What happened to (popular) music?

[Cosmos]

If you're feeling utterly horrified and repulsed of what passes as popular music nowadays, you are not the only one. But have you thought about it in more depth and asked yourself why and how music could have plummeted so dramatically, especially over the last decade? Is this assessment just a subjective assessment of "old people" who are not seeing the "progress" of modern popular music, or is there something objectively going in a very bad direction? I, for one, am young and wholeheartedly share that "old peoples complain". Have you listened to the radio lately? How do you feel about what you hear? Can you describe most of what you here as "music" in any shape, form a or fashion, or do you feel like calling what you hear there "music", is like an affront that has just assaulted your ears/spirit? I, for one, do. Worse even, does it often sound/feel pretty demonic, deranged and pathological to you? Not only in terms of lyrics but the so-called "music"? It seems like I'm not the only one. And is it just the popular music? I have similar feeling about many popular modern movies and series (not all though!), so I might open up a thread about that too.

In any case, I would like to share some of the interesting discussions I brought up earlier about this topic and would like to know what y'all think? First, here (in the following two quotes) is what I brought up earlier about it. After that, I share what I listened to recently about the topic:

Here is one of my favorite songs:

And here Rick Beato explains what makes this song great and how there is practically nothing in popular music today that comes even remotely close to the arrangement and musical knowhow. What is produced in popular music nowadays is IMO in large parts a total disgrace.

Here Beato explains some reasons behind the incredible degradation of music in the last decades:

Here is short discussion that relates to the above. One interesting idea that comes out of it is that somehow the idea of different people playing/practicing music together in a group/community setting (like in a band with different instruments) has become rather rare and might be contributing to the change in popular music.

I like good music (from most genres actually) and Rick Beato is one of my favorite music guys on YouTube, who shares many of my music tastes and brings up and discusses what is happening to music nowadays (he is a great musician and producer himself). He still tries to figure out what has and is happening to music.

Here is another recent short talk of Beato about the topic:

And finally, what follows is Beato's first podcast episode called "A Warning On the Future of Music"
that aired yesterday, where he interviews Ted Gioia, an American jazz critic, music historian and author of eleven books. Here is his Substack. I haven't listened to it fully yet, but from the little I heard, there are some fascinating insights and ideas that are brought up (see below):

- YouTube

Auf YouTube findest du die angesagtesten Videos und Tracks. Außerdem kannst du eigene Inhalte hochladen und mit Freunden oder gleich der ganzen Welt teilen.

youtu.be

Here are some of the points in the discussion:

- It might not be the case that music in general has degraded but that popular music has been hijacked by, paraphrasing, "Silicon Valley" people who dictate what is popular and "good music"

- Music and music innovations seem to have dramatically and objectively degraded over the last decades/years in contrast to the explosive development and "leaps forward" of other sectors like computers, cellphones, video games etc.

- Music devices have gotten worse in terms of quality and innovation (examples are brought up that any old and cheap music systems from back then, such as a cheap Walkman, had a better quality than what is produced now in a cellphone or other device with which you can hear music)

- How Spotify and similar services have hijacked the music industry and apparently made the situation for musicians (primarily in terms of income, creativity etc) worse

- Why the Spotify concept isn't sustainable according to Gioia

- Gioia thinks that primarily the big cooperations and their leaders are the prime cause of the disinterest in music and the degrading of popular music

- Gioia and Beato seem to think it is high time that something should be done. One idea Gioia throws out there is the idea of some sort of "Super Vinyl" that brings innovations and progress back to popular music. Why is it that the music industry can't or doesn't innovate like other industries and brings out new and objectively better products? Why is it that a vinyl is apparently still the best invention when it comes to hearing recording music (from and music/audio/data perspective)? Why has there been no or little progress? Worse, why (in large parts, it seems) has a regression taken place?

- Historically, it was always pretty difficult for musicians to make a living out of what they do, and it seems like what has happened over the last years hasn't changed that and made it even worse in some (many?) cases

- Gioia brings up "the fact" (his opinion based on listening to enormous amounts of all kinds of music) that there is still a lot of very good music out there (from non-popular musicians and bands), but somehow most of it doesn't reach popular status/audience any more (in contrast to the past). It seems like Gioia attributes this in large parts to the big players in music nowadays and what they push as popular to society.

- Those companies who sell the most and have the most to say now in music have little to do with music (as well as many of the employers in those companies?). They have no music background either. Their primary concern is making money through things like subscriptions while music (the actual product) seems to be literally on the back burner

- Music, instead of a primary product to own and enjoy, has become a cheap and not much valued thing. A good example is made in terms of Apple Music: The primary product is the cellphone here, and you get music more or less as a throw-away thing for a subscription (or even "for free") besides the smartphone product


Additional points from earlier discussions from Beato:

Nowadays people (and young people especially) have a superabundance of all types of music at their fingertips/disposal. Thus, the value of music and what it needs to have/do it is supersaturated. That can be a very good thing if applied/valued correctly: for example, if you wish to learn technics on an instrument, today you can learn them much faster (and many more!) than in old days! A big downside to that is that old people were forced to train their musical ears much more (one of the most important things you need as a musician) because they had to listen to a vinyl, tape or CD (no Internet) for what was being played and what you need to do on the instrument to do so. So, the music hearing abilities and imagination have probably plummeted quite significantly? The older generations were very limited in terms of what music they could get and hear and had much less at their disposal, thus they saw more value in it?

 

[psychegram]

This is a topic dear to my heart. Not that I'm a musician but I used to be very into the live music scene. So far as I can tell, that ecology of small, grungy night clubs catering to unknown musicians is more or less dead, now, and I don't think that role can be overlooked.

Music is a fundamentally communal thing. People come together to see their favorite bands, and sing along to their favorite songs. In the course of that experience, subcultures form around different genres of music - with their own typical fashions, slang, rituals, and so on. That provides an arena within which youth can differentiate themselves from the wider culture, form friendships, and hook up with the opposite sex.

At least, that used to be the case. It had already started degrading in the naughties, and was dead by the mid-teens. These days it's a memory. Walk around the bar district of most cities and you'll find mostly restaurants. Going out now means, not rubbing shoulders with strangers and meeting help new people brought together by a mutual love of a band or genre, but sitting at a table with people you already know.

So, why? I figure a few things happened.

One, the internet. With the ability to instantly access music from anywhere and anywhen, people's musical tastes fractured. It's no longer uncommon for people to have no idea what kind of music their friends even listen to.

Two, the generally repressive nature of society. Youth grow up in a culture that is ruthlessly intolerant of differences of belief. Step out of line on anything and you get cancelled by your peers online, and punished by the leftist ideologues that have captured the schools. In that context, kids naturally adopt a 'gray man' strategy: they seek to blend in with one another, and avoid drawing attention to themselves. Hence the awful blandness of youth fashion - the only identifiable subculture really are the Pronoun People, who are the exception that proves the rule really, their own distinctive attire serving as a sort of uniform akin to that of the Soviet Union's Young Pioneers, an indicator that they are the favored hand of the authorities and had best not be trifled with.

So you've got a retreat of the youth into private, virtual spaces more or less as a defensive measure, which in turn inhibits the formation of subcultures. Subcultures being inhibited, the live music ecosystem dies. It no longer being possible for young musicians to make a name for themselves playing local gigs, young musicians also retreat online, trying to gather an audience from the internet rather than from their local environments.

And voila: the auditory dystopia of 2022.

 

[PopHistorian]

I know a lot about this, having spent over twenty years in the thick of the local original music scene and studied it as history. I agree with pretty much all stated so far. A major factor is the entropic, collapsing-in-on-itself, corporate-psycho nature of the major record companies and radio-station networks. Both underwent gradual, corporate consolidation into near-monolithic, pathological beasts controlled entirely by the PTB. Centralization happened, just like in any dictatorial system. We have an infinite number of accounts from musicians about what these vampiric entities are really like and who actually controls them, which helps explain the nature of the general, negative messaging that comes across.

The serious change seemed to begin in the mid-1980s. The book, The Mansion on the Hill is a very good account of how the record labels came under control of marketing professionals rather than music people. Among the negative consequences for music itself was the deliberate creation of outsized mega-stars, which caused the rosters of artists in development to shrink, allowing ever-fewer musicians opportunity for wide exposure. Then, new recording artists were given shrinking timelines on which to produce sales or be cast out. This helped give rise to the last great era of independent record labels, most of which were managed poorly. Most of these competitors became fed upon and destroyed, ultimately, when the majors learned how to kill them. Finally, the big companies devised ever better ways to program (and thus predict) tastes, which elevated the practice of manufacturing pre-fabricated stars (virtually all pushing some aspect of the globalist ideology) and turning pop music into much more of a factory system. Though, today, there are so many talented musicians, and so many willing to do anything for fame, that it's a simple matter to choose some and control them entirely.

The pathology in lyrics was always around (human nature), and beginning in the late '60s a lot of Marxism. Sick lyrical content of mainstream popular music took strong hold in the 1990s, by my reckoning. That became the template for the couple of generations of derivatives that have followed. Now, the record companies are no longer the giants they were, and terrestrial radio has been dying for a long time. In the WWW age, independent artists have returned because music-production technology is cheap and easy, and the Web allows people to self-launch. Many of these have learned to do business themselves, away from the controlling powers, but they mimic the bad examples they grew up with. Music-streaming is like the inbred child of the record companies and radio, just as notoriously exploitive to artists.

Young people, it has been lamented for many years by live-music producers and promoters, just don't go to see live music at the grass-roots level. It's not how they discover new music, and most of the artists don't develop that way, anyway -- they literally never enter that setting. The college towns in America are no longer the incubators of musical innovators that they were. Yes, that all ended in the mid-'90s. If you go to see a guitar-rock band today, chances are the musicians are the same people who were on stage thirty years ago, and the audience is the same age.

Homework: listen to any popular modern country radio station for a couple of hours and count how many songs refer to (normalize) the use of alcohol or other self-destructive behaviors.

 

[brandon]

This topic is dear to my heart too... My background is in music recording/production, though only VERY small-time, in a small local music scene, in the 2000s.. So I don't have heaps of experience, or particularly nuanced opinions or anything. Agree with everything you guys have said.. I'll check out the videos you posted later Cosmos, they sound interesting! I'm not quite young still, not quite old yet...but definitely getting some Old Man Opinions these days :) I often wonder if it's just that... I imagine how I feel about current popular music is how my parents felt about what I listened to as a kid.. Everything changes. But, it DOES seem to me to be becoming objectively more impersonal, mechanical, and inhuman.

My intro to the fact that not all is as it seems in the music industry was when we watched a documentary (I can't remember what it was called) in a class as music tech school, about how major record labels work, aimed at musicians who were looking to be signed to one. Eg - common practice is, if your band got signed by a label, they'd "pay you" a huge advance sum, but then as part of your contract, force you to make expensive music videos / do marketing shenanigans / just spend a heap of cash, which you have to pay for yourself out of the advance - often likely paying companies owned by the same people who own the record label. Sort of looks like money laundering. So it was common for there to be "famous and popular" bands who, on paper, are doing great and making heaps of money... but in reality they're still broke and nothing they've made is really theirs. Any actual money they do manage to make would have been from things like merchandise sales at gigs, done at their own instigation... And the documentary said this would pretty much be the case for all bands on major labels until you get right to the biggest, biggest leagues of superstardom.

Anyway. I have no experience with labels or fame :) What I'm interested in is the actual music production.. and yeah, the modern sound is horrible to my ears. And I *like* electronic music made with computers and synthesisers... it's what I mainly make, myself. I like SOME of it anyway.. the "people making heartfelt music by themselves on their computer, because that's what they have & know, without any regard to commerciality" genre... I love and feel deeply about a lot of that stuff, though am under no illusions that most of it reaches the peaks of creativity and glory of music of the past.

So you've got a retreat of the youth into private, virtual spaces more or less as a defensive measure, which in turn inhibits the formation of subcultures. Subcultures being inhibited, the live music ecosystem dies. It no longer being possible for young musicians to make a name for themselves playing local gigs, young musicians also retreat online, trying to gather an audience from the internet rather than from their local environments.

Just as an aside - I think there's some extra nuance to this that can be missed..because I am/was one of those young musicians retreating into the internet already, 15-20 years ago and more..(retreating is the wrong word in this case - I was always there, it's where I began and grew up, started doing telecommunications at a young age).. Just wanted to note that I reckon children of the late80/early90s internet/BBS scene have very little in common with the internet youth culture today, woke stuff etc, and I feel like we often fall through the gap when slightly older people talk about internet kids. If that makes sense. :) Like "we" have a bit of a foot in both worlds, or something.

Some technical specifics of how I feel music has been changing:
Everything is much more controlled. Mistakes aren't allowed... Any wrong notes, singers slightly off, etc, edited out or "fixed" via computer. Less key changes... songs tend in the direction of just doing the same thing over and over... Timing is EXACT, everything is locked to a grid (even with early computer/synth music, timing was not necessarily exact...).. Greatly lessened dynamics - quiet bits aren't allowed any more, because people listen to music on little earbud headphones or mobile phone speakers (I can't fathom this haha!)...... so, the technology used in TV adverts to make them seem louder is used in music to make the quiet bits louder, so everything is at a uniform volume. (This was the case for decades, compressors/limiters etc, very useful effect - if used in moderation can make recordings sound really great and closer to how they sound live IMO.. but the style now is MASSIVE OVERUSE of this effect. People love to blast themselves with low frequencies..maybe for the bodily rush it provides, according to my friends who are into that). Greatly increased use of pre-made sounds... I don't just mean samples, but also synth patches, effects, even rythms/beats... seems like to many, the music itself is seen as a commodity. Basically like the difference between a hand-made piece of wooden furniture and a mass-produced plastic chair from a supermarket.

Of course there are huge numbers of unknown musicians NOT doing any of that.. though as PopHistorian says even lots of those seem to mimic the popular example...

Also yeah like Cosmos said, the sheer amount and availability of music must make a difference... When anyone can get anything at any time, nothing is as special any more, maybe? Like photos. Early photos required a great deal of time and effort to produce... then advanced through 60s-90s film cameras which were much easier, but produced finite, specific results, which were still special. But now.... we're swimming in photographs. It's normal to have thousands and thousands of photos on your phone, take photos of anything at a moment's notice, upload em to The Cloud etc... I don't think most people probably look at most of those photos ever again. It's different than the shoebox of old photos under the bed, you pull out and look at sometimes, remembering days gone by....

Somewhat rambly post, I'm a bit scattered this morning... Thanks for the thread!

 

[brandon]

Oh yeah, as well as lack of dynamics in the sound volume of the modern music style, there's less SPACE. Like there are no gaps, no pauses, there's no human breathing room or something.. Same goes for many TV shows. The way they seem to edit things now in popular shows/movies is like, a constant barrage of stuff, fast cutting from one thing to the next, to fit as much in as possible... Old movies could have long stretches of silence, etc, which are almost shocking when you've forgotten and become used to current style.

(Don't know if this really fits but I noticed, in older movies, they tended to spend a lot of time - most of the movie, often - building the world, setting up the story... and the ending was sometimes quite sudden. New movies, everything kicks off right away, there's much more middle and ending and less beginning... the older style sudden endings are a bit jarring, but the newer style feels less "real" to me because of the lack of world-building. Don't know what that means or if it matters...)

 

[BHelmet]

Context: I’m way old; I played in bands; music in my veins; have both millennial and Gen X and Z Kids.

My take: pop music is now like CNN. It’s the narrative. Only boomers actually listen to the radio anymore anyway. Maybe. People listen to what and who they like. I believe the numbers of the big pop stars are fake and overinflated. Just like Bidens vote total. Fortunately it’s easier to avoid what is being shoveled into peoples heads music wise than avoiding the political and pseudo-cultural narratives.

My kids have their Spotify playlists and genres and they all make fun of and hate pop. I know boomers who have their satellite radio stations. Pop is irrelevant these days. Everything sounds the same; the singers are all Uber emo and promoting their dysfunctional lousy relationships with life and other humans. But it is the same as the nightly news. Homogenized; repetitious, vacuous, shallow ad nauseum.

Just turn it off. Nobody listens anyway. Except maybe immature 13 year old girls. And maybe that is the target.

 

[T.C.]

There’s obviously lots of factors as to why popular music is the way it is these days. The first thing I think about when I hear modern pop is the fast food effect.

Fast food is designed to appeal to the body’s simple and natural liking for salt, fat, sugar etc. Modern pop does this by having an easily accessible, repetitive beat that ‘you can tap your foot to’, melodies that ‘hook’ you and easily stick in your mind, and are not very harmonically complex so that there are no jarring twists or deviations in unexpected directions that might take a little inner mental or emotional adjustment - i.e., effort - on the part of the listener, thereby reducing the chance that they would change to a different song or channel.

Many of the top 20 songs actually have numerous professional writers who work together in a factory style way, each with their own expertise in the ways to hook people, and a lot of the songs by different artists even have the same writers and production teams. So it’s a very precise and calculated effort. It’s not just one guy with a computer who makes an easy beat, writes a simple melody and gets someone with half a voice to perform it.

Another large factor in my opinion was the advent of MTV and music videos. In the past, music was about what you were listening to, primarily. Nowadays, a tried and tested formula is to find people who look like models and dress them in sexy clothes (or lack thereof). But many of them have little musical talent. The songs then end up being like soundtracks to soft core pornography. Over the years, that makes a vicious cycle where people care less and less about ‘good’ music because they’re not used to hearing it anymore, because these artists are unable to perform it. Basically the music itself doesn’t matter.

The way people listen to music is possibly the biggest factor in how songs and style of music are written and develop. The reason we had opera singers was because there was no way to electronically amplify a voice, so you had to sing loud. When microphones were invented, music changed, we got crooners, people could sing quietly for the first time. Then guitar amplification came along and we got the Beatles, then rock music. Then lots of young people wanted to play guitar and small music venues opened up where they would play, and the due to the size of the room, we got punk, new wave, grunge, and indie. Then came sampling and digital production which lead to disco and dance music.

Nowadays, everyone listens to music with ear buds. The frequency range is severely narrowed, which leads to lack of nuance and dynamics and so encourages heavy compression. When production teams for pop artists write now, they have to bear in mind that this is how most of the audience are going to hear the music.

The accessibility of music has gone from people having no way to hear it at home, and a trip to the theatre being a special event, to being able to download and listen to every song ever made wherever you are, which has taken away the specialness and lead to music being basically disposable to anyone who was born in 90’s onwards. This is again why modern production teams have to go the fast food route, because they’re competing against every song ever written, so their product needs to bring immediate visceral satisfaction and be as addictive as possible.

 

[PopHistorian]

Many of the top 20 songs actually have numerous professional writers who work together in a factory style way, each with their own expertise in the ways to hook people

I'm not so sure about that. Although songwriting credits were always suspect, as far back as the 1950s at least, they are now rife with outright dishonesty. In these cases, one or two people compose the song, and then "cut in" various other people as part of a deal so they receive part of the publishing, mechanical, and broadcast royalties. Often, this concession is necessary to get a song recorded by a major recording artist. Very often in such cases, the recording artist is listed as a co-writer, but had nothing to do with the composition, as a dishonest way of building artistic credibility for singers who don't actually write, so they can tout the "singer-songwriter" title. There have been many scandals about these false writing credits, too. Songwriting credits are often fake news and illusion.

There are songwriting "factory" teams that can be three or more people, all of whom get credited as composers on a given song, but in reality, the output of any one or two of them is simply credited to all. Think "Lennon-McCartney." R.E.M. didn't write much together, but all of their songs are credited to all four members - and there are many examples of other bands doing that, too.

The article linked below introduces also the notion that writers plagiarize so often now that they give credit to the composers from whom they borrowed, rather than risk being sued, which is informative about the sway that lawyers have in the recording business (and have for a long time). It isn't just Hollywood movie makers who are all out of ideas.

How many people does it take to write a hit song in 2019?

Credit listings can now run to 30 names. Here's why

www.gq-magazine.co.uk

 

[Cosmos]

A new Beato summary on why music is getting worse. Good points I think. The summary is as follows:

„In this episode, I discuss the crisis in music in two acts:
Act I - Music is too Easy to Make
Act II - Music is too Easy to Consume
...and their cumulative negative effect.“

 

[BHelmet]

another side angle: “Popular” implies a broad-based consensus which I don’t think exists anymore. Whether it’s stylistic, genre or the message/meaning or the vibe, society is divided, generationally splintered, and ADHD-challenged with short attention spans and waffling tastes. So my take is that pop music no longer exists (if it ever really did) because it can’t. There is little to nothing that a large majority agrees on, no matter what it is. Hence, pop music has become an anachronism.

Everything Beato is saying is right on. Can the horses be but back in the corral? Probably not. Anything truly new and innovative that becomes truly popular is going to immediately become cloned, replicated, homogenized, quantized, regulated and dumbed down. Lovely.

 

[Seato]

The radio at the store I help out at is mostly tuned into a dreadful "popular" music channel, except for an older staff member who switches it to classical on her shifts.

I started actually paying attention to the music playing a few months ago. Pretty much all the songs seem to be about failed relationships and relationship failures. The most "positive" song was some man begging for his romantic relationship not to fail. All of it seems thoroughly depressing.

This particularly caught my attention due to the focus here on the romantic reading exercises and imagining positive relationships. A strong contrast to the overwhelming negativity and distress broadcast via these modern songs.

 

[Cosmos]

A new Beato summary on why music is getting worse. Good points I think. The summary is as follows:

„In this episode, I discuss the crisis in music in two acts:
Act I - Music is too Easy to Make
Act II - Music is too Easy to Consume
...and their cumulative negative effect.“

Beato has published a follow-up video, after people complained that "he is just an old guy, not understanding new music" and more such "points":

I 100% agree with what he is saying. By the way, I'm not an old guy, but I see the same things he is seeing. I'm open to pretty much all genres of music, and never was the type of guy who would say that such and such a genre is necessarily bad or that I would not listen to something from that genre just because it is in that genre. I like many music styles/genres, and I don't agree that popular music has to be below or bad compared to others. Not at all. I happen to like a lot of popular music, but usually those were pretty much all songs that were written/performed/recorded before the early two thousands (with the exception of Willow now, which I wouldn't even call popular though). That is a very noticeable thing IMO, in general.