Roll over Beethoven and tell Tchaikovsky the news. It’s the opposite way around femoore12. Where ya' been?
Is Old Music Killing New Music?
I ran across this Atlantic magazine article on another music forum. It asks the question if old music is killing new music. I didn't realize that older music represents 70% of the music market according to this article. I know I use Qobuz and Tidal to find new music and new artists for my collection, but I don't know how common that actually is for most people. I think that a lot of people that listen to services like Spotify and Apple Music probably don't keep track of what the algorithms are queuing up in their playlists. Perhaps it's all becoming elevator music.
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@curiousjim It is KCRW out of Santa Monica, CA. They have 2 feeds, the periodic NPR FM one and the 24 hour HD FM one. I prefer the NPR one which I listen to from 9AM - 12PM and also sometimes in the evening, from 8PM - 3AM. Listening right now. I love this station so much that I ended up getting 3 FM tuners last Sept, Luckily, vintage FM tuners are super cheap and sound great. Music | Streaming Internet Radio Online | KCRW This station allows the DJ;s to play whatever they are in the mood for. The DJ's are walking music encyclopedias.
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I disagree with the premise of the article as well. I’m just about 65, and I started streaming about two years ago. There is so much great music being produced right now that the old stuff, is really starting to seem very old to me. I would say probably 70% of my listening is to music that Has come out in the last two years. And every week I look forward to finding a new artist and I usually do. I have expanded my portfolio a Favourites 100 times over from 10 years ago. I think as we see more people switching to streaming, the old music will certainly not have the status that it once did. And from a production standpoint, I find the new music far better produced and certainly more in tune with the audiophile hobby… in terms of over all sound quality. I still love the old stuff… But there’s a ton of new stuff that rivals it. |
@berner99 er, yes, really. I ask because I suspect you are completely ignorant of great contemporary music from certain genres. |
@clearthinker Define "new music"? |
Hi @infection It's really for the OP to define; it was his term. I would define it by release date, not style. I could say post 2009 - giving it 10+ years. Or more narrowly, what's being released now. I sometimes look into review recommendations of current releases by new artists. I am invariably disappointed. It must be my age although, as I said, I suspect a lot of youngsters have move on from recorded music. |
@clearthinker which artists/genres? |
The author of the article doesn’t give a starting point for when they think "new music" starts. To me anything from the year 2005 and forward would be classified as "new music". I think that is around the time streaming started taking off and downloads had already surpassed physical sales. Streaming killed the video star. |
I would ask what that 70% number represents. If it represents sales then I believe it. The young generation listening through their phone or $10 bluetooth speaker’s do not purchase music. They are content listening to what ever the server spins next. This is the issue when you start to reference a percentage, you can make it mean anything you want by omission of how you got there. Weather forecasters will will tell us their is a 40% chance of rain. Why not tell us their is a 60% chance it won’t rain? Because we would not check back again and again to see if it will rain snd they have commercials to show us. |
My first thought too. The monotony. The simplicity. The same three chords over and over again. The way almost all cars look the same because of aerodynamics for gas mileage regulations, and SUVs and trucks all look the same for utility is the way music has become. It's very formulaic. Songs are now written by committee, so they're dumbed down to a common denominator. It amazes me that you need seven writers to come up with the same old three minutes of "boots and cats" computer-generated rhythm overlaid with fake auto-tuned vocals. And don't get me started about rap, which is much more literature than music, and even more monotonous. |
"New music is killing new music" is my thought as well. I primarily look for music coming from new Blues artists who re-interpret the classics and come up with new tunes. To me, "pop" music is still pop music; commercially driven crap that is put out there for world consumption. I have a nephew who plays alternative rock and has his own band. He writes his own music which he labels as "original". Honestly, most of it sounds really bad. He complains that only a few can appreciate his original music. His point of view is if you don't like his music then you must be an idiot. To each his own, but to me musicianship is paramount regardless of the genre. Autotuned, drum machined pop music is not what I am looking for.
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Technology has made making music easier and more accessible to the masses. Not everyone in the masses should be making music. There is more new music than ever before but the number of real musicians, people that can play instruments, is likely not that much greater than in the past. I read 2 instances of articles on this subject and heard a report on NPR. My take was that NEW MUSIC was classified as something at most 2 years old.
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hilde45 "Every generation, blames the one before" - Mike and the Mechanics, The Living Years. Could it be that the generations younger than the boomers have had it too easy when they were raised and just aren't willing to work hard enough to get their share? There are plenty of opportunities for the younger generations to become doctors, lawyers, and other high paying careers, but it takes a lot of work to make it in those careers. There are a lot of good kids out there, but are they determined enough to put in the effort? This thing about living in their parent's basement is not just a stereotype, it's actually true. They're addicted to social media which can be a distraction to the concentration needed to get ahead in the more difficult fields. Last but not least, I find their music somewhat lazy too, all thumping beat but no melody or orchestration. Hell, even Led Zeppelin used strings in some of their songs. They should watch The Beatles: Get Back and learn where true genius combined with hard work can take people. |
Distinction between old and new has not much meaning, save if we speak about money going in the pocket of living musicians for their living... There is only great and greatest music, not old and new for me.... I had way too much absolute masterpieces to listen to non stop to search for the "new"... I search for masterpices , old or new, the date make no differences...Nor the country or culture of origin....
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+ 1, you hit the nail on the head with adjectives: "monotony, simplistic and formulaic." Most of the so-called new music sounds like everyone involved was following some type of recipe. Poor songwriting is bad enough; but, there is a serious lack of stellar musicianship that could lift the poor songwriting above the level of mundane muzak or sonic wallpaper. This is a complicated subject with no easy answers. Someone once said: "there is nothing new under the sun," which is another way of saying it's a copycat world that we live in. The thing that worries me the most about this subject is that I don't sense the kind of non-conformity by young musicians or listeners that is needed to shake things up and create something new or transcendent. I hope to be proven wrong on that one. |
is this old or new? I dont give a damn.... It sound pretty much near the "eternal feminine soul " to me....How about Eve in the garden? A thousand years old tradition sang nowadays how do we called that? It is "jazz" from India to my ears....Not less beautiful than Ella Fitzgerald for sure.... Hypnotically beautiful .... For this thread , i will change the title for: "old ears" listening always the same tunes are killing the eternally new.... 😁😊 By the way the population of India is : 1.38 billions, 4 times de US.... They have some musicians and some unknown instruments that are among the finest instruments ever created by mankind....... How many americans confuse the simple veena, the rudra veena and the vichitra veena and the chitra veena , the sitar and the sarod? Who know the hypnotical power of the sarangi? I can goes on here about many thousand years old Indian "jazz" musicians..... Dont upgrade, buy some "new" music.....😁😊
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For producer Rick Rubin, The Beatles' recorded achievements are akin to a miracle.
He's not the only one who thinks that way today.
Just goes to show how times and sensibilities have changed.
From Please Please Me to Abbey Road in 7 years is one hell of a journey. You could argue that they were lucky in that a lot of things fell for them - Epstein, Martin, EMI, the emergence of the LP as a serious art form, the kaleidoscopic background of the 1960s, but nevertheless it still looks rather miraculous. |
Well said but in defense of my favorite Beatle from my youth I think his musically unproductive years were more like from 1975 through 1980. He did release four albums from the time the Beatles broke up in 1969 through 1974. Three more albums than most artists today release in the same period of time. Of course artists like Ryan Adams and others are the exception. Plastic Ono Band, Imagine, Mind Games, and Walls And Bridges were nothing to sneeze at in that four year period. And the song Imagine is potentially one of the most powerful songs ever written. And the artists during the 60’s like the Beatles and Stones were pressured from their record companies to release two or more albums in a year while also touring. Not an easy task. Making it in the music industry is for only the few but for those that do make it I’d say they have an easier task in the world of streaming and not being pressured to cut an album every year or three. I enjoy a lot of the new artists that I can hear through streaming but I’m not simpathetic if I still enjoy the music of the 60’s, 70’s and 80’s.
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If the Beatles are geniuses because of thirteen albums in few years what about Bob Dylan productions? He was alone and it is certainly comparable productions... Anyway who know the 6 thousand works Telemann output? The 500 hundred Vivaldi concertos? And his more than one hundred operas? People call genius anybody they like... I prefer to call genius some others .... I will call Bach a genius for example.... Sorry for the Beatles, i like them very much anyway....They will be the first astounded by the ignorance of their fans.... 😁😊
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Maybe not enough "new" music is "good" music. When something is appealing, people find it without it being spoon fed to them by a music executive. Take a minute to listen to what is now defined as R&B. Over processed tunes that muffle good vocals trying to sing poor lyrics. Maybe if artists... focused on making good music and not scoring likes on Tik Tok or IG, there might be stuff people would gravitate to. One thing this article inadvertently proves... good music never goes old ... even after 18 months!!! |
By speaking of the Beatles I was not implying that they were over and above Dylan or any of the classical, jazz, or artists from any other genre. And was not comparing them to Bach, Vivaldi, Beethoven, Miles Davis, etc. I found the article by Rick Ruben interesting and I would say that he knows quite a bit about the artists of today. With that said I do think the Beatles were genius in their own right.
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I think that theBeatles have some "genius" for sure.... Anyone negating that is deaf....I apologize to you for my post if i was appearing to suggest the opposite... But genius is a big word in a small world....Or a small word in a big world... This is also like the marvellous Beatles genius, a true genius craftmanship:
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If one is not streaming they'll have a difficult time discovering new music today. I quit listening to mass consumption music after early 70's, only place to hear more ambitious music was the underground/freeform fm and university stations. After undergound/freeform stations went away, left to university stations and a few specialty shows on commercial fm for this up until I discovered streaming.
While I have at least 2500 cd's and 3,000 albums from all eras and most genres I was losing interest in music constantly rotating the usual suspects of collections. Streaming is like having unlimited underground fm and university stations, and I get to be the DJ!
Going to see Beach House this weekend with my older brother and his son. The typical concert I go these days pretty much devoid of boomers.
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I am quoting just a snip of your excellent comment. This is I think is the most accurate analysis of what "popular" new music has now become. Record companies have always been in pursuit of commoditizing music into a simple consumable product. Everyone sounds and looks the same. Just like vanilla ice cream. |
@femoore12, I tend to agree.
Though this brings back a very vivid fond memory. During the summer of 2016 I attended a High School Musical performance in Carriere Mississippi and was just flabbergasted by these young performers. I’m talking one right after thee other. But check this out ... finishing act, just two tracks laid down by a 5 piece band in tribute of Prince and his passing earlier in the year. My mood shifted from flabbergasted to gobsmacked instantly, for they totally nailed it and were firing on all cylinders. What we would call, PRAT ;-) I always have hope .... Those tracks ... Let’s Go Crazy and Purple Rain |
I listen to jazz and classical mostly but otherwise have been part of the music biz for over five decades as a musician (not jazz, I'm not that smart) and (more recent decades) a live sound mixer. The music biz has never been a good idea for a career (I was lucky for many years), and neither have any of the other arts. Period. Touring always sucked for all but the very few, record companies pretty much consistently ripped everyone off in any way possible, and for 99.9% of musicians...well...get a gig in the local bar scene? What's that? Be a solo artist and practice your ass off and get VERY good, and do the "coffee house" thing. Play French Horn in Les Miz. Otherwise it's DJ or zip. Get good but don't expect financial success and you might not go insane. There's lots of great new stuff from all over the world for the tiny minority of jazz freaks like me, and streaming has turned me on to some amazing music I likely never would have stumbled on otherwise. Modern Pop music...mostly just don't care about it with a couple of exceptions...but really...meh...
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@dabel That is a great experience. The talent is absolutely out there. I love that they did a tribute to Prince. Phenomenal musician.
@wolf_garcia life as a musician is a tough gig. My brother used to tour the country as an Opera singer. He loved it, but it was a rough life being on the road almost all year. |
Agree. With the ease of recording nowadays, the selection is gargantuan. The problem is sifting through all the crap. It requires work to find them. As always, the Top whatever lists drive the marketing. Those don't require sifting and are therefore favored by people less obsessed with music. Just go to the Spotify Top Ten and hit Play. Speaking to your "out of the mainstream", metal has seen a similar negative shift in quality. If you go to Spotify's top lists the metal is either unoriginal, unimaginative, monotonous or not metal. There's even a song called Call Me Little Sunshine. Can you imagine a metal song being called that? Even worse, it has never-ending repetitive lyrics just like pop. You will never walk alone And the even more out of the mainstream extreme metal has gone from having groove and melody to favoring dissonance. It's like they're doing the opposite of pop and trying to be so different that they've left the realm of listenable. So the quality issue may be generational and not limited to pop. |
+1 @jssmith An insightful post. |
As the parent of a 20-something year old musician, my son says if there is a music industry, it's nothing like it was when I was growing up in the 1960s and 1970s. FM radio was king. If your music was played on the radio, people went out and bought the physical media. That meant that a few executives decided what new music people heard. There are tens of thousands of hours of new music uploaded to the internet every week. How do you listen to all that and say there are "no good musicians" anymore? That's not true. There are so many who never get championed by someone already famous to promote them. If you want your music heard, you pay big money for your music to get promoted. Also, young people rarely listen to the FM radio. My son doesn't listen to FM radio. |
I’m a boomer that grew up in New York and was a fan of WNEW FM and got to see all the great concerts. I got interested in Jazz while still in High School. Bottom line for me is that I enjoy several genres of music and try to keep current using Sirrus XM. |
Man, finding new artist and music has never been easier. And such a huge variety. While I fondly remember sifting through album bins for half a day in my younger years the fact is, and while I still enjoy it, I just don't have that kind of time anymore. So I find having a few minutes to read through threads like this makes it easy to find new artist and music...read post, select highlight, Command C, Qobuz, search bar, Command V, enter, new artist, click the Heart and my next listening session is set. |