I'm not a big Beato fan but he makes some good points at time. This is one of those times IMO. I know some of the younger generation will disagree with the whole premise. Being born in 1951 the boomer gen was hit with the same indictment about the new Rock & Roll music. There was some truth in it. But we didn't care because we liked R&R. I expect the same from some today who like today's music. but I think if you listen you may find some morsels which can be enlightening. This is especially true for musicians who may find they agree wholeheartedly..
Very interesting and valid points coming from a "producer" of music.
But there are two sides to every story. Like the consumer of music’s side.
In the old days, you only got to listen to a few select things that others in the industry determined to produce and play (on the radio).
Yes its easier than ever to both produce and listen to music which changes the whole value proposition, but at least one up side is its easier than ever for artists to get their music out there for others to maybe hear. Of course, there is more tro sort through than ever to find it. But, if its good enough and has the appeal, anyone might deliver a "hit". Maybe even form a successful career. All on their own, at least to start. Then the sharks come to feed as they always have.
So yes its all very diluted and more garbage than ever, but a music lover is able to find things they may never have had the chance to in the olden days.
All in all, as a consumer of music and not producer, I believe this is the best time ever for a music lover. Streaming is a big reason why. Who receives the profits? Probably not the vast majority of the worker bees. But maybe those special talents who somehow manage to "break through"? I still see plenty of artists out there that seem to have successful careers. Seemingly more than ever! Maybe Taylor Swift will share!
What happens is always market driven. I think the market for music is no less than years past. Probably more. But still only few will be able to grab the attention of many and perhaps achieve "stardom" and its rewards.
Being a musician was never an easy pathway to fortune for the vast majority it seems.
I'm 73 and I disagree with Beato pretty much all the time when he's whining about how 'his music' just isn't relevant to 'the kids' anymore.
He sounds like people of my parents' generation moaning about the Beatles and and that new rock and roll stuff - 'that's not music! That's screaming!' - when they first came on the scene, and why can't the kids like Perry Como and Dean Martin like they do? That's real music....
There's always been great music. There's always been not-great music. Often that is totally subjective and boils down to taste and life experience.
I was writing a reply to many of the posters and had a brown out & lost it. Oh well. I'll just say that most were good comments with which I mostly agree. its obvious who did not read the post and commented to the header alone. For them I'll quote from my previous post
I know some of the younger generation will disagree with the whole premise. Being born in 1951 the boomer gen was hit with the same indictment about the new Rock & Roll music. There was some truth in it. But we didn't care because we liked R&R. I expect the same from some today who like today's music
Contemporary art, in this case music, has always had critics and detractors regardless of genre. This has always been true and will be so, then, now and in the future. Even Mozart had his critics who described his music as “harsh, too complex, overloaded and even boring”. I’m a “baby boomer” whose love of music has grown with me to appreciate all genres. Many of the lyrics are the “poetry” of our times and the artist’s life experience. For that I am appreciative.
Enjoy the music.
A lot of modern music is catchy, tuneful, danceable, and memorable.
It’s also pure crap production-wise. It’s pitch corrected, auto-tuned to an inch of its life, quantized without fail and is mechanical and lifeless.
Let’s now add artificial "drums", synthesized guitar, a bunch of programmed loops and every Pro-Tools "plug-in" imaginable and it becomes a certifiable dumpster fire.
Case in point is Billie Eilish. I love her songs. However, her music is almost un-listenable, production-wise. On a bluetooth speaker across the room it’s fine. On anything approaching hi-fi it’s a complete mess.
That’s my reason why modern music is garbage. It’s good songs ruined by crappy production.
We cannot deny that there is as much musicians of genius today as in the past...
It is evident,...
It is evident also that corporations manufacture the singers, the musicians the public and the product to some great extent and sometimes completely way more today than by the past ...
It is also evident that there is music garbage very well done in a professional way in the past as today...
It is evident than there is garbage not so well done yesterday as today...
Yes i am an old dude complaining as Beato did...So what ? I like his sincerity by the way...
But i just wrote a precise sociological argument : Manufacture of singers,musicians,products and especially manufacture of many, many niches products for an atomized public reduced in tribes by corporation fine tuning the medias which they control pretty well...The listeners and the public is then manufactured also and way less homogenous than 80 years ago.
Then there is way less place for the artist creativity and originality if he want to eat, he must choose between integrating a machine in some niche or goes independent.....
An artist who became a machine is at risk to loose his genius... Some can survive to this by developing big turn at 90 degree in their style, but you must be a genius to let your created loving public behind your race toward your own musical goal as Bob Dylan was able to do and some others, freeing themselves... Madonna is the same machine as she was since the beginning.Big talent no genius.
When Beato talk about how easier it is to make music today, he say the same thing than me about "manufacturing" everything even the artist.
Talking shit about Beato will not change this fact...
The grumpier dude here are perhaps not me nor Beato but those who do ad hominem attack instead of "thinking" ...
Technology made everything easier at the cost of replacing human imperfection by a perfect mechanization of our gestures. This is Beato point. And he is right.
Machine perfect gesture kill art expression because it kill the subtle very meaningful microdynamic controlled imperfection which is the breathing of art.
I bet those who disparaged Beato video as a Grumpy man rant did not listen the video accurate content or worst dont understood his points..
His last point : music is too easy to consume nowadays and it may destruct some of his value it for sure right...
It make music a product as anything else not a revered sacred creation which we must work hard to own. Then it motivate the producers to produce more garbage to consume in the continuous " faucet" of Spotify or other medias.
It's been 54 years since the Beatles stopped making music. That late 60s early 70s period would probably qualify as the renaissance period of adult rock and roll. Young people today who are exposed to the Beatles, Rolling Stones, Zeppelin, the Who and others often regard one of them as among their favorite bands--usually Beatles or Zep
I listen to music every day and buy a significant amount of current fare. I admire and listen to countless new stuff- Taylor ( very good although the lyrics are usually directed toward female sensibilities), Chappel Roan, Killers, 21 Pilots, Billie Eilish to name a few as well as new country and Americana (too numerous to mention). I enjoy a lot of current music, but I do not believe the vast majority will be something that be listened to 50 years from now. I'm not talking about a song here or there--I'm talking about an artist.
So, despite the fact that every generation has its own music, I do think that as a rule, the music of the late 60s - early 70s is "better", that is, appeals to a wider array of people and generations than the music of today.
The arc of music like literature, art, and architecture has been bending upward since the dawn of time, so I don’t understand the premise of the video. As a boomer, I’d be happy to never hear music from the ‘60 and ‘70’s ever again. The newer the music, the more I’m interested in it.
He sounds like people of my parents' generation moaning about the Beatles and and that new rock and roll stuff - 'that's not music! That's screaming!' - when they first came on the scene, and why can't the kids like Perry Como and Dean Martin like they do? That's real music....
+1 @larsman. My Dad really liked the Lawrence Welk show, but he didn't seem to have any use for much else. Nothing that I liked, anyway.
In my opinionRick is correct. So what is good music? You need to be able to write a song that will tell a story, play an insturment(s) to convey the message, have the music well recorded, mixed and mastered. If you think that you can sit at laptop with a variety of plug in's and make a decent song / recording, it's not going to happen. The music will always be artificial and without any soul. If you're lucky, you have had some music training including songwriting. If not you will be lost.
I don't stream because it doesn't sound as good as hard media and the artists get ripped off. My brother has a real recording studio and we can count on one hand how many "musicians" have had the perequisites listed above to be successful. When they do, you do a proper microphone setup and let them play. It's a pleasure to record them instead of a painful process in ProTools of cuting and pasting segments together because they don't know how to play their insturuments or sing with a crappy song.
I had to quit at the "Music is too easy to make". That means that people that have a talent to create music but not the technical skill to play an instrument now have an opportunity to create unique great music.
So, while that may have caused flooding of the music scene with not good, it is hard to believe that it hasn't enabled a bunch of great music to be created by non-instrument playing folks.
All the talented new artists have everything rigged against them (w.r.t marketing/recognition)....cblocked by a whole lotta boomer bozo artists who’ve already had the marketing in place for a few decades.
Any young music lover looking at a specific genre is forced to look at some untalented boomers placed front and center at the record store. All the high caliber youngins never get looked at, i.e., a stinking shame.
Every generation thinks their music is the best because it’s personal and it means something to them. As I get older I realize my thinking that my music was the best when I was younger and everything else wasn’t was myopic. I like some of the music my kids like. I try to keep an open mind and keep checking out new music. Old dogs can like new music.
You completely miss his point about the mechanisation of the human musician gesture which make it more easy to create ready-made consumers products instead of artistic creation.
For sure there is advantage to mechanisation of musical process. There is. But Beato point is not negating advantage but to point to a big unobserved problem.
I had to quit at the "Music is too easy to make". That means that people that have a talent to create music but not the technical skill to play an instrument now have an opportunity to create unique great music.
So, while that may have caused flooding of the music scene with not good, it is hard to believe that it hasn't enabled a bunch of great music to be created by non-instrument playing folks.
Beato point is not new against old or vice versa.it is not about dad taste or new artist creativity. It is about the manufacturing content of music and manufacturing the complete artistic scene as a factory...
My God! Some people are not able to understand a simple point without attacking the man or distorting his meaning.
I dont listen music because it is old or new but because it is good... Josquin desPrez is good and Bob Dylan too...
Music for me is not just the consumation of always new products one after the other... It is more exploring to discover something i will kept listening till death.
Then your sentence reveal that you listen music as a distraction from boredom then it takes always something new...All classical beautiful songs from the 60 &70 has nothing to do for you.
I myself half the time listen for the hundred’ th time what i love from any era since Gregorian chants till today...I dont use music as a consumer product to kill silence but as a sacred emotional experience...
Good music has nothing to do with his country of birth or his date of birth...
Bob Dylan was a genius then and is today..
I just discovered last week a promising new artist... But it is not so often... I ask if not genius true free creativity...
In a word i want if not ectasy pure artistic genius why less ?
I’d be happy to never hear music from the ‘60 and ‘70’s ever again. The newer the music, the more I’m interested in it.
While the gravitational pull here is music, looking beyond that subject, the video is easily applied to ALL marketing. The generification of food, clothing, cars and tract housing speaks to data smoothing in search of replicable product that maximizes sales/profit with minimal corporate effort.
Many traveling far from home will still look for familiar franchise food in lieu of something regional, interesting and particular to the culture. Eating at McDonald's while in Denmark. Looking for Taco Bell while in Argentina. Really?
People are by nature not risk takers, seeking the familiar. They even practice it in travel, touching on only what's found in the brochure. People are tribal and travel in support of that. Cruises dumping 5,000 at a time on a port so they can find expected. People do not like surprises. They like easily digestible music.
Thanks for your enlightening interpretation with which i concur...
I will only add that like cooking, traveling, music also need always education of basic tastes...
I dont listen music as i did when i was young even if i kept my taste it changed and amplified encompassing world music and jazz and classical After Bach.
While the gravitational pull here is music, looking beyond that subject, the video is easily applied to ALL marketing. The generification of food, clothing, cars and tract housing speaks to data smoothing in search of replicable product that maximizes sales/profit with minimal corporate effort.
Many traveling far from home will still look for familiar franchise food in lieu of something regional, interesting and particular to the culture. Eating at McDonald's while in Denmark. Looking for Taco Bell while in Argentina. Really?
People are by nature not risk takers, seeking the familiar. They even practice it in travel, touching on only what's found in the brochure. People are tribal and travel in support of that. Cruises dumping 5,000 at a time on a port so they can find expected. People do not like surprises. They like easily digestible music.
@celtic66+1 Seekers are the few and far between, artists and consumers have to put in the work to discover one another.
I find plenty of new interesting artists, and I still listen to old favorites. I like to read the comments with youtube videos of the oldie acts, generally the comments betray youthful reminiscing and bashing of contemporary music. Seems to me, these people lament their loss of youth, when one can no longer find pleasure in new and exciting things they certainly have lost their youth.
Well... I went back and watched the whole video. Twelve minutes I will not get back. Let me paraphrase... "Wahhhh, things are changing and I don’t like it. Wahhhhh." The old days were so much better... I was so privileged to not be able to buy much music. Yes and a bowl of gruel will taste oh so much better if I am starving to death. Darn... I loved to old days when I was starving to death... I just don’t appreciate food like I used to.
I, and I think most of the people here, are not just random listeners of music and actually don’t just follow whatever is released. We don’t just consume what is put in front of use and love it. Sure that is true for the general public...for thousands of years they have been told what to think and fed what they should like and have been taken advantage of... nothing new here.
Great art requires great artists, they find the tools to create it. Appreciators of art will find it and appreciate it.
This and several other recent threads beg to be answered with, "OK, Boomer."
I get how it's harder to accept change with age, but to assume the present isn't as good as the past is to simply increase the pressure that leads to fossilization.
This and several other recent threads beg to be answered with, "OK, Boomer."
This has lost you all your credibility. I'm not a boomer.
And the kids (or even adults) who start or finish their phrases with insult for the previous generations have no credibility to their arguments because at that point it degenerates to name calling.
There are a lot of valid points in the video and in here. And make no mistake, today's music is absolute crap 99% of the time for many of the reasons cited in the video. The biggest culprits to me are the new -tech "tools" that are abused and misused. The tools are:
Auto-tune, pitch correction, quantization, Pro-Tools (and it's million plugins) and GarageBand, which makes every rank amateur musician a worse recording artist and even worse studio producer.
Think about it, most charting songs today are assembled in the studio as fragments from hundreds of takes, often times taking single notes from a take to insert into other takes and those songs are more assemblages of blocks than they are performances. Every edit subtracts from the whole. This has been the case since some clever studio engineer figured out how to splice tape.
In general, while I agree with much of Beato’s argument (’technical’ perfection and ease of use vs. skill, inspiration and ’selection’), I also think there is a lot of survivor bias whenever one is comparing ’the great music of the past’ to the ’poor music of the present’. A lot of past stuff has rightly been consigned to the bin of history.
The arc of music like literature, art, and architecture has been bending upward since the dawn of time, so I don’t understand the premise of the video.
I’m not sure I understand what you mean (i.e. ’things have always got better since the beginning of time’ or ’things have got better on average over time’), but either way I disagree with it. Bach is pretty old, and Hildegard von Bingen is even older, but they didn’t write bad music; neither is ’worse’ than anything - and I mean anything - written today. At best, it’s incomparable. Just like at best Damien Hirst and Mark Rothko are incomparable to Vermeer and Piero della Francesca. At best.
Engineering to some extent has been progressing, but architecture hasn’t necessarily "progressed" - Hagia Sophia is an architectural masterpiece, as is the Pantheon, as are Palladio’s villas. Not much designed today is ’better’ - even if it is bigger and has more functionality (not least because we can provide more functionality).
The Mahabharata; Greek myth written down by ’Homer’ (or many Homer); Aristophanes; Cicero, Livy, Caesar and Martial; the Edda; Dante; Shakespeare - all on an ascending arc to ’Butter’ by Asako Yuzuki (no offense meant; current bestseller at Waterstones UK).
In this video Beato said something obvious about technology use in music his "perfection" versus human gestures and "imperfections"...
This point is made even clearer with A.I. coming...
And many here instead of seeing his point dismiss it as an old dude bias about new music... ( probably a case of seeing in the eyes of others the big biases in our own eyes as the ignorant claim above about music value always going upward in "progress")
Are you able to understand a book if you are not able to get the main point of a 12 minutes video without attacking the man who did it as biased ?
Beato is a pro musician and only spell evidences in this video ...
it is useless to go further in this matter, and we can dig in it way deeper , because it seems many here dont get a simple point , they need a straw man argument to feel better instead of thinking ..
We did not like our parents music and born 1951 and they did not like ours.
But today I have a tube amp that produces so much detail from a songs that I never knew existed in all the years listening to them..So at 73 since all I do is stream and go back and listen to what my dad would listen to on a Reel to Reel he had .
And you know I can listen to some of it now , not all but some .
I look at reviews of equipment and they mention songs that bring out detail for you to hear and most newer songs they mention I can not stand to listen to..
I hear new artist and ask who is that and give them a try and 98% of time can not play their music.. So 73 yrs old I listen to Peter White LOL and oldies and some of Dads old music...But each has to decide to their own beat what you listen to.
Not Worse but age has so much to do with it for sure...LOL
I get the criticisms for the pop music of today, many artists simply slapping out product using technology to cover up a lack of talent. But there are so many contemporary artists and music out there, real artistry produced with the tried and true technology of yesteryear. Pop music hasn't been important to me since sometime in the 90's so I couldn't care less about it's existence.
@baldric the phrase, okay boomer, applies to anyone, not just boomers. And again, music paradigms are changing. If you're going to judge music by contemporary pop then just about every generation is going to suck. They're a hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of really good artists out there who aren't widely disseminated or played. As @snssaid above, pop music is ephemeral at best. I kind of lost track with contemporary pop music decades ago and I still try to keep up with some of it but I'm much rather dive into the other genres that matter to me.
@dlevi67I meant the present builds off the past, and thus advances it, whether it's knowledge, art, or music. Of course the past contains great thinkers, artists, and musicians. What makes the greats great is the ability to advance the status quo much further than the not-so-greats. What made Einstein so great was both his intellect, and his ability to advance science in major ways. The average physics professor today probably know more science than Einstein did, largely due to Einstein. The same holds for the arts, IMO.
Put on a Vinyl record like Miles Davis, even if jazz is not your thing. Hook up a good integrated hybrid amp with some good high end tower speakers or be cravy some KEF blades. Compare that to streamed music, any current pop on Bluetooth budget to moderate priced gear. You will hear the difference, let the music flow over and through you. You will feel and hear the difference.
Applicable to just about everything from music to literature to politics… well, maybe not politics. I think my grandmother had that right when she would look at some politician on TV and say “they’re ALL thieves.” Or, in the words of the immortal Jerry Doyle “Washington DC is Hollywood but for ugly people.”
Ahem.
Yes, music changes. Hardly anyone uses a Hurdy-Gurdy anymore (well, Lludvig Swärt’s FORNDOM, or FAUN, out of Germany… but I said HARDLY anyone), and who uses bones of ancestors to tap out rhythms like Urg once did while sitting around the dying embers of the Allding Feuer (and his father before him) except maybe Heilung.
Hammered dulcimer players certainly got torqued when some clever person reassembled all those strings (and more) into a box on a massive bronze frame with an amazingly simply row of “keys” one tapped with their fingers and the strings would be PLUCKED like a proper LUTE then eventually HAMMERED and they called the thing a piano. THAT really upset a lot of people, not least the friends of the piano player who had to come practice at HIS house ‘cause nobody wanted to move and retune the darned thing every time they wanted to rehearse.
Nowadays a keyboard fits in a suitcase, weighs about as much as a couple of six packs and it’s the drummer’s house that gets filled with noise several nights a week while the parents moan “Oi-veh ist mir! Is it too much to ask he should be a DOCTUH!?”
Music certainly changes.
Who can forget that #1 in the hit parade of 1946 (IIRC) “I’m a Cranky old Yank in a Clanky old Tank on the Beach of Yokahama with my Honolulu Mama doing those Beat-o, Beato, flat on my Seato Hirohito Blues” by Hoagie Carmichael?
Or the venerable tune sung by doughboys throughout the Maginot Line circa 1918 “Roll Me Over” (in the clover, roll me over lay me down and do it again) which had the Karens of the day protesting in front of sheet music stores where the pimple-popping gum-chewing teenagers were being corrupted by such evil lyrics.
Fast forward to MY day and there was Todd Rundgren’s “S-L-U-T” or Queen’s “Bohemian Rhapsody” to upset the musical purists.
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