem here is that we lack impactful music because of a decaying culture, over-commercialization of the industry, and a lack of technical innovation.
What can we do about it? That's the same question everyone is asking about nearly everything else these days.
I’m an amateur musician (29years old, for reference). I can play the piano and the guitar and sing, but ever since I was a child my most innate musical talent was whistling.
Something I have noticed about the old radio hits from the 50s-70s is how fun many of them are to whistle. Most contemporary pop, rock, r&b, country can’t hold a candle to the popular songwriters of that era in terms of whistle-ability.
What I take away is that the popular songwriting style in that time was very “melody-forward” like in the days of tin-pan alley. Today I can tell that many songs are written in a more “mood-forward” way, and artists are more interested in exploring tambre than to make an absolute ear-worm of a melody. The result IMO is that those mid-century songs will have a lot more staying power.
Given the sheer amount of copyrighted music these days, I wonder whether some of the lack of whistle-ability and pure melody might be due to sheer number of melody permutations already taken by previously written music. Given common chord progressions and music scales, it's probably likely that any catchy song your write bears some resemblance to an existing song with a protective copyright holder. There are many examples of lawsuits claiming retroactive ownership of new music.
I couldn't tell you the date, though I sort of feel like it was somewhere in the late 90s, music shifted from music to entertainment. Sure there had been boy bands prior, there had been musicians that were more schtick than music, but something palpably changed. Yes, many will call out "autotune" but it feels more like that was a symptom than the disease.
My gut feeling is it came down to money - music producers / distributors realized they could separate the working musicians from the pretty face. As far as I'm concerned, this is the basic problem with movies too - the majority of movies are just a vehicle for whatever flavor-of-the-month pretty face they need to splash on a billboard. There's very little artistic about either music or movies, they are just "new" and industry expects us to eat what they feed us.
That isn't to say there isn't great music out there, and I'd argue it is the golden age if you are someone who wants to produce anything creative and take it directly to an audience. It just means that there's a breakdown between the "mainstream" and the "good".
I think ironically you might be on to something - it wasn't when MTV came onto the scene that music changed, but rather when they stopped being about music...
There's a great 2004 documentary called Kill Yer Idols that explains it all.
It follows the bands that inherited the mantle of seminal New York bands such as Sonic Youth. For the most part it's what you expect, with some great historical cuts, interviews, the new bands reflecting on and praising their predecessors, etc.
*SPOILER*
But it has a surprise ending. Suddenly there's a different tone from the old bands. They disparage the newcomers: The older bands completely rejected what their predecessors did; they destroyed it. The new bands that copy their music completely miss the point; what they are doing is antithetical to the art.
And I agree: We still have people playing rock'n'roll and hip-hop generations later. Are you kidding me? How shameful! How boring! Heck, someone play big band at least. Rock and hip-hop were revolutionary artforms; they didn't try to sound like Frank Sinatra or (for hip-hop) the Beatles - in fact, they tried to sound completely different, to demonstrate their rejection of the prior generation, to throw it in everyone's faces. Until I hear someone completely reject rock and hip-hop, burn them down to ashes (artistically), and piss me off, it's all bullsh-t. (And I mean it; I haven't listed to this crap in years.)
Electronic music has become heavily derivative of itself since the current "techno revival". newer artists are literally copying 90's techno artists, instead of inventing something fresh.
There has been zero innovation or new genre in Electronic music in the last 7 years. the 90's popularized techno, house, trance, abstract hiphop and drum'n'bass. 2000 popularized minimal techno and dubstep. Since then? Nothing.
Just because there are no lyrics and it is no longer technically a song does not mean that the music has no structure. Saying so is needlessly pedantic.
Some electronic music fits the bill, to a degree, and there is plenty of niche stuff - New Music (i.e., contemporary classical), for example - but the OP is about broadly popular music.
Correct.
There are millions and millions of old music made throughout many many decades. Thousands and tens of thousands stood the test of time and people like to listen to those regardless what the calendar shows. Others got mostly forgotten. New songs are from a much shorter period and so those are in the thousands and tens of thousands only. And perhaps hundreds or more will stand the test of times and will be listened to many many years from now too.
This is how it is when people can pick their music more freely instead of fed by the industry and from a seemingly endless list not just from those stamped as 'new'.
No killing is going on here. Music that people like will be listened to still, regardless of their age. It is just much much more out there from earlier than now, due to longer period and more people throughout the history.
There’s also tons of covers which can suit you better than the original (or even suit you at all where the original definitely did not).
For me “stories” (acoustic covers by the Scary Pockets crew and the same model of rotating guest singers & musicians — without the fixed members though Lerman is generally on guitar) is a daily with a 95% hit rate, but about half the originals I wouldn't listen to at all.
"Respect" comes to mind. Otis Redding recorded it in 1965, and in his version, it's pretty clear that respect means sex. Aretha Franklin re-arranged it and released her version two years later. She flipped the song to be from a woman's point of view, and it became one of the anthems of the women's rights movement of the late 60's and beyond.
Even though his version reached a decent #35 on Billboard, Aretha's version completely eclipsed it. Reportedly, Redding conceded that "it's her song now" (paraphrasing).
I've just listened to the original version for the first time. What leads you to the conclusion that it's "pretty clear that respect means sex"?
To me, he could mean she gets used to living without him when he's on the road and treats it like her home when he gets there, instead of theirs. If he's going to give her most of his money, at least she could make nice.
Also Johnny Cash's cover of Hurt , Nirvana's Man who Sold the World, and the Animals' House of the Rising Sun.
I've also seen it claimed that Leonard Cohen thought Pentatonix' cover of Hallelujah was the best he'd ever heard but I can't find any confirmation for that.
I'm not sure how big a factor it is, but I have for a long time wondered if music produced in the 70s (perhaps late 60s) and later would have more staying power than earlier music. That was about the time that really high quality masters could be made which sound good even today. Used to be that old music sounded as old as it was, but now you can listen to music from the 70s with the same quality as if it were recorded today.
I like old music because old music really is better. Most of the (non-"alt") music that I listen to was written and recorded before I was born.
It's not that old music is "killing" new music. It's that new music has been slowly killing itself since the 2000s. Even the Backstreet Boys and Three 6 Mafia seem fresh and interesting compared to the stuff I've been hearing on the radio over the last decade.
Even probably the best (IMO) pop artist of the current era, Stromae, writes songs that are mostly the same hooks and background elements repeated over and over for 4 minutes, with no change in dynamics or structure.
I'm honestly pretty sick of all the 60s-80s stuff I've been listening to, but what else is there?
Don't get me wrong: there was plenty of stupid garbage in those decades too. But the great stuff truly is great beyond most of what we get today, at least when it comes to stuff that's considered "mainstream".
But if the record industry wants to destroy itself, who am I to stop them? Keep listening to (and paying for!!) alt stuff, that's where the personality and creativity is.
> I'm honestly pretty sick of all the 60s-80s stuff I've been listening to, but what else is there?
Listen to a whole album. This is THE fundamental problem with streaming.
Any band that produced one good song probably produced quite a few other good ones. Bands that got pigeonholed into a "sound" probably produced other songs on their albums that weren't in that sound.
Even for mega-popular bands like "Journey", for example, 3/4 of the songs on their albums never get played anywhere. You'll probably find something you really like in that set.
Sadly, this seems to break down starting in the late 1990s.
> Bands that got pigeonholed into a "sound" probably produced other songs on their albums that weren't in that sound.
The best place too look for these (since the pigeonholing is often at the very start of their commercial recording, with the label pushing them into a particular niche) is stuff later than their most popular works (which are often what fuels their ability to ditch the narrow commercial optimization strategy that the label would impose for riskier, more diverse approaches.)
> I'm honestly pretty sick of all the 60s-80s stuff I've been listening to, but what else is there?
Well, as you mentioned yourself, there are lots of great musicians doing their thing, but mostly flying under the radar - you just have to find them, which has become easier thanks to Spotify et al. But then it's sad to see that they only have 30.000 or even 3.000 "monthly listeners", while Ava Max has 30.000.000. And, I did notice that even for new music I tend to be attracted to stuff that sounds more or less "retro", but I guess most music that's not > 90% electronically processed sounds retro nowadays.
You should check out Iggy Pop's BBC show. He's a 70s icon but he's still excited about new music and is always looking to share his latest finds. I also really enjoy BAGeL Radio.
Ultimately, curation matters. If iheartmedia doesn't care about your personal interests then none of the toplists are going to be useful to you. Find individual curators who are principled and like what you like instead.
Anecdotally, recently my dad got me a Tidal subscription (which has masters at supposedly higher quality than CDs) and an entry-level DAC. The two put together have blown me away and I've been having a blast the last couple of weeks re-listening to all my favourite records from as far back as the 70s.
I think the 70s are also around the same time that a lot of familiar genres started to emerge, while music from before then is often dismissed as "oldies" or saved for special occasions - e.g. old crunchy recordings of Christmas songs.
It might very well be the DAC doing the work then, or maybe the placebo effect is just making me pay more attention to music I first heard years ago and I'm picking up more :)
Thanks for the information though, I'll do some A/B testing to see if it makes any difference to me.
Just the Hifi level is probably enough for almost any system. I also noticed a huge difference coming from YouTube and Spotify on the Hifi setting in Tidal. I didn’t bother with Master as my ears aren’t that magical
Nah that's just Tidals marketing talking. "Anyone" can submit music to Tidal through services like DistroKid etc. However, to get the Tidal "MASTER" badge on your song, you basically just have to pay them extra. I don't need to submit another file to them, so it's the same master. It might be that they do some post-processing on it, but it's not the revolutionary thing they make it out to be.
> high quality masters could be made which sound good even today
Those mixes and masters were optimized in a world where everyone listened to vinyl, radio, home hifi, and crappy car stereos. This biases the whole production in certain ways, which together with fashions of those time colour the sound and dates it. Remasters (I think) remove some these biases. The new targets are headphones and streaming.
New recordings can and should sound very differently unless they are pastiches.
Some people like the old sound because it's already etched in their brains, and they want to hear it again. They've associated it with "genuine" and "honest" and whatever.
I think there is a similar thing in modern music - lots of people listen on tiny little phone or laptop speakers, and the sound often has a lot more 'information' in the treble range. The sound is designed such that it's listenable with the bass portions basically inaudible.
There is also huge selection bias, when people are listening to 60’s, 70’s 80’s w/e music they are listening to 1% or even less of the music that was recorded.
Exactly. And that also explains the difference in quantity: the author is comparing the best 1% of songs from a catalog spanning several decades, to the best 1% of songs from the last year or so.
No, music back then wasn’t better in general, we’re just not listening to the shit songs from that time. In 20 years time we’ll still be listening to all the good music from today, have forgotten about all the crap, and then decide that music from the 20’s really was better that whatever we’re producing in the 40’s.
this is so important to bear in mind. How many artists, songs do we remember and frequently play from a given decade? Be generous and say it's 500, and that's still a drop from the bucket of music that was released and popular in its time. Compare to today, when it's easier than ever to record and release new music, and it's a drop in the ocean.
Agreed. The latest remaster of Let It Be ALMOST sounds like it could have been recorded today. Conversely, I think a lot Adele's ALMOST sounds like it could be from the 70's
Listen to "One After 909" from Anthology (or the 1963 'bootleg' release).
Then listen to the version from Let It Be.
"Production" such as it is is, I'd think, 'minimal' in most senses - there's some mics in front of singers and amps. One was outside, one inside. But the sound is different. The performance is definitely different in 1969 - so much looser, relaxed, and more accomplished. In some ways it's hard to think it's the exact same band a mere 6 years apart (yes, excepting Billy Preston added keys in 1969).
I'd always wished they'd have re-visited a few more of those early ones (originals or covers), just to get that sense of development, progress and transformation in such a short time. It's interesting that we ended up getting at least one song captured so 'far apart' from itself.
Back then they were looking for any new technology that would help make clean recordings.
Nowadays audio professionals are looking for any new technology that will help imprint the analog artifacts of these years on the clean digital recordings.
it's not only technical. the 60s-80s were also hugely innovative and maybe people are just rediscovering just how good older music is now that's trivial to stream it. Personally I think the 2000s onward, with exceptions of course have just not been great for music.
Alternative explanation: 60s-80s is when the boomers were making music. Population boom led to production boom which led to a greater number of iconic works. Larger consumer population led to continued playing of said iconic works leading to more people growing up listening to them and perpetuating the cycle.
I choose to read this as a ever more pressing need to explore music beyond 12-tet. and not just in a niche microtonal fashion.
computers can take us there but not so long as MIDI is the standard. the 'problem' (which is really more of an opportunity to improve and go beyond) is not MIDI but the conceptual theoretical framework of the 12-notes keyboard underlying all 'western' traditions.
but don't get me wrong, it's no coincidence that this 12 notes system is so widespread, it really is very well made. anything that attempts to take music beyond it needs to be even better, which ain't easy as it's quite something already.
in summary, computer technology has so far just made cheaper and easier to do the same things that were already possible. no new things have been tried yet regarding the choice of notes to use.
I'm actually a big fan of this idea, and am slowly doing work to get my DAW (Ardour) more capable of supporting non-12TET and non-western tunings.
However, putting on my devil's advocate hat for a moment, this leans heavily on the idea that humanity didn't already explore non-12T music already, which is a difficult argument to make.
It is false that the 12T model originated on keyboards.
Finally, it also fails to note the reason why we have 12TET. Western music is relatively unique among world music cultures in the dominant role that harmony plays (contrast with the highly evolved classical musical forms from India, which are incredibly rhythmically and melodically sophisticated but lack almost any notion of harmony (let alone harmonic movement) at all).
If you want to make music that is rich harmonically, it is likely that at some point you will want to be able to modulate between similar relationships (call them "scales" if you like) but starting from different initial tones. Doing this without it all going horribly wrong requires ET.
ET arose from the need to play music in all 12 keys on a moment's notice without any one of those keys sounding like the obvious dump stat. It's a compromise to play a song that is strictly diatonic in a single key in ET.
Two artists who have been doing fascinating work around microtonal music are King Gizzard & The Lizard Wizard (check out the album Flying Microtonal Banana) and Jacob Collier (insane musician, perfect pitch, extremely worth checking out).
So there is a lot of cool music being produced today; much of it is not mass market/chart topping/etc and so it doesn’t just get dumped in one’s lap like pop music did in the era of radio.
That said, a lot of music today is over produced- levels set too high, etc.
Also, a lot of pop and r&b music today doesn’t seem very creative to me- pounding bass line, trivially simple melody, chanted, simple, explicit lyrics, and then depend on production to try to make it interesting. This obviously appeals to a lot of people but maybe not so much to others.
Mass market music is intentionally formulaic; search the web for “Doctor Hook”.
On the other hand, there are some super creative things out there. I like genre-bending remixes personally like Pentatonix’ cover of Fleet Foxes’ “White Winter Hymnal”, or Steven Seagulls cover of “Thunderstruck”.
Point is, that the stuff that will fall in your lap is mass market and not as creative IMO as pop was in earlier generations. However there’s great stuff out there; you just have to look for it.
Also the tools to find music you might like are better than ever, eg you can hum or sing into Shazam or Siri a snippet of a song you liked, online you have lyric searches. And all the music services have ML to find songs you might like based on songs you like.
all those years spending $17.99 just to have ten songs I can play, the chickens have come home to roost.
if there's not as much money to be made selling new music I think it's mostly because there is so much new music. anyone can record an album now, or whatever, release it, do the whole nine yards, without having to go through that ridiculous hurdle so many years ago of "getting a deal with a label". if you're into a whole genre of music, that's great, but there's like 18 thousand other genres that are all just as valid now, unlike in the 1980s when there were something like five. All the bands that you think are great and have changed your life listening to are not anyone else's in your town. it's as though the music industry has spread across the whole galaxy to millions of planets and it would be impossible for there to ever be some artists that are as important as names like the Police or Madonna were in the 80s.
It was widely understood that even then, while "getting a record deal" was the only way you'd have a career, the publishing companies were generally in it to rip the musicians through a shredder and extract as much cash as they can before discarding the talent, except in the very unlikely case that said talent did well enough to still be viable for more albums.
I'm sort of amazed that industry hasn't just thrown in the towel at this point, they were basically gatekeepers on recording and distribution technology.
There's no Moore's Law for music. Why should new music displace old? Baroque music is still great. So is Bebop.
I have a thought, which is that modern music production and distribution have blurred the lines between "recorded" and "live" music.
I'm a musician. The only way to hear my band is to attend one of our concerts. There's no reason for us to even attempt to commercialize our music. It doesn't need to have any lasting or widespread appeal. If we get an audience of 100 people, that's huge for us. Because of the novelty of our performances (never the same mistake twice), we don't have to be perfect in order to interest the audience. Nothing we play is "produced."
Prior to online music distribution, there was a sharp distinction between live and recorded music. If you wanted to reach beyond those 100 people, it cost an arm and a leg to get your music into commercial distribution, so it had to be targeted to a mass audience, or at least a big enough audience of enthusiasts to cover your costs. There was an economic reason to be good in the sense of having that widespread and lasting value.
Today, it costs no more to stream your music than to play it live. Maybe less. So it may just be that the financial incentives weigh towards creating throw-away recordings that last long enough to replace them with the next one. Just like with live music, your job isn't so much "the performance of a lifetime," as it is, "get them to come back next time."
Today, if you move outside of mass commercial music, there is plenty of great new music just like there always was. That's because, while the economics of popular music have changed, the economics of great new music really haven't.
Disclaimer: When I'm not playing jazz, I'm accompanying fiddlers and folk musicians. I've opted out of the popular music scene.
I think this is due to the relationship with music changing. I'm in my early 40s now, but when I was in my teen/early 20s, I would buy a 1 or 2 CDs a month and I would listen to those CDs over and over again. I would study the linear notes and the cover.
Music is too disposable now. With my spotify subscription, I can still listen to those albums from the 90s/early 2000s over and over again, but there's just so much new music. Even new albums that I really enjoy, I'll listen to them a handful of times and forget about them.
I find new music I love on bandcamp, perhaps that's outside the data used for this analysis?
Anyway, I spend thousands of dollars on amazing music on bandcamp, and the artists get a higher percentage from bandcamp than a studio, so I'm making the best choice for me and the future of my music.
I'm late to this thread. I'm shocked that I had to scroll past an entire page of "music is dead" to find something about Bandcamp.
Producing music is easier than ever so there's more music out than ever.
Listening to music is easier than ever.
If you're relying on mass media (tv/radio) and big labels to find music you'll enjoy, you're doing it wrong.
The curators nowadays are Youtube channels and Spotify playlists and indie labels on Bandcamp, I'm following music subreddits, finding stuff on Soundcloud.
I get the worst resistance when I say it but I think music died when autotune became ubiquitous. Curiously this happened at the same time that Napster hit so piracy got a lot of the blame.
Personally I think autotune sucks all the emotional connection out of music. It is one thing that Miku Hatsune sings like that, it's another thing that Miley Cyrus does. (Not to pick her out as a particularly great musician but she is a competent singer with a beautiful voice that stands on its own without processing.)
Autotune music just washes over people without having any effect.
When there is autotune music on at the gas station people can't tell you who the artists is sometimes they aren't even sure if it is rap or country music. Ask people on the street to actually name a Kanye West song and most of them struggle. I'm almost tempted to say that "Kanye West doesnt't exist or that he's just famous because his wife is famous."
Are you talking about Antares Auto-Tune? Or are you talking about pitch correction with Melodyne or in-DAW pitch tools? Or do you mean finer-grained pitching with vocal track slicing and pitching? Or do you mean splicing together tons of different takes to create the perfect vocal track?
As a producer, my sense is that people who refer to "autotune" generally don't know what they mean when they say it, but they really want to identify some point in the history of music where things became "artificial". That's not how it works. Plus, people don't just throw a vocal track through some magical automatic tuner and get a perfect result. There is an unbelievable amount of manual work involved to produce a high quality vocal track.
This stuff has been going on since the beginning of pop music. Most pop hits since the 70s have had spliced vocals where ideal takes are combined. Since advanced sampling began in the 80s, we've had manual pitching and adjustment of tiny vocal clips. That became easier in the 90s with computers. In the 2000s, when full-featured DAWs and plugins became practical, we've had more automatic pitch correction, like the auto-tune vocal effect you heard from T-Pain and others. But there's always something manual involved, and there's a lot of work from the vocalist to make this happen.
Max Martin, the producer of countless pop hits starting in the 90s, has detailed many times that he combines dozens of vocal takes and corrects pitch throughout the entire vocal tracks. This is normal. People actually want this.
They clearly mean the shitty vocal artefacts from pitch correction software pushed to the extreme. That's really not in the same paradigm as multi-take / double-tracked vocals.
While pitch correction software is used subtly in a lot of recordings, OP is obviously meaning the sound that started with Cher snd Daft Punk in the early 2000s, and is now ubiquitous on modern radio.
Pitch correction (in the non-Auto-Tune and non-vocoder sense) is used in literally all commercial vocal recordings. There's nothing really subtle about it.
EDIT: This guy is right about both of those tracks using Auto-Tune.
I'll say this. If you're in the middle of this culture you might not see it clearly.
I knew someone who spent a lot of time in a small town in Alaska and told me how the people there were obsessed with guns. If there was a story in the newspaper about vandals shooting up an outhouse the story would be full of juicy details about what exact kind of ammunition was used because the people in that small town wanted to know.
Really I am not offended by artists who use vocoder effects that are in character like Kraftwerk. I do think though that there have been a few phenomena in music production that I see from a distance.
One of them is that the vocals are really different than they were before 1990. I don't mind that Cher song because it was fresh at the time. I never liked T-Pain and I can't stand modern rap. I got into an argument on the phone with the DJ of an urban music program at a local college radio station and told him I wanted to hear some rap that wasn't auto-tuned. (I am a big fan of rap up until M.F. Doom or so.)
He put on a track from Three feet high and rising and I was struck with how completely out of place it was compared to newer rap.
Another thing I noticed was how many artists who were highly productive in the 1970s became irrelevant in the 1980s. I love synth music like Depeche Mode and Information Society but it seemed like the pervasive use of synths and a "music word processor" had something to do with why Billy Joel and so many others got "too old to rock and roll."
Here is a circa 1980 track which I think is one of the best engineered tracks of all time
what I like about it is how the vocals are kept distinct from the instrumentals such that the vocals have a strong effect almost like a-capella that you just don't see in the Punk genre that this track appears to be part of. I think there was a labor intensive process involved in "cutting holes" in the instrumentals in time-frequency space so that they didn't stomp on the vocals. Today I see technology used not to improve music but as a labor saving device and I think the quality suffers.
> As a producer, my sense is that people who refer to "autotune" generally don't know what they mean when they say it, but they really want to identify some point in the history of music where things became "artificial".
Sure, most people outside of music production (unless they've, say, seen the documentary on it) probably don't know that the sound they are referring to is the characteristic sound of a particular extreme setting in Antares Auto-Tune (which may or may not now actually be produced by other software), but I think they know exactly what sound they are talking about when they say it, rather than referring to some kind of fuzzy transition in the overall feel of music.
And it's kind of weird that as a producer you wouldn't be aware of that (upset, perhaps, by the publix characterizing the tool by that particular use, I could see, but not even recognizing the public association is odd.)
I'm assuming GP does not mean not any kind of attempt to produce nice sounding vocals. The are referring vocal tracks that don't really sound like human voices anymore, but like robot/android voices.
I just listened to the current top 5 pop songs, and 3 of them would definitely fall in that category:
- Heat Waves, Glass Animals
- Need to Know, Doja Cat
- Stay, The Kid Laroi and Justin Beiber
Happily the #1, Adele's Easy on Me, has a very beautiful, human-sounding vocal track.
That's because trap music (the hip-hop genre) and EDM (which has a trap subgenre) were highly influential genres in the 2010s and their influence continues to be felt, even though the latter's heyday with its huge electronic music festivals has passed. Those genres quite often intentionally used robotic vocals as an artistic choice. Simultaneously, there's been a revival of synthwave and other '80s electronic music in terms of influence and style. "Stay" somewhat typifies the latter.
When OP says “robot/android” voice I don’t think he means literal robot sounds like Kraftwerk, but instead that artificially flawless, ultra-precise, sterile “ISO-standard male(or female) vocalist” sound that seems to show up on many modern pop songs. You can’t tell the difference between modern singers today since they’ve all been produced into this single bland homogenized voice-like sound.
It's interesting to me that you called out Glass Animals. To me, they are exactly the type of music that's innovative, using interesting beats, vocals, and melodies.
Speaking of Max Martin, I had wanted to reference the Weeknd's new album Dawn FM into the discussion somewhere, which was coproduced by Martin. That is a heavily produced album, a lot of influence from '80s New Wave and Michael Jackson pop all the way to obscure internet retro syntwhave, yet the vocals were very human and soulful and not at all unemotional. YMMV, as always.
It's interesting that you mentioned Max Martin. I immediately thought of the new Adele single Easy on Me as a counterexample to people wanting 150-200 production tracks on a single song like you'll find on Max Martin songs. What's interesting is that Max Martin worked on the album 30 but is not listed as a producer on that song, and I think it shows. It's stripped down and you can hear the rawness, squeaks, and rasp of Adele's voice. Contrast that with something like a Max Martin produced Ariana Grande song (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cBDJDZAo41c) or Katy Perry, both who can sing extremely well on their own, and there's a stark difference in production taste. Something like Rihanna's (ft. Kanye West and Paul McCartney) FourFiveSeconds would be impossible for Max Martin to produce (yes it has vocal and instrumental processing and tuning on it but it is very stripped down).
Max Martin certainly has a nose for hits, but it's almost self-fulfilling. When he's producing everything, he sort of dictates what people "like" and other producers follow. I quote like because what's played on the radio is not necessarily what people actually like, it's what they're made to like through various marketing schemes. So I sort of balk at the notion that people want Max Martin style music. It's just what they're given.
It's also a bit misleading that people have been recording this way since the beginning of pop music. Yes, lots of takes and doubles, but these Max Martin and similar production style DAW sessions have literally hundreds of tracks that actually get mixed down into the final song.
Even ABBA had multiple vocal tracks mixed together, with subtle phase/pitch effects done with tape, to achieve richer/fuller/sparkling sound.
Meanwhile, breakdowns of Billie Eilish mixes show that Finneas, the producer, is using mostly techniques in principle reproducible on tape. Today's equipment and DAWs save time and space, but they are not what is creating the magic. It's easy to see.
Pointing out that there is greater complexity than merely Antares Autotune doesn't change the point at all. If music is snapped to 12-tone equal temperament it loses something for some listeners. You don't need to know the technical details (and I do know at least some of them, having developed vocal pitch detection algorithms) to have an aesthetic response to that.
That judgement is an aesthetic one though, and entirely subjective. Many people like the pitch "corrected" sound and there's nothing wrong with that. Personally I'd take Adele or Voces8 (the latter really know a thing or two about vocal pitch) over it any day of the week.
Exactly this. Complaining about auto-tune is a self report to not understanding what the loaded umbrella term means. Every artist adds some amount of pitch correction to their voice just like they add some level of compression to their voice.
When a layman is complaining about Auto-Tune, they're almost always referring to the super-corrected version where a voice will snap to the tonal "gridlines" perfectly.
Whatever you can glean from that complaint (that they don't know about the intricacies of music production) isn't really a counter to that. I still think that overly-quantized tones from the vocals sounds like shit.
Kind of like a digitally altered image "being photoshopped" is a valid phrase, even when GIMP or some other software was actually used.
The point is that most people cannot tell when the vocal is adjusted to the grid, because if they could, they would be complaining about it on every single vocal track since the 80s.
"Auto-Tune" is meaningless if you use it to refer to anything other than the specific effect popularized by Antares Auto-Tune.
My sense is that most people mean pitch correction and samples that are perfectly snapped to even intervals.
To me, modern 'robotically accurate' music feels like creating food using salt, sugar, lemon, MSG and coffee powder. It technically covers all 5 flavors and should be able to create any culinary experience out of them. However, it shows the hubris of food science to think that the food experience can be summed up as some simple y = f(x) style mathematical equation of narrowly defined base variables.
It is great in the moment, but one-dimensional and shows the human hubris of thinking that the entire musical experience can be captured within these mathematically accurate beats and notes, ignoring all the nuance that a trained musician either accidentally or intentionally inserts into a playthrough.
> People actually want this.
I'll extend the food analogy a little bit. People want more MSG on their chips because that sells, and people want more sugar in their coke because that sells. But, it is never a person's answer for the best meal of their life. It is usually one that keeps rewarding you for revisiting it every time and one that evokes a deep sense of nostalgia, memories and emotions.
Tool's Wings for Marie hits as hard as it does, because you can hear the imperfections and crackle in Maynard's voice when as he mourns his mother through the song. It's emotion conveyed through musical nuance.
You remove nuance, and you're stuck with songs that are the equivalent of 'eating chips'. Freddie Mercury's big performances and Van Halen's Eruption still cause goosebumps, decades after their heyday, and part of it is because they are nowhere close to 'perfect'. But, the heart of their music is found within those exact imperfections.
All pop music now feels sanitized. I recognize that it takes a LOT of effort and talent to continuously create sanitized works that everyone will like. I also recognize that this isn't exclusive to music. Marvel Movies and COD games are a reflection of that exact phenomenon in other media. But, that media is not made to last. I love the experience, but I want to move on to the shiny new thing within a week.
___________
I suspect that this was always true with commercial pop, but every half-decade there would be a new genre that would be created, whose pioneers would rule the pop world and stand above the commercially sanitized works for the duration of their reign. Backstreet boys, Spice Girls and Bon Jovi were just as sanitized as any artist today.
I went back to look the top selling albums of each year, and the sales numbers completely betray the narrative of our musical history. The albums that go on to become the highest sold over time [1] are rarely the ones that topped the billboards for their year [2]. A fraction of the top selling albums of all time are their highest selling album of the year.
But one thing you can see in the highest selling albums of all time that don't make it onto the yearly charts, is that they were usually popularizing a new musical movement. Nirvana, Metallica, Led Zep and Linkin Park were scratching new itches that their pop counterpoints did not touch. (I stick to rock, cuz I know more about rock).
Now, getting to anywhere near the top 10 needs a level of virality that can only be facilitated by huge marketing budgets or a short hooks that organically spread on the internet (tiktok recognized this and made an entire platform based on it). This means that a full albums from artists without a marketing army is shit out of luck if they want to enter the zeitgeist. Becoming a moderate success in their sub-genre is the best they can aspire to be. It is a double edged sword, every artists regresses to the mean sales afforded by a certain marketing budget.
_________________
It is not all doom and gloom. Pop music may sounds creatively bankrupt, but there is so much amazing music right under the surface.
Clipping. ,The Dear Hunter and Vulpeck are moderately successful bands that I've gotten pop listeners effortlessly hooked on, and they're all doing really creative stuff. If these bands had the sort of marketing budgets that pop artists do, then I would not be surprised if they started topping charts too. If anything, I think they would live far longer in our cultural memory than any one of the dozen milquetoast albums that are topping the charts right now.
What is "pop music" even? Maybe the Top 40 crowd is just always going to be a certain style for mass market audiences, and will always sound sanitized and overproduced because of production styles. But that's not all pop music.
> Nirvana, Metallica, Led Zep and Linkin Park were scratching new itches that their pop counterpoints did not touch. (I stick to rock, cuz I know more about rock).
Hybrid Theory was the first album I ever bought, and even as much as I appreciated it then and I do now, I do not think they were the opposite of commercially sanitized. The production sounds as fancy and artificial as any pop band created in this era. Their sound was far more family-friendly than contemporaries such as Korn. Heck, even the original band's name was Hybrid Theory until Warner suggested they change it to be adjacent to Limp Bizkit in alphabetical order.
I think rock is being over-lionized in this discussion in general. Everyone remembers grunge fondly, less so hair metal.
Regarding Kanye West, I think that might just be your social bubble. I know multiple people who seem to randomly start talking about Kanye West songs totally unprompted.
And similarly, your dislike of auto tune likely reflects your cultural upbringing more than anything else.
Kayne's in the top 20 of most albums ever sold.. OP saying he basically doesn't exist because some hypothetical people hypothetically wouldn't be able to name a song is hilarious. And chalking that up to autotune?
Yea same, I know people like that though I personally never engaged with his music. I wonder what the decision boundary for being in each group is? I grew up listening to rap from the 80s, 90s and early 00s so it prob isn’t that.
You're talking about mainstream music, which is essentially mcdonald's and starbuck's. There are millions of other coffee shops and burger stands out there that are only serving thousands of people instead of billions.
If you think music died or is dying, you're probably just not exposing yourself to enough new music. Or you're just living in the past. Or a combination of both.
Not sure what autotune has to do with anything. It's over-use in the top hits can be annoying, but who gives a fuck. You don't have to listen to that music. The vast majority of music I listen to, across a wide spectrum of genres, doesn't use it.
There's a huge amount of survivor bias when thinking about old music. All the crap that never made it far is mostly lost by now; what's remembered and what's on the 80s playlist is basically the top pick from a whole decade, readily discovered for you and sprinkled with nostalgia from your childhood.
Also, in different decades, different styles were mainstream. Today you can find music for any genre that was popular in any decade and the best of it will also sound great; it's just not present everywhere or readily picked out for you. It's quite likely that you don't like the decade, you simply like the music style and didn't find the niche that is still producing it.
Is autotune ubiquitous? Other than the trend of artists like T-Pain who used it for stylistic effect (who actually has a great natural singing voice- https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CIjXUg1s5gc), I don't think it was ever overwhelmingly used except in certain genres such as EDM.
Any ignorance of Kanye West song names may simply be a reflection of his more avant-garde new albums not having the same memorable hooks as old ones, but I can at least think of one recent song by him ("Donda").
What you think of as Autotune from your examples was popularized by Cher (turning it up all the way to produce that effect).
Used sparingly it can turn people with terrible pitch into reasonably good singers. Turned up a bit more gets you a pristine sound, which sometimes pops pleasantly but often enough ends up bland and less memorable. You may have to have an ear for music a bit to notice it.
Fair point, but it still depends. Even inhumanly perfect sterile vocals can be offset by interesting instrumentals and innovative production. Really depends on what genre, or even what specific song, we're talking about. There is a lot of overproduced vapid pop (to pick a genre that might use this to a higher extent), but there is also a lot of interesting pop.
I can't disagree here about some really good music using Autotune. Even if it is not your cup of tea, Cher's "Believe" is undeniably iconic.
I am not a record producer, but I feel like Autotune is a big part of the reason that we don't have many modern classics. I would love some producers' hot takes on this article.
Yes. What you're thinking of is "autotune" as in totally overdone, which is the signature sound people know. What the parent is referring to is autotune as in tone correction (which is, funnily enough, what the autotune software did, unless you turned it to 11). And that's everywhere; it's basically a standard part of a post-production pipeline right now. The thing is that you really can't notice it; it's just that singers hit the tone just a bit better.
And even live concerts are not safe, you can easily (and cheaply!) do that in real-time by now.
Autotune the special effect a la T-Pain is not ubiquitous, but Autotune, the process, definitely is. The software itself (or its cousin, Melodyne), or the rack unit are still used in most pop music. Even bedroom studios will have it. Not using it today is pretty much a stylistic statement.
It can be set to be very subtle to the point of imperceptible, keeping the vibrato and the portamento, to the point it is impossible to pinpoint its usage. But it kinda has a sound: vocals that go trough it sound absolutely flawless.
Whether regular people can perceive it, I have no idea.
> Whether regular people can perceive it, I have no idea.
If the singer is somewhat good (so that the correction is small) and it's applied well, you have no chance. Even musicians will have a hard time.
But you can definitely notice it in sum - everything sounds pitch-perfect and all the little misses, which might be stylistic in and by itself [0], just go missing.
[0] A good sound engineer will of course know when not to use it, but the unintentional characteristics go missing.
Yeah, you’re right. it’s when you put all the things together that it makes a lot of difference.
It’s not just autotune, but also the fact people today can make almost infinite punch-ins, a lot of music is time adjusted, samplers and modern synthesizers are in perfect tuning (compared to orchestra/guitar/synths of the past).
IMO “perfect music” has its own sound, which is a good sound, but there isn’t much to go after it. Maybe the next wave will be a little looser when it comes to this.
Some degree of vocal tuning is probably ubiquitous, but the extreme T-Pain/Cher effect is definitely not ubiquitous or even that common anymore.
Who are the biggest artists today? Off the top of my head: Taylor Swift, Ed Sheeran, Adele, Billie Eilish, all of them use pretty much natural-sounding vocals.
And the big artists that use Autotune and vocal effects like The Weeknd, Kid Laroi, and Post Malone don't do it to the same degree. Their voices certainly retain some unique character
And to add to your last point, I’d say those three vocalists you mention are using those effects for stylistic purposes and not (just) to cover up human-sounding flaws for the sake of overproduction.
You should walk the music documentary This is Pop [0] on Netflix. It goes into a lot more details about the inventor and the history of Autotune.
In summary, it was used a lot longer (like old Mac 68k days) by a lot more artists than you realize. T-Pain turned an aid for lackluster artists into a form of art all its own. And the industry was pissed.
This only applies if you somehow are only exposed to music that is played on the radio. The same type of people who don't connect with current popular music probably didn't connect with previous popular music. Many people largely disengage with seeking out music once they enter adulthood, if they even did to any meaningful degree at all. They might still listen to music they liked when they were younger regularly, but they aren't going out of their way to discover it.
My parents are in their 70s and were never that into music. My dad kind of liked the Beach Boys, but if I asked either of them to name a Beatles song they would struggle as they were pretty much out of school by the time they reached superstardom. I, on the other hand, listen to tons of new music, but if you asked me to name a random song on the radio, I probably wouldn't be able to name the artist primarily because I don't give a shit about the kind of music they play on the radio. I don't think new radio music is any better or worse than old radio music. It's always been corporate-driven pablum, autotune or not. As for autotune itself, it can be effective when used appropriately as a texture, and not necessarily as something to pitch-correct a bad singer.
Your perception of Kanye only being famous "because his wife is famous" is something that is influenced by your own media consumption. I'm not sure if you actually asked people that they would struggle - Kanye has been big for a long time. I think if people struggled to know the names of the songs it would probably just be because Kanye isn't radio friendly.
The reason music "died" around the time of Napster, is that editorial distribution died. Before Napster, if you wanted to listen to music you either had the radio - which played the same thing for everyone, or you really had to dig record crates. Now it's completely possible to exclusively listen to hyperpop-house-vaporwave artists and not know who is charting. In short if you were expecting someone to curate your music, that mechanism no longer exists; likewise if the algorithm of your streaming service of choice is never playing Kanye for you, you might be confused to why everyone thinks he's so famous.
Kanye West is one of the most listened to artists in the last two decades, and is widely considered one of the most influential artists of the last two decades.
If you haven't at least tried to listen to My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy with an open mind, you can't really trash on his music. If you have, and still don't like it, that's fair.
> Ask people on the street to actually name a Kanye West song and most of them struggle
I think Kanye may be a terrible example for your point since people tend to listen to his music for the lyrics, which are often well crafted. Your point makes more sense for mass produced pop music where the lyrics for almost every major song are written by ~6 different groups. In that case most of the lyrics tend to have similar tone and themes and so it matters much less who is singing them.
I'm with you on autotune. It's an effect that was briefly musically interesting and then almost immediately massively overused. I can't stand the sound of it now.
I entirely disagree on music dying, though. The bland stuff that washes over people is made to be bland and wash over people. You don't have to listen to it.
We're living in a golden age of music production if anything, with every conceivable taste catered to. The challenges are on the consumption side: finding the music you like and forming a meaningful relationship with it can be challenging in a time of such excess.
This feels like the same argument you'd here when electric guitars became ubiquitis. Or synthasizers.
Can you not create emotionally resonant music without vocals? You'd be hard pressed to find someone who doesn't think you can. What about with no vocals and only electronic instruments like synths. You can. So why does adding a level of "electronic" feeling production to vocals do anything different? Sure, there's _bad_ autotune. There's also bad singing without it. But there's nothing inherently wrong with autotune.
I agree that there isn’t anything inherently wrong with autotune, but electric guitars and synthesizers were very expressive instruments that generated new possibilities for musicians to express themselves: guitars with more sustain allowing for legato playing, for a different kind of vibrato, synthesizers allowing change of different parameters that traditional instruments can’t, etc. “Autotune the T-Pain effect”, is also a new sound…
But Autotune/Melodyne being used to make vocals flawless is sort of “removing” flaws from vocal tracks. This would be similar to replacing an orchestra with Gemeral MIDI instruments. It is technically perfect, but there’s less expression.
Whether this is good or bad I don’t know, but part of the charm of old recordings is the infinite variations of tuning and timing.
That’s an interesting idea, but I believe your right that much modern music have the problem that it all sounds similar. Once in a while some artist stands out, but so much modern R&B, pop and rock is so simular that you can switch songs between artists and no one would know.
It might be survivour bias and was always the case that most music sounded similar within a given time period, but it could also be a result of high prompted and manufactured artists. The article does sort of touches on this subject when talking about which artists get promoted. That’s really what we’re seeing in movies, TV, design and much more. The risk is eliminated and only the safest option is push forward.
> Ask people on the street to actually name a Kanye West song and most of them struggle. I'm almost tempted to say that "Kanye West doesnt't exist or that he's just famous because his wife is famous."
Not a great example - whilst Kanye is undeniably a vacuous prat these days, he was one of the most influential music producers in his generation and has two, arguably three, albums that are widely regarded as having raised the bar for hip-hop. He's won 22 Grammys.
Have you heard "Jesus walks"? The man was brilliant.
He has certainly contributed more creative talent to the world than Kim Kardashian. They were both extraordinarily famous before they married.
Do you think that Beethoven would feel the same way about rock and roll, or 1900s folk feel the same way about vinyl killing sheet music and so on through the history of music.
I once heard a saying, "the future of music is not music." All through history, most recently with Autotune and previously with rap music (and further back in other ways), we hear people saying, "that's not music!" Invariably, these styles establish themselves and time moves on. I mean, if you want to talk about antipathy and outright-racist music criticism and hatred being thoroughly demolished, let us look at how rap has taken over Country music, because it has. 30 years ago half of everybody didn't consider rap to be music. Do you remember people saying "(c)rap" or "hippity-hop?" It wasn't that long ago!
You say music died not when Buddy Holly and the Big Bopper went down, but with the advent of one musical effect among many in the recording signal path (and I bet a lot more of your favorite artists use Autotune than you realize). Emotional connection is just what you like about the music. Many people think Death Metal has no feeling, or that Yacht Rock is dead-eyed pablum, or that any toddler could make a dance music track. After all it's just a drum machine, or cocaine, or screaming, and where's the love?
>Ask people on the street to actually name a Kanye West song and most of them struggle.
It's been a long time since my phone set on shuffle allowed me to memorize the title of anything. There just isn't the repetition that fixed-format radio and "I can afford one 12-song album per month," gave people. That's how you memorize song names, or you hum it into Vocaroo and hope an internet stranger helps you out. It's absolutely irrational to blame Autotune for this state of affairs, and if anything it made songs more identifiable! It just so happens that people and song titles aren't as tightly connected anymore. I don't know how you can say that without knowing a song's title the music doesn't even exist.
>it's another thing that Miley Cyrus does. (Not to pick her out as a particularly great musician but she is a competent singer with a beautiful voice that stands on its own without processing.)
That's funny because my way of dismissing her is to call her a Brenda Lee ripoff. Thus, emotion gets sucked out in many different ways. There's no accounting for taste.
My free advice is to check out the stuff people don't think is music, because not-music is the future of music, and I feel there's probably always something valuable in evolution. If you don't like it, that doesn't mean you're closed-minded, but if you reject everything about it out of hand, you might be. Not that there's anything wrong with that.
A coworker 10 years my senior when I was 20: When did MTV start sucking and VH1 get good? MTV used to be good and VH1 used to be for the boring older crowd. It's way better than MTV, now.
Me: Hate to say it, but I don't think it's VH1 that's changed.
I think that is part of it, also the way that mass-market music is mixed today. It's very loud all the time and has no dynamic range. This has been a problem for a while TBH but it certainly isn't better in 2022. It all combines to make a very artificial sound.
There's a reason why DAWs usually have a "humanizer" knob. Turns out humans relate better to imperfect things that feel like were created by other humans than they do to overly perfect things obviously created by machines.
No, it's about tiny and usually unnoticeable delays in hitting a note or a beat. There's nothing incorrect about them. They are not variations either, just tiny mistakes that happen to _all_ humans when they play an instrument.
Gold digger was an amazing song when it came out. After that I would struggle to name one. I know that the Ye is talented and influential, I just don't think as much as some people make out.
Autotune is just one of many tools that were used to (IMO) overproduce music in the early '00s. I think DAWs in general give producers enough rope to strangle the life out of any recording.
You don't think people on the street could name "Golddigger"? It was in the first episode of "Glee" for Pete's sake. I think you'd have more luck getting people to name a Kanye West song than whole lot of other artists.
It'd depend on the generation of course. Maybe GenX/Boomers would struggle with Kanye ( and I say this as a GenXer ) but I'd guess a lot of millenials/genZ's would struggle a bit with the Rolling Stones. I'm not sure what either proves.
I doubt the person who could not identify Kanye West could also identify nearly any other musician. Do you think they'd be able to identify John Lennon?
I only know the one where he talked over the top of a Daft Punk track. I already had the CD with the Daft Punk track which was really the same song so I just kept that one.
Personally I became alienated from the music industry and don't know how to find new music.
I care about privacy, so I opted out from having a youtube/instagram/facebook account. I never used streaming because I listen to albums and want to own my music.
The result is that I don't even get notified when my favourite musicians recommend a band or even release a new album.
Where is the product for me? I am not in any of their data and just sit here listening to an offline library I built more than 10 years ago, desperate but struggling to find new stuff
Depending on your genres (there’s not a ton of music that is being played on the radio), you might want to check out Bandcamp [0]. You can follow labels or musicians to get notified of new releases, most of the time you can stream the whole album unlimited times for free before deciding to buy it, downloads have multiple formats available including lossless. It’s where I get 99% of my music from (the outliers being some very few I have to get from Amazon, and one Danish dude [1] who hates the modern world and only sells CDs via snail mail)
For new Metal releases, I used to subscribe to the RSS feed for a Metal torrent tracker, I mostly stopped listening to bigger bands, but before that, the notifications were better than what I could find elsewhere.
Thanks for the second link. Years ago I emailed Erik Ravn about getting copies of some hard to find Wuthering Heights albums. He mentioned that he was working on remasters after he got the rights back from the record company. Glad to see he finally got it done.
I understand that you said you want to own music but I would suggest separating discovery from your library. You should let yourself listen to singles released via streaming as long it has corresponding artist and title name. Internet radio is still going strong. I know in the US many popular traditional radio stations have an online stream as well. You will have to be okay with ads though.
If you're focused on a getting a multi-track experience, I would strongly recommend looking up live show recordings of some of your favorite artists. You will have to use YouTube or SoundCloud or wherever because it's rare that an artists release a show on something like a bluray. I have seen it in Kpop but not much in the west. Netflix and Disney plus have gotten into releasing documentary concerts like Taylor Swift's Folklore: The Long Pond Studio Sessions.
The Billboard's top 100 is still a pretty decent way to expose yourself to new releases.
You can still get notified and be up to date with the world even while caring about privacy and not bothering with social media. Just pretend like its 2002 again. Where do you get notified about your favorite bands new music? Your favorite band's website. Where do you read about shows coming to town? Your local venues website. If you don't want to keep checking manually there are services today to generate an rss feed or an email. Where do you find new music related to your existing music? Your local record store. Where do you see whats popular? The billboard 100 or who is on festival setlists.
How did you do it before youtube and social media?
I suppose there are still some magazines about music on the news stands, but I'm not sure if they cover "new music" instead of "new releases" of the same old music.
I looked into my podcast app and there is a music category. Perhaps there are some interesting podcasts presenting new music.
You could still use streaming and then buy the physical releases of the music you like.
It's one of those things that takes effort. When I was younger I had a constant stream of gigs and recommendations from friends, but that's faded away as we all got older. It felt easier, but that was mainly due to it being a collective effort
You've said you're against streaming, but you could just use it as a way to find new music before buying the physical albums. I use the radio feature in Spotify all the time and often end up finding new music through it - you basically pick an artist or song you like and it makes you a playlist of similar music. You do need to change the radio start point occasionally if the algorithm starts getting repetitive, but it works well enough
Well there's still radio! You have a vast amount of professional and amateur radios at your disposal thanks to api like radio-browser.info [0] which many sites and mobile apps use. In fact I do such a site myself [1] (but I'm not Russ Hanneman) ;)
Personally I miss Google Play Music and its automatic playlists A LOT.
so I opted out from having a youtube/instagram/facebook account
Oh, you didn't lose much. My playlists are decimated monthly by "video deleted/unavailable" and "not showing 3 unlisted video" or something along the lines. And there is no way to know which video that was. I don't even care to add music to playlists anymore, I just search for it.
Also, algorithms stopped delivering new stuff long ago. The right column is full of tricking you into watching some promoted bs unrelated to the video.
I listen to a lot of "new music" in my particular genres of preference, and that's mostly thanks to Spotify's algorithmic "Albums you might like" (on top of the usual music festivals and friends hot tips, of course)
Am I somehow in the minority of people happy with their stuff? I never go to youtube for music. Should I?
I have a subscription to YtM; I think it's great (though I think the user interface isn't as good as GpM was). Playing a radio based on a track I like is very good for discovering new music and bands - it has consistently given me an essentially endless stream of music that is different, but similar, to the chosen track; my subscriptions have increased dramatically in the last couple of years based on that.
Anecodtally, YtM seems to be better for EDM these days; my friends, who are mostly spotify, complain that they're not presented with the same quality and variety of music as I am via YtM. (EDM is just a portion of my tastes, but it's where I have noted a difference in perception between YtM and Spotify).
Sounds like Spotify works for you; if you're finding that "albums you might like" is giving you sufficient good new picks, then why change. If you feel that it's not giving you enough, it might be worth trying YtM (I've been using it for years, and don't know how much that impacts its ability to offer me new music I like, so obviously YMMV).
In the very late 80's to early 90's is when I feel music as a monolithic cultural force started diverging. You had major veins of music that were able to stay in their own lanes to develop and had the music industry/radio support to do so - rap/hip-hop, pop, and alt-rock.
Early 90's is also when various underground styles and genres--house, techno, rave, jungle, industrial, were a thing enough to be easily discoverable even without the Internet. It was also then when 70's music was old enough to be called classic rock.
Then:
- Rap, techno, and other electronic-based styles of music showed that one-person music groups could be a thing.
- Music production technology started a trend of getting cheaper and cheaper as PCs became capable of real-time audio processing and non-band genres proved themselves viable.
Combine that with the Internet and it's not surprising we have an oversupply problem.
Then you have the Internet's effects on any type of media - almost costless to distribute, streaming and mp3 players enabling people to listen to exactly what they want anywhere they want, and social media's bubble effects. So it's not surprising we have a problem with things attaining cultural significance.
It wasn't like this in the past so music from the time when it wasn't has a special nostalgia.
It has never been a better time to get new music if you are willing to escape your bubbles and look, though.
> So the problem isn’t a lack of good new music. It’s an institutional failure to discover and nurture it.
It really looks like the music industry as an institution is failing, and I'm fine with that. It's not needed anymore.
> So the problem isn’t a lack of good new music. It’s an institutional failure to discover and nurture it.
I read Gioia's book, and respect his opinions on music. I think he is missing at least one point:
This finding makes complete sense if you assume there is nothing fundamentally better about new music than old music, but that there is much more old music, and that it is better curated.
There are many more of what we could call "great songs" from the last 100 years than in the last 18 months, not because music was better in the past, but because there was so much more of it. It's also really easy to find this old music now, because everybody knows about it, has written about it, has put it in lists, has included it in soundtracks, and so on. So, if you only cared about quality, and you picked your playlist more or less at random from a collection of "great music", you would expect the vast majority of what you listened to to have come from the past. Which is what we see.
That's even setting aside recommendation algorithms, which give you more of what it thinks you want. How many songs from the last few months are there that are similar to the one I said liked? A few, probably. But, compared to the number of songs from the last 50 years, it's probably a small number. So, if you catch me randomly listening to music Spotify thinks I like, it's going to be mostly older music, even if I have no preference regarding the age of what I listen to.
The relative prevalence of new music makes sense in the past, when you got all your music from a few sources, and those sources were incentivized to push your toward the latest products. MTV, radio stations, record stores, current bands: all these people want you to listen to new stuff, so as gatekeepers, they're going to push you toward it. Now, those pressures aren't as strong, so we're seeing more like a "fair" distribution of listening behavior.
To be clear: I don't think people listen to music at random, but I think recommendation algorithms tend to unlock more of music history as a side effect of needing to keep giving you more things to listen to.
I'm really sad to see this thread just shitting on new music because you all are nuts. We are legit in a god damn golden age of music right now. There is so much amazing new music dropping constantly I can't even keep up. It's never been easier to put music out into the universe, and incredible small bands that never made it out of their local venues waiting for a record label recruiter are able to find their audience on Bandcamp, Soundcloud, YT, TikTok, and Spotify.
There's a lot going on to kill new music. Competition for distribution is hard because yeah, every year since 1973 (when the more bass, more full range style of recording became the norm), the catalog of songs people love gets bigger. At the same time, there isn't the kind of universal distribution that existed prior to the late 90s where MTV and radio drive the playlist. Now Youtube, iTunes, and Spotify's music's algorithm drive discovery... Throw in all-inclusive subscriptions and I can listen to my favorites all the time... and not have to turn on the radio ever and hear anything new. So what do you do?
One, pull a Weezer and release a lot of covers of favorites. Remake Toto's Africa... etc... Do this, you give up the composer's royalty but you sneak in the playlists.
The other solution is to focus on an increasingly small market for new music which seems to be less and less appealing to the larger market or genres, but appeals more and more to people who like "new music".
A lot of people are pointing out that a lot of new music is autotune or genre bending stuff that is kind of hard to love. Music has always been full of stuff made to ride a trend, or enabled by new instruments or new tech. It's the search spam of music. It catches on for a minute. Some of it sticks and becomes part of "the catalog".
There are also more competition for what used to be the youth mindshare. Now it’s YouTube, vidya games, social media like TikTok that are all audiovisual experiences targeted at being interesting to the youths.
When I was a kid I would have to listen to the radio or watch MTV to be reached by youth culture.
> Never before in history have new tracks attained hit status while generating so little cultural impact.
I have this theory that by democratizing music through on-demand services, it's harder for music to hit a critical mass where enough people know the song to sing along at a piano bar a decade later. It's great that smaller artists get more attention, but I miss having the cultural touchstone.
I think that started earlier when popular music productions was taken away from musicians, who - maybe because of bigger skills - experimented and found new ways to express themselves, and put in the hands of people who were just able to whip up a quasihit song with the clicks of a few mousebuttons - leading to somewhat popular, but ultimately forgettable songs. Everyone still knows music from the 1970s, but noone in my social bubble could tell you what the big hit of 2017 was...
Nah. Autotune is killing music. Has anyone else noticed that modern singers can't sing? They have no tone. Autotuning is obvious, along with various electronic manipulations to "sweeten" the tone for singers with mediocre voices.
Then listen to an album from the 70's by a great singer, like Karen Carpenter. What a difference!
I buy the argument that tracks are often overproduced and lack any rawness, edge, or soul, but there are absolutely popular artists that can sing. Not all of them, but enough of them.
Ok, where is today's Whitney Houston? Man, what a voice! Ditto for David Cassidy.
I even saw a documentary on autotune where a music executive remarked that they don't look for great singers anymore, because the sound engineers can "fix" it. They look for pretty people.
Like the Monkees.
I shudder to think what a modern sound engineer would do to "fix" Robert Plant's totally unique voice.
In the mainstream: Adele, Sia, Ariana Grande, just to name a few.
> I even saw a documentary on autotune where a music executive remarked that they don't look for great singers anymore, because the sound engineers can "fix" it. They look for pretty people.
That was never different. Madonna is an absolute terrible singer, for instance, and that was fixed long before autotune existed. For recording, you just make heave use of vocal comping. Live, you can use a combination of (soft) playback and background singers.
But at least Pop was never about "perfect" voices, but unique, recognizable voices that can convey emotion, and that hasn't really changed. Bowie, Björk, Leonard Cohen, Thom Yorke, Damon Albarn, these are simply great voices, but they can barely hold a tone.
If you'd look at live recordings, you see that these women are great singers, whereas Madonna cannot hold a tone for a second. Madonna would never have had a chance as a singer without a ton of studio equipment.
So what you are actually complaining is how modern music is produced. I can certainly agree that autotune is overused nowadays. That's a fad that will go away eventually, just like the talk box, gated reverbs or heavy chorus effects.
The early Madonna stuff is really easy to sing, and she's really struggling. She has no control over her breathing and does the usual tricks to compensate: finish early and let the background singers take over, vocal fry, "squeeking" and other kinds of ornamentations to avoid holding notes. She clearly has had no formal training whatsoever at that point.
Which is fine. As I said, this is pop, good singing is overrated, other stuff is much more important, and I actually vastly prefer Madonna over Whitney Houston any time of the day.
Thanks for the link. But I think it is a bit unfair. Madonna is trying to sing while dancing. How can anyone have breath control while panting? How can anyone hold a note while bouncing up and down? Music videos where the singer is singing and dancing are all lip synced. They often even lip sync their concerts.
(How do I know they lip sync them? Because their "live" singing exactly matches the radio cut of their song! Nobody ever sings a song exactly the same way twice.)
Secondly, Madonna's tone still comes through as great. Breath control comes with training and practice, but you can't fix anyone who doesn't have great tone.
There’s plenty of great singers out there, plenty of mostly or completely acoustic groups.
But you have to look for them, they’re not chart toppers, they haven’t been for more than a generation.
If you’re not looking for them and are just waiting for them to be spoon-fed to you, well of course you’re not going to get them. It’s not what sells and majors can polish the product in post, so that’s what they do, as with movies, they have no reason not to.
And with the rise of modern tech and social medias, they don’t need to sign up to majors to make their art and a living (though they’ll often associate with such for publishing e.g. Collier is self-produced and has the personal label Haganja but partners with Geffen - universal - and Decca).
> There’s plenty of great singers out there, plenty of mostly or completely acoustic groups. But you have to look for them, they’re not chart toppers, they haven’t been for more than a generation.
I find it absurd to claim great vocalists are out of fashion when we've had two decades of mainstream pop cultural fascination towards finding new raw talent via massively popular singing competition shows such as $COUNTRY's Got Talent, The X Factor, The Voice, etc.
As others have noted, it's certainly possible that modern production styles skew too heavily towards hiding natural voices, but to say that modern culture deemphasizes great natural vocalists makes no sense.
How many enduring stars have those talent shows actually produced though? The first season of American Idol got us Kelly Clarkson, who is still well known enough. That was 20 years ago though. Can most people name any other winner of these talent shows?
Meanwhile several massive stars who have become household names (Taylor Swift, Katy Perry, Kesha, Justin Bieber etc.) have arisen more-or-less the old fashioned way; via good marketing and viral music. And then there's Disney (Ariana Grande, Selena Gomez, Olivia Rodrigo, and Britney ofc, though she's another story...).
None of these stars became big by virtue of having particularly stellar vocals. But their voices were unique and suited to their music (and the likes of Kesha and Bieber made auto-tune part of their signature....what's T-Pain been up to recently?).
Honestly if one is looking to make it big in pop music, they'd be wasting their time participating in any of these talent shows, even if they do win. These days you just start a TikTok account...
I'm not sure raw technical talent in singing or playing was ever particularly emphasized in popular music, rather just a nice perk and fodder for stan wars.
You're not wrong that many of the winners end up becoming obscure anyway, though Carrie Underwood is another prominent counterexample [0] similar to Kelly Clarkson. But my point is that the previous poster's assertion that modern music doesn't care about great singers is plainly false. Pop culture is certainly still enamored with finding new voices, both through singing competition shows and online platform viral breakout hits. Natural talent is still prized, even if the actual music industry process and song production would seem to diminish that.
[0] More musicians that received early publicity from singing shows:
> modern music doesn't care about great singers is plainly false
So far, the counter-examples given of great singers turned out to be electronically manipulated to sound better.
C'mon. Post a link to a popular modern one with better tone than Whitney Houston, Karen Carpenter, Grace Slick, Madonna, David Cassidy, (I can name many more), and didn't electronically "enhance" their singing.
How could they have been electronically manipulated if these singing competitions are done live without mixing or autotune? We're talking about talent tested under the most raw conditions. You haven't even bothered to provide any evidence to the contrary.
It is absolutely insane to claim that there are no prominent modern artists with singing abilities comparable to those in the past. Just trivially disprovable. If we were to go beyond the domain of winner of song competitions, there are plenty of acoustic or live performances from other pop superstars that demonstrate singing capability.
Kelly Clarkson - she sounds ok. Not wild about it. Yes, I'm picky. Am I wrong? Compare her to Julie Andrews, decades past her prime https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Te85B8BjlSY and she still blows Clarkson away. And in her prime? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yvQ4t-Nk128 still gives me chills to hear her. And that's what a song sounds like without autotune. Amazing!
Carry Underwood - she should never have tried to upstage Julie Andrews! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uo6o1bhWlD8 It's good, but she is just not in the ballpark of JA. No chills there.
Jordin Sparks - nothing but good things to say about her singing. Is she great? Not sure. I think she needs a better song to showcase her abilities. But thanks! P.S. the link is from 14 years ago. A long time in the music biz.
Thanks for watching and digesting these videos. fwiw, not a single person here is comparing any of them to Andrews. All of this is in service of refuting the original statement that “that modern singers can't sing”, which by your own admission, is flatly false.
P.S., while it’s perfectly for to personally believe that Julie Andrews is the best female vocalist of all time, it’s far harder to consider it a matter of empirical fact. One can easily assert that Ella Fitzgerald, Etta James, or Celine Dion is better. One’s mileage always varies.
I've heard all three of those. Andrews wins by a knockout in the first round. I bought Dion's albums, too. Sorry, dude!
The only problem with Andrews is her songbook is kinda small. She burned very brightly, but all too briefly.
But I have a suggestion for you. Get the bluray of Sound of Music. Put it on play. Forget about the schmaltzy plot, the sappy lyrics, the saccharine emoting, the cardboard characters. Just listen to the music. You'll be blown away. I envy anyone hearing it for the first time. If you're up to it, figure out which character is Marni Nixon without looking it up.
And lest I forget, check out Roberta Flack. She gives me chills, too.
Thank you for being the first to provide links to unprocessed songs to make your point. I appreciate it.
BTW, autotune can and certainly is used in live concerts. Musicians have personally told me they use it! They also pump their vocals through effects pedals. What else are they using?
I don't know about competitions.
> You haven't even bothered to provide any evidence to the contrary.
I can't prove a negative. But I've provided many links to popular songs of old, and compared them to popular songs of today.
> absolutely insane
Cool your jets, dude! This is a friendly discussion. I actually want to be wrong here. I listen to popular music all the time, on the radio, Pandora, various streaming stations, and of course I hear it in the movie soundtracks. I want to hear a singer that sounds like an angel, not a Cylon.
It's impossible to know at this point who would pass in your mind. Isn't it possible you just don't care for the examples that have been offered already?
As far as my ear can tell, Lady Gaga, Adele, Pink, Beyonce, Rihanna, Christina Aguilera, and Miley Cyrus all qualify for the purposes of this subthread. I'm not going to claim they're "better" than Whitney Houston - that's kind of an impossibly high bar. I do think they're excellent, and to the best of my ability to determine via the internet, they don't use autotune.
As I commented elsewhere, Beyonce is clearly using autotune. The best way to tell the difference is to just become familiar with singers that predate autotune. It's the way they abruptly (too quickly) shift notes, and then stay dead on the note. You'll hear it after a while, and then you can't unhear it. It's a one-way ticket.
> that's kind of an impossibly high bar
So true. But so is Karen Carpenter, Julie Andrews, Grace Slick, etc., that all predate autotune. I suspect a cause and effect there.
We're in a golden age for music creation, you don't even need a garage and a band to get started (though it certainly helps for the more complex acts or if you want a band), people like Bo Burnham and Jacob Collier got their start (and part of their early fame) making youtube videos at home.
And probably most importantly you have no need whatsoever to be "discovered" by an "agent" or somesuch, you can have viewers and listeners from the other side of the globe, from your room.
That's a teenager in england (skillfully) playing with dissonant harmony in split-screen multitrack. The top commenter is a californian who'd go on to found Patreon the following month (or had founded it a month after the video was posted, youtube doesn't show exact dates for comments).
Autotuned all the way. It sounds sweetened, as her tone changes from song to song. It sounds "adjusted" in a way I never hear from older songs. This is apparent around the 48 minute mark. Sometimes she pushes too hard and it sounds a bit screechy.
I saw (and heard!) A Star Is Born. I was so impressed by her singing, I rushed out and didn't buy the soundtrack, and can't recall anything she sung. Oh well. Julie Andrews she ain't.
Julie Andrews is probably the greatest female singer that ever existed. (Well, Marni Nixon who was so good she secretly dubbed the other stars deserves accolades!)
It's trivial to do so yourself if you just looked for live or acoustic performances. And there are even videos that do the work of isolating vocals for you:
I didn't know that about the Matrix sequel. Being a crusty old moron, as other HNers have accurately labeled me, I thought the first Matrix sucked and so never watched the sequels.
But don't you think it's sad that a modern movie has to reach back in time 35 years to find a good song to use?
(I bought that Sanctuary album back in the 80's, when Brain Pain was broadcasting their metal show weekly. I miss Brain Pain.)
Sure. But it can be overused, and currently it is applied everywhere. Whatever happened to singers with good tone, like Grace Slick and Madonna? You can hear autotune taking away the ability of the singer to play with the sound.
It isn't just autotune. It's the electronic modification done, like the color "adjustments" done in modern movies that turn every movie into blue and orange tones.
With discovery being AI driven and no credibility connoted by knowing bands - the music industry is in trouble as it has become commoditize to a certain degree. Listeners no longer have as much value or identity to who they listen to as there isn't any real effort to find music (by the majority of people).
That and artists needing to make big singles too monetize their work - so the approach to making music is different. Getting a movie/show themesong or leveraging another artists popularity to drive song plays
Musical instruments becoming quite inexpensive increasing the competition while the market place is increasingly fragmented. Former gate keepers don't have that much cloud [record labels].
As a former music head it really sucks to look at music from a business market perspective - but it really does frame what's going on.
There's a confluence of forces making new music difficult that and you would also think a lot of the items i posted above would make there being more higher quality music.
I don't think this is really a reflection of any sort of quality of new music vs. old music, but rather the structure of how people listen to music. If you listen from a main playlist on Spotify and add 100 songs a year and you listen to it generally on shuffle, you'll progressively listen to less and less new music as a proportion of your total listening. This is despite you being interested in the same amount of new music each year. This seems like a likely culprit particularly considering the 18-month limit this infograph seems to consider as new music.
In ye olden times one had to actively choose music to listen to, lending itself to the newer albums, and a relatively weakened aggregate power of one's back catalogue. Spotify and similar services lend themselves to a very passive means of listening however (shuffle and go) that will naturally give more listening to the music which has greater quantity (old music of course).
> The declining TV audience for the Grammy show underscores this shift.
Rick Beato had a recent video[1] ranting over the quality of the Grammy entries this year. Now I'm fast approaching the get-off-my-lawn age, but I have to agree. Surely there must be way better songs made in the last year, regardless of category, than what ended up on that list.
Personally I find lots of great music being released on places like Bandcamp. I love listening to their Bandcamp weekly[2][3], even though not everything might be up my creek.
It's not hard to find great new music. I guess the issue is one has to care to look for it.
"new music" is too derivative of old music. I'm into EDM. There is a techno revival right now. The problem is that new techno tracks sound exactly the same way as techno track 20/30 years ago. Why should I even bother listening to these new tracks at first place when they just copy what was done before?
Before, big labels could rely on ignorance to sell something old as "fresh". It doesn't work today when it's really easy to distribute and share old music.
EDM is in need for innovation, yet rely heavily on nostalgia. It's not going to help younger artists if they don't invent something of their own.
This is such an interesting problem. I do think that new music that is competing with old music has an advantage in its newness, which humans tend to prefer. But it needs to be as excellent as the music it is competing with. If you as a musician are not writing music as compelling or interesting as, say Sgt Pepper, you are doing it wrong. You need to bring your AAA game if you are going to compete with the GOATs, yeah?
That said, the absolutely killer bit of this article is:
I learned the danger of excessive caution long ago, when I consulted to huge Fortune 500 companies. The single biggest problem I encountered—shared by virtually every large company I analyzed—was investing too much of their time and money into defending old ways of doing business, rather than building new ones.
[...]
But senior management hated hearing this, and always insisted that defending the old business units was their safest bet. After I encountered this embedded mindset again and again and saw its consequences, I reached the painful conclusion that the safest path is often the most dangerous. If you pursue a strategy—whether in business or your personal life—that avoids all risk, you might flourish in the short run, but you flounder over the long term.
This is sage advice. For your career, for your business, whatever. I'd spin it as this:
When an industry is on a downswing, it becomes cluttered. Market demand is falling so existing players are fighting for share of a shrinking market. For new entrants, there's no opportunity. So for example if you are trying to get a job in this industry, you won't find openings. If it's a market you're trying to enter as a business, you won't find demand/customers. Whereas in a growing market the opposite is true. Therefore we can say it is a truism that any opportunity is more likely than not to be a good one, because opportunities only exist in an upswing, and are pushed out in a downswing.
There's more to it, of course. Bubbles, for example. But the fact remains: opportunities signal a rising market and in general you should seek them out as the payoff, over time, is likely to be worth it.
Besides, a pure focus on technical excellence only gets you so far. If technical capability were the yardstick of good music, the only remaining genres would be math rock and speed metal.
What new music? Everything is hip-hop, rap, or r&b nowadays.
I just can't turn on the “new songs” radio station in Apple Music because 90% will be hip-hop & rap.
I imagine how modern music producers are fed up by an endless stream of demo records from ‘new hip-hop stars’ - my condolences.
If streaming services will add the button “Do not propose music of this genre”, then new music will be more discoverable. But right now the only two things I saw in Spotify and Apple Music are “I like this genre” and “I love/hate this song”.
I hope it will become a killer feature of some new startup.
I was hesitant to chime in here, because I'm in my mid-60s, which puts me solidly in the boomer generation that grew up with classic rock. But I have to agree with this. I have some faves in the realm of "old" music, but also like a lot of current/newer musicians, a few of whom are R&B but none of whom are rap/hip-hop. It's just not something I enjoy, and I agree that too many new songs radio stations are full of it.
Looking for new music doesn't occupy much of my time, so my tolerance for the choice presented to me is fairly low.
The record industry is failing to seek out new music. But people who love music will find it. They will still play shows in basements that will go unnoticed by the suits above. Music is just going back underground. And, you know, if you want to find it, you can absolutely find new music on any streaming platform. I'm listening to a track right now called "There's a woman at the station" by a band I've never heard of called 20 point buck, and it's amazing.
I agree with this sentiment and it feels right to me personally but I think to know how much consumption is changing we'd benefit from seeing this broken out by age demographics. If the teens are listening to older music at the same rate as the late 30s/40s then that is certainly a problem for the music industry. Otherwise this might just be driven by the streaming adoption. We couldn't quantify this stuff before when everyone was listening to music on CDs, mp3s etc.
The mass reactionary trend permeates and defines the perspectives of most people I know, even if they reject the political aspect. People have transformed: Creative, open-minded people now reflexively scorn creativity; the power of individuals and freedom (including their own power); learning, knowledge, and original thought. They actively promote despair and depressive outlooks, and I am a non-conformist to say anything that even indirectly challenges that. The first requirement for any idea is not to attract ridicule. As an example of many, when I suggested to a college student that they could do something about a local problem they objected to, they mocked the idea of anything being accomplished by people acting voluntarily (so much for democracy, FOSS, and much else!).
All of that is antithetical to innovation and creativity. Artists and innovators don't thrive by avoiding ridicule - in fact, it's commonly experienced that 'first they laugh at you', etc. - or by conforming. They thrive, I think, in environments where challenging, non-conforming ideas are prized and encouraged, and where innovative individuals are prized over powerful ones. I think it may kill SV too.
A couple big hits seems to make artists really famous and sufficiently rich that they never seem to progress past the album/set of music that made them "big". It's not worth the hard work of touring/recording/creation.
Either that, or interconnectedness is suppressing the creation/germination that comes from isolation. It's all just a big cacophony of grey now.
A band cranking out four or five great albums/sets of music seems dead.
Music tools, processing, remixing, sampling, it's all way more accessible than it used to be. And yet creativity of popular music is far behind, say, the 1980s and 1990s. And publishing/serving tail audiences. That should be producing crossover / surfacing hits, but it is definitely not.
But it also could be the reassertion of dominance of the popular channels of music by the big boys.
Also, since the 1970s music, it doesn't sound alien to new kids. Elvis sounds old. The 60s is weird and primitive. But Led Zeppelin? Still just awesome. So large catalogs of great stuff, back when better germination and career dedication/craft was followed, makes for a lot of base competition for new music.
This debate about 'new' vs 'old' music can be approached through many angles, just a few on the top on my mind:
* Extrisic quality: does it sound "better" as a production, autotune, analog vs digital recording and play-back means, etc. -- I personnaly have mixed feelings about this one, as autotune and programmable drums are probably the worst thing that happened to contemporary music by taking away their human components (but that's mostly an unsubtantiated opinion), and on the other hand, so much progress in the recording and play-back hardware/software that reduce the gap between live and recorded performances
* Intrisic quality: is the music "better" in an absolute sense, covering mostly philosophical questions such as the nature of musical beauty, its objectiveness or subjectiveness, the existence of music as abstract compositions, etc. -- I'm firmly of the opinion that there are such things as 'beautiful musical compositions' and 'well-written music', and though I'm barely able to describe what that means in words, I can certainly say that I have heard less and less such pieces in mainstream music as years have passed, and that in non-mainstream music, most attempts to create original things end up in pieces that may be well thought but rarely in 'beautiful musical compositions'.
* Discovery bias: a topic that is well covered by the OP
* Acquired taste: despite everyone claiming that they look for something new and exciting and original, tastes do become ingrained with age, and I believe this is all the more true with music given the kind of physical feelings that it generates, which can sometimes be very powerful -- the 'feedback loop' that also ends up in the discovery bias above is probably reinforced by the fact that our tastes in music vary little after a certain age, and that we rarely seek something that is 'that much' different from what we like.
Perhaps, Pop/Rock as a genre has peaked. Most of the "song space" might already be explored.
In the past, new music has often been inspired by new instruments (e.g. the electric guitar, synthesizers). Strictly speaking, that often was not even new music, but a new sound.
Today we can create all sorts of sound digitally, including the "original" sound from the 60s, 70s, 80s. New music productions often adapt a sound from a soecific era.
The linked post brings up one important point about old music: it's much lower risk to market than new productions. You know already that the songs work, and you can be reasonably certain about intellectual rights ownership when you bought the catalog.
It's the same with movies by the way: Most successful movies these days are sequels or remakes.
Seems that conservative mindsets prevail in the mainstream of art. And THAT is not new, either :D
And I can observe, albeit in my own little bubble, that current pop songs that have that staying power tend to be those that sound "old"; think Dua Lipa, The Weeknd, and Bruno Mars with their 80s sounding hits (although Bruno Mars can sound anywhere from the 70s to early 2000s).
I personally like the effects of this trend, specifically the rediscovery of forgotten artists like the band Fanny[0], which arguably can be considered as the first major label all-female rock group. They already faded into obscurity but became popular again when one[1] of their old live recordings became viral.
I'm not convinced the arguments in this article are really the cause. We're in an era where musicians have to build a following by means other than their music.
I'm just not sure how an aspiring musician would connect and build a young audience outside of social media. I doubt they could consistently build engagement in a streaming platform alone, it's just too hard. They're just one recording along with decades of other recordings.
The social media era hasn't really included musicians very well. I can't really think of a single case where I discovered music via social media. And I'm not even sure how I'd go about finding it. A lot of this is just that the music industry itself is kind of small and insignificant to big tech. And it's not like any of these platforms want to send people to streamers like Spotify or Apple Music.
Streaming is really just another payday for the winners of the popular music boom of the 60s, and more particularly the IP holders. They got to have their cake with the original vinyl sales, eat it again in the CD era and now they can rent it out permanently via streaming. And they're not interested in sharing any of that out with emerging musicians.
In the past, there was enough of a barrier to just getting music onto disc and out on the airwaves that labels would have to invest in 100 acts just to have one breakthrough. So they'd need to take some of the winnings from their biggest selling artists and reinvest them in new acts to stay in the game. But now they can get income from streaming rather than sales - there's much less incentive to keep new records and artists coming through. If anything it makes more sense for them to just sit on their back catalogue and squash anything new.
So nobody's going to invest the comparatively large amounts needed to get unknown bands into good studios to record albums any more, let alone fund them through the difficult second and third albums often necessary to get traction. Emerging musicians can only do what they can at minimal cost - hence much more of a move towards electronic and bedroom production. That can have great output now due to tech advances in home recording, but it's not gonna be the same as putting musicians in fully kitted studio. (And things like a shift to high-loudness, low dynamic range are another side effect of the ways that music is distributed and consumed, plus advances in what's possible with digital recording and limiting).
The article kinda touches on this stuff but what it doesn't really seem to acknowledge is this is just what's good for the industry. Big labels are perfectly happy picking the winners that blow up on Youtube - it just saves all their development costs. The whole thing just works for them - their interests aren't in having a diverse range of music produced, allowing for a living for artists that aren't their big cash cows, preserving particular genres or recording styles etc.
The declining TV audience for the Grammy show underscores this shift.
The declining TV audience is not just a Grammy issue, it's affecting all kinds of live awards shows, including the Oscars, as well as broadcast/cable television in general which has been hammered by shifting audience preferences and viewing habits (https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2021/03/17/cable-and-s...).
The author should take a look at the social media/YouTube followings many new artists have, and not just the superstars. That's where the engagement is taking place.
I don't mean to be nonconstructive but... my gut response is "naaah".
A generation of wealthy nostalgics overspends on the same old music.
A generation of hard-up youth (and there's nothing wrong with that in strictly origin-of-media-cultures terms!) won't pay anything the "music market" can easily measure, for what they actually value.
Musicians aiming for commercial appeal really seem to be scraping the barrel now. There are people with new ideas but the profusion of barrel-scrapers makes "try to sell big" a poor use of an inventive musician's time.
Where do we go from here? No idea, but it probably needs to involve inventing (or reinventing) some different kind of engagement.
I don't think my preferences for what kind stand much of a chance, but no matter.
> I hear from hundreds of publicists, record labels, band managers, and other professionals who want to hype the newest new thing—for the simple reason that their livelihoods depend on it.
Well, maybe the reason should be the love for music as an art form?
> So the problem isn’t a lack of good new music. It’s an institutional failure to discover and nurture it.
This is absolutely true. Most of the stuff that's pushed to the top is a bunch of lifeless, riskless, perfect crap. Moreover, everyone involved knows it: musicians playing the parts (if there are any), producers, sound engineers, label representatives, artists and, sometimes, listeners.
I agree with the main idea of the article: music is treated is an asset and it does no good.
My five year old is some kind of evidence here. I let him listen to all kinds of music while showering, and he likes most the stuff from 70-80-90. Not children music either.
He loves hard rock or metal. He recently sang along to queen, running around on the playground singing Beelzebub has a devil put aside for him, which is a bit worrying even if he doesn't understand much English. Things like Arsenal, R.E.M. and K's Choice are also welcome.
But he doesn't care at all about more modern stuff, even if there is more of it on the radio. It just bores him. We sometimes let him choose from a playlist, and he always ends up in different genres from the same periods.
Sure, we still have good tracks here and there. Good artists are still there but it’s pretty hard to compose something « new » without being « strange ».
It’s mostly impossible to do better than the masters of your musical genre because most genres exists for more than 60, sometimes 100 years so, statically speaking, they may have been mastered by one or multiple artists since then.
Even if an artist managed to be greater (for what it could mean) than his masters, well, he could never have the advantage of novelty.
I don’t think it’s an issue (except maybe for the industry), after all, there is already enough music to enjoy an entire life, and still pretty good new artists.
A lot of that old music was curated a developed by people in industry. A lot of new music is made on computers and anyone can produce it. I think we have a quantity over quality issue. Of course tastes change, when I was younger if you wanted to get radio play you had to be able to sing or create great music - now I hear a lot of loops of break beats and someone with a raspy voice growling out of the radio. Also, consider how compressed music is now, with every sound at the same max volume - I honestly find it hard to listen to. I think there is more nuance to this story that relates to curation and production of music.
> The reasons are complex—more than just the appeal of old tunes
Are they so complex? Personally I can listen to popular music from up until 2015 and "get it", but after that, what's supposed to be popular music starts to sound more extreme than what I listen to alone. And it's not just a "me" thing, we have a wide variety of tastes in the family, and we agree that most of that plays on the radio these days is not what any of us would listen to. I don't know what niche this music is optimizing for, but I think that most people are out of it.
In parallel, lots of less-known artists continue putting out great stuff.
Speaking for myself, once i had access to spotify, and basically every bit of pop music that ever came out post WW2, I stopped listening to newish music and started listening to all the artists my favorite artists were ripping off.
I think this is just one component of the general information overload that exists today.
There used to be a few genere based radio stations. It was easy to find new music, because there weren't many places to look.
Today we have an infinite number of places to find new music. Far more than any person could ever hope to actually listen to.
And to complicate that, music creation as a whole has become something that anyone can do with a laptop and distribute into the mainstream platforms (e.g. spotify, etc.)
SO, the hours of music that exists keeps increasing exponentially, while the number of hours in a persons lifetime stay the same.
> The radio stations will only play songs that fit the dominant formulas, which haven’t changed much in decades. That’s even more true for the algorithms curating so much of our new music—the algorithms are designed to be feedback loops, ensuring that the promoted new songs are virtually identical to your favorite old songs.
new sound never comes from obvious places. get outside your bubble. I always manage to find a couple new good artists each year who's albums I'll play on repeat for years.
Lots of the usual hacker news comments by people who have not bothered to check the authors bona fides, sigh
It is extremely unlikely that anyone reading here knows as much about this stuff as Ted Gioia. He's an award winning music historian, journalist, author, and performer. I personally have five of his excellent books. He knows of what he speaks.
I love old music. I'm old so it's just music from my life. At the same time I spend most of my listening time trying to find new good music. This is the problem. It exists but there isn't a good way to discover it. Old music has higher quality by natural selection. Anything that didn't cut it gets left behind and goes unplayed. New music is a firehose and it takes effort to sift through it all.
Good music will organically get more rotation. Great product experience wins, old or new.
Lots of this is just people getting into streaming and able to access anything they want. Ultimately they are making playlists of what they want to hear, not is what is pushed. From the mix tapes days to the streaming days, people will choose what they like when they have the ability to.
Music enhances moments in work or play, and nostalgia is a hell of a drug.
> So the problem isn’t a lack of good new music. It’s an institutional failure to discover and nurture it.
These days it seems investors are focused on rent seeking, they are not looking to build. Why nurture new talent when you can sell an NFT of some classic music cover art. Please don't blame the young artists, they are doing what they need to do to survive in this situation, we should blame our own greed.
I know that it is hard to judge art, because, well, beauty is in the eye of the beholder and all that, but is it maybe that new music is not really that good ( https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IJilkMPqvs0 )?
I might be biased, because I was raised on 90s music and most stuff today seems so tame by comparison.
I’m curious what’s tame vs the 90s about artists with recently released albums like Yves Tumor, Snail Mail, Mitski, Beach House. I only listed a few with albums during the pandemic.
Or say a band like Radiohead who can be considered a 90s band. Their 00 and 10s albums are brilliant as well.
This is just a symptom of the cultural zeitgeist moving out of the mainstream distribution channels. People are still listening to new music, it’s just not happening the way it used to (e.g. labels, records, radio, or even streaming services). A lot of new music is discovered/distributed through social media which makes it much harder to quantify what even counts as a “listen”.
They define new music as from the last 18 months, so every recording is solidly inside the pandemic. I wonder if people just aren't going out as much.
I dunno -- would anyone care if superstars vanished? A much better result would be for lots of artists to make, like, middle class wages on Bandcamp or whatever (not saying this actually happens, just thinking about possible better end results).
There's another explanation why old music's share of total music is growing: old farts like myself and older are letting go of their CD and vinyl habits and have totally converted to streaming.
I won't argue that streaming is totally transforming the music industry but whining about it won't change a thing. Make something people want to hear or shut up.
No one has put forward the hypothesis that this might be caused by ever-lengthening copyright terms (till recently). I mean: surely they must have some effect.
The old songs still have a (known) value, while new songs are still an unknown quantity. Since the copyright on the old songs lasts such a long time, there is less of an incentive to invest in new songs.
Honestly I think this is just society en masse is suffering from nostalgia for novelty. Listening to music now is so easy. It used to be you'd have to listen to hours to make a mixtape on the radio. The artists capitalizing on the novelty that's left (live production, remix's, mashups) are the ones that are making money.
Turning on the radio does not convince me that this is true.
But to be cynical, there's likely already enough music in existence today that you could spend your entire life quite fulfilled by it. So maybe it's a slight waste of resources to keep producing it (except for the pleasure of making it).
There's more old music than new music. I mean, if you just focus on "pop" (say, 1950 onwards), there's 70 times as much stuff that's old as there is from the last year. Hell, all through the festive season, any shop I walked into was playing tunes sung by Bing Crosby.
I think the absolute glut of new music available makes it hard for me to seek out and find new artists. Even with the help of spotify and pandora. Also driving to and from work was where I sampled a lot of new music, and that has gone away with covid. It’s just easier to jump into something I already know.
This comment section has some major boomer energy. Anyway, my take on this is different from the author's. He cites the following as (anec)data:
1) According to MRC Data, old songs now represent 70% of the market share
2) The 200 most popular tracks now account for less than 5% of total streams.
3) The current list of most downloaded tracks on iTunes includes CCR and The Police etc.
Not going to touch 1), because I don't feel like going hunting for that data. But a single data point is useless. Let's see the trend, please.
2) has nothing to do with old versus new. The average music consumer today has so many music discovery avenues open to them on a level that is completely unprecedented. Should we really be surprised that people are listening less and less to the top 200 songs when the sheer catalog of music accessible to (and actually discoverable by) them has grown by orders of magnitude in the last 10 years? This data point tells us nothing about old versus new, because there's so much new music that is never going to hit top 200 that people can find and easily listen to now.
3) I mean, really, are you surprised? You're looking at music people bought on iTunes. _Of course_ that would biased towards people old enough to actually pay money for tracks. This is equivalent to trying to figure out the most popular porn categories by looking at DVD rental data, ignoring the fact that 99.99% of porn consumption has moved to online streaming platforms..
I think the 70s and 80s pop hits have had staying power because those songs were the pop music of the people with the power to choose the content of mass media as media became more massive in the 90s and 2000s (further television/radio station standardization and the internet).
Have you listened to the radio? To background music at the mall (ha ha). Hard Rock, Classic Rock, Soft Rock, almost nothing from the last 30 years. It is weird to be 50+ years out of college, and have a choice between talk radio, religion, and college music while driving.
There are more options today because the music making tools are accessible to almost everyone and there are more new music now than a decade ago. I think his data sample is just limited to make such a titled article.
I agree with the thesis here 100% but isn't this argument prey to temporal bias? Its easy to compare the current moment with a much longer period of time (all other past moments), and have the current moment fall short.
Sorry, but why is “total album consumption” the metric here? The vast majority of people listening to contemporary music don’t have the attention spans for full albums (I include myself here).
>The number of hours played by working bands has never been lower in history.
Are you referring to a decline as a result of the pandemic, or a larger trend that was occurring even before ~spring 2020? If the latter, I would be curious to see any data you have to support that.
The 1900 Census counted 92,264 musicians or music teachers in the United States. In 1950, 166,000 people identified as "musicians" or "music teachers." In 2010, there were 182,000 musicians, singers, and related workers in the United States
Digitization means winner take all for new music, it also means the value of new music relative to the corpus of all music approaches zero with every passing year.
random aside: I don't know what if anything changed but .... if I put on 94.9 SF , they've literally been playing many of the same songs for 8 months now. I can turn it on any day since last May and 30-40% of the playlist hasn't changed. from June to October about 85% stayed the same. And the songs would repeat every 2-3 hours.
I don't remember radio having songs that played that many months
The reasons are complex—more than just the appeal of old tunes
Does the author explore the reasons at all? Should we just guess? One jumping out at me is the share, population and disposable income-wise of boomers, who might just be buying music that was popular when they were growing up. Are people rebuying their current collection of old tracks in new formats? Does the current lack of a mono-culture around music mean that new music can't get the same traction old music had enjoyed? Do fans of new music spend less time/money enjoying music compared to other things that fans of older music don't like, like twitch subs, games, whatever?
I think you hit on something I missed, and much of this thread missed: there is one weird generation that was sold the daft idea of rebuying its music as format shifts - the 45, the LP, the cassette for the car, the CD remaster... - who also have economic advantage and so the commercial stats just don't reflect what lots of people enjoy because the metrics measure that generation's interest and vice versa. Thanks. that was useful.
Combine that with new or rescued recordings meaning a greater range of _really old_ music is available to people prone to falling down musical-history rabbit-holes... and you really do have a recipe for it becoming hard to spot the evolution of music happening vs. the surrounding (pardon me) "noise". Yet it is still happening...
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!
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.
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.
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.
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.
>> 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.
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.
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.
Since this seems like a genuine question, nts.live is an online radio platform running out of London that has tons of good contemporary jazz. Try typing an old jazz song that you like into the search bar and find radio shows with that song featured. There will likely be new songs mixed in with the old.
In general, I find search engines to be a really poor discoverability resource for anything, not just music.
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.
Thanks, I’m doing this, of course, but this method doesn't discover new music - it's just a way to find something similar, and mostly it's not “fresh” (by release date).
Then what's stopping you from simply listening to random tracks from new releases sections?
I've done this before- with Spotify, I've even picked albums based on their cover art, the name of the record, the name of the artist. Occasionally the aesthetic vibes align and I find a new artist that is actually enjoyable. Usually not. But if you're just trying to find new music, there's ample methods to do so.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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!
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...
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.
I’ve heard about how music is written by labels these days. They get a bunch of writers in a hotel for a few days and brainstorm song themes and lines, then mix and match what works. Writers will get paid for a couple of words.
It’s no wonder the songs these days say nothing, to anyone, unless you’re a brain dead teenager or emotionally stunted adult. The tastes of which have driven the industry for decades now. I just want something that’s relevant.
> The current list of most downloaded tracks on iTunes is filled with the names of bands from the last century, such as Creedence Clearwater and The Police.
Well yeah, younger generations, who are much more likely to listen to newer music, have moved on to streaming, for the most part.
> Just consider these facts: the 200 most popular tracks now account for less than 5% of total streams.
It's easier then ever for people to find different music to listen to now. Not everyone listens to the same hits anymore. It doesn't mean people are listening to less new music. Their listening is likely just more distributed across more new music.
> Just consider the recent reaction when the Grammy Awards were postponed. Perhaps I should say the lack of reaction—because the response was little more than a yawn.
As the article showed, people don't watch the Grammy's anymore. This doesn't mean people don't listen to new music anymore. People look more towards things like The Needle Drop[0] or streaming playlists then the Grammy's for music recommendations. Honestly, the Needle Drop's channel growth alone, should be enough to show that new music isn't going anywhere.
Overall, the vast majority of the points here can be attributed to the lower barrier to entry of making music, and to the new ease at which people can find the niche they like in new music.
[0] https://www.youtube.com/user/theneedledrop