The Real Reason Why Music Is Getting Worse!!

I am often struck at how amazing and innovative the music is… it is so addictive and compelling… all of it sampled, autotuned and completely manufactured… what great innovative “non-musicians” we have producing music!

Are you serious? do you use music like people doing gymnastic in a gym as a rythm to enhance performance ?

When we use our body like a machine working we may listen to A.I. created music perhaps but i will not call this great music.

 

 

I dont think i will need to explain what means this video :

https://x.com/BrianRoemmele/status/1884070819279822862

Salutation my friend!

We feel better here in winter and we are used to it...

I hope all is good for you and send you my best wishes...

 

Hi, @mahgister ...How's the the Great White North and you in the thick of it.... ;)

The imperfections are what give music soul and they recognize it. No processing. Can you find soul today? Sometimes. But production kills it a lot of the time.

i concur.

 

I blame the proliferation of affordable electronic gear that made it possible for a bunch of "No Talent Bums" to be able to put their "product" into the mainstream ! People gravitate towards whatever is convenient but not necessarily valuable. A lot of garbage came from those home studios and now we are expected to call the preparators "artists" !

there is some truth here ...

 

None of my LPs have bar codes on them because I only buy records that were recorded and reproduced using analog equipment. Look at pictures of Rudy Gelder’s recording studio. His approach was the pinnacle of the art of recording music. I do listen to streamed hi-res music, but not if the beat has been put on a grid. Real musicians don’t allow technicians change their performances. Why the hell would a musician ever allow a technician change their performance? I understand splicing in a corrected note to a well-performed piece. However, that should be the limit to what recording engineers are allowed to do. Music should be recorded in a few takes, with the best take being chosen. And, from recording to the pressing of LPs, only analog equipment should be used. Then, the precious and life-enriching experience of music would be revealed. Listening to the stuff cranked out by technicians using all their tools to “perfect” music is like having sex with an inflatable doll; it’s a very sad substitute for the real thing.

there is some truth here also...

 

All of you are you three old boomers who squale about new music out of your decade ?

This argument from old age is preposterous. i learned to love music from all corners of earth except the music programmed by the north-American music industry proposed for POP Chart listening and radio listening ...Then nobody can accuse me of being nostagic of the Beatles whom i never bought anyway even if they are good band with good songs...( at 20 i listened mostly Bach and Monteverdi and indian raga +Bob Dylan and Léo Ferré poetry)

 

Good music is not always popular anyway... Good Turkisch music so good could it be will not be popular in America ...neither Japan Jazz...

Guess why ?

It is because the sleepwalking public is conditioned and programmed to hear bad music and the bad music itself is manufactured one "hit" after the other...

 

I already suggested new contemporary  music which is good and many others did also here...

The fact that some contemporary popular music is relatively not bad or even good dont change the reasons why most popular music is worse now...

 

«Beato is an old dude crying...

All is good at all times, to each his own..

music instrument are better with progress in technology ...

Dulcimer is not progress nor the Veena, theramin is or electric guitar ...

Or Piano over harpsichord...

All is about My taste anyway ...

 

Period»

 

it is easy to resume thinking here ....

 

 

There is an ocean of new musical geniuses around the world , in different cultures, in jazz and in classical...

But in North America and in the  modernized countries in the controlled medias  there is an ocean of  well manufactured mediocre  pieces and worst...

Technology is not artistry...

And those who think that art progress positively  in a linear irreversible way as sciences  are ignorant about art and about sciences...

 

 

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 ..

 

 

 

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.

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.

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.

Why am i not surprized?

Guess why....

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. 

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.

 

Beato video is excellent and on the point...