There's also the instruments themselves, for a lot of 60s-80s pop music. A guy on the street corner with a money hat today can make any electronic sound that Kraftwerk blew people's minds with.
The ease of obtaining such sounds on the cheap makes it difficult to appreciate just how cutting-edge those sounds were in Kraftwerk’s time. Making electronic drums sound good requires a lot of processing, and they did all of that with analog equipment before we even had a complete idea of how electronic drums “should” sound. And that raises the bar for today’s musicians — doing “Kraftwerk” today requires pushing boundaries like they did, not just making the same sounds.
